Allégorie de la Patience

Around 1552 the bishop of Arezzo, Bernardetto Minerbetti, asked his friend Giorgio Vasari for a picture of Patience, and Vasari turned to the greatest authority he knew, Michelangelo, for ideas on how to show her. The result is this figure, half-dressed and waiting by a rock. Water drips from a clock above, wearing a slow groove into the stone, which carries a Latin motto meaning long-suffering endurance. It is patience pictured as erosion, the idea that time and steady bearing will grind down anything. The painting was lost from view for centuries and only reappeared on the art market a few years ago. Since 2020 it has hung in the National Gallery in London.