Alegoría

This panel is an early work by Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, dated to the late 1490s. He was the son of Domenico Ghirlandaio, one of the busiest fresco painters in Florence, who had died in 1494 and left the family workshop to relatives while Ridolfo was still a boy. So it comes from a young painter raised inside a famous Florentine shop, at a tense moment in the city. In 1498 the reforming friar Savonarola, who had held sway over Florence for years, was condemned and burned in the main square. The picture is an allegory, its figures standing for ideas rather than telling a story, and it hangs today in the Uffizi, a short walk from where that fire was lit.