Allegory of Love
Artist: Workshop of Titian (Italian, 1488/1490-1576)
Date: c. 1520-1540
Medium: Oil on canvas
Collection: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, United States
Description
In contrast to the man with whom she shares this outdoor scene, the female figure is incongruously naked. Her features seem generalized. Rather than a specific person, she may have been intended to represent an idealized, anonymous lover.
This painting has significant compositional similarities to a Titian painting in the Louvre called Woman with a Mirror (c. 1515). Allegory of Love may have been begun by an artist from Titian’s workshop after the master’s completion of Woman with a Mirror. Examination of the paint layers under the surface shows that the original composition included some details present in the Louvre painting - for example, the man’s left arm was placed higher, presumably to hold a circular mirror above the woman’s left shoulder, and his right hand held the rectangular mirror from the side rather than from below. Such changes suggest that the painter had access to Titian’s designs.
The man’s costume provides clues about the period in which the artist produced this work. The doublet, with its short, pleated skirt, resembles a fashion dating from at least a decade after the Louvre picture; the pleated collar and cuffs of the shirt and the cut of the hair and beard also did not become fashionable until the mid-1520s. Probably, therefore, the painter adapted Titian’s design, perhaps in the form of an underdrawing begun circa 1515–1520, and completed it at some date in the 1530s.
