The Triumph of Love and the Triumph of Chastity

The subject of this fine cassone panel is taken from Petrarch’s renowned series of poems, I Trionfi (The Triumphs). Written over the course of more than two decades between 1351 and 1374, they tell the story of redemption through six allegorical triumphal processions, beginning with the Triumph of Love and the Triumph of Chastity, represented in this cassone front. The poems became a popular source of inspiration for artists, especially during the fifteenth century in Tuscany, when the rich symbolism and narrative scope of each triumph served as ideal subject matter for the decoration of cassoni.

The representation of Love was of course particularly apt given the function of cassoni as wedding gifts, while the depiction of Chastity served as a reminder of fidelity and the moral virtues of matrimony. Reading the panel here from the left: Cupid stands on a chariot, ready to fire an arrow toward a couple below. Amongst the crowd that surround the chariot are Hercules, seen on the far left, holding the distaff before Omphale; and Aristotle, crawling on the floor beside Phyllis, enslaved to her, a cautionary tale that told of the seductive power of love to conquer even the most rigorous intellectual mind. To the right, in front of the hexagonal fountain with a gilded statue of Cupid, Chastity is seen disarming Cupid, and further on a second chariot shows Cupid captured, his hands bound behind his back, beneath the figure of Chastity, who stands triumphantly above. Both the narratives and the depiction of the processions themselves would have inevitably recalled the nuptial processions in which this very cassone would have been carried.

Most marriage chests were made in pairs and the companion panel front to the present lot (fig. 1; sold Sotheby’s, New York, 26 January 2006, lot 34) shows three more of Petrarch’s Triumphs: Fame, Time and Eternity. The attribution of these panels has attracted scholarly debate in the past century. They appeared together in a sale held in these Rooms on 5 May 1911, when they were given to Dello Delli, one of three brothers from a Florentine family of artists. In 1922, Tancred Borenius was the first to publish the pair, suggesting they may be by Andrea di Giusto (op. cit.), an idea subsequently supported by Paul Schubring (op. cit.), while the broad similarity in composition has been noted between this panel and that of the same subject in Edinburgh (National Galleries of Scotland), attributed to Apollonio di Giovanni. Everett Fahy proposed they were painted in the early 1440s by Domenico di Michelino, an artist linked to Francesco Pesellino and Zanobi Strozzi, who painted the magnificent Dante and the Divine Comedy for Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, in 1465. However, when they were most recently published on the occasion of a 2010 exhibition in Florence, it was proposed that they be grouped together with works under the name of an anonymous hand called the Master of the Landau Finaly Triumphs (op. cit.). It was suggested that they are characteristic works of the artist's maturity, and stylistically similar to The Story of Trajan and the Widow (Florence, Private collection), and to a pair of cassoni showing the The Story of Susannah, fragments of which are dispersed between the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick and Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.

Prior to their sale as separate lots in 1967, the pair belonged to Walter Spencer Morgan Burns in North Mymms Park. Burns's father, Walter Hays, was born in Newark, New Jersey, and married Mary Lynam Morgan, daughter of the banker Junius Spencer Morgan, in 1867. In 1878 he became a partner in his father-in-law’s increasingly influential bank. In 1884 he purchased the house at 69 Brook Street, now the Saville Club, which he had remodelled extensively, and nine years later he acquired North Mymms Park, a fine late Elizabethan house close to London, in Hertfordshire. The architects Sir Ernest George and R.B. Yeates were called in to add an additional wing and make other alterations to suit the domestic requirements of the time. Walter Spencer Morgan inherited important pictures, such as Bellotto’s masterpiece, the View of Verona, sold in these Rooms on 8 July 2021, and made further key acquisitions, including the present panel.

We are grateful to Lorenzo Sbaraglio for his assistance in cataloguing this panel.