Late 16th century portrait of a young lady, North Italian School. She’s in a red costume with her hands resting on a two tailed siren and a basilisk. Portrait in the manner of Agnolo Allori, il Bronzino. 'INFINITA BELLEZZA E POCA FEDE’ is inscribed on the top edge of the painting. Painting location: private sale.
“Infinita bellezza e poca fede” is a line from Italian lyric poet Petrarch, in Il Canzoniere, or the Rime sparse, written in the 1300s. Here’s Sonnet 203, with the line in English:
“Infinite beauty and little faith, do you not see my heart in my eyes?”
Petrarch devoted much of the Rime sparse to describing and praising Laura, his love— but this love is an idealised, abstract love, as she was already married. Here, he compares her voice to a siren’s, in Sonnet 167:
“When Love bends her lovely eyes to the ground and with his own hands gathers together her wandering breath into a sigh and then looses it in a clear, soft, angelic, divine voice,
I feel my heart sweetly stolen away and my thoughts and desires so change within me that I say: ‘Now comes the final plundering of me, if Heaven reserves me for so virtuous a death.’
But the sound that binds my senses with its sweetness, reins in my soul, though ready to depart, with the great desire for the blessedness of listening;
so I live on, and thus she both threads and unwinds the spool of my appointed life, this only heavenly Siren among us.”
Petrarch’s sonnet is reminiscent of Plato’s description of the heavenly sirens. “Agnolo Allori, il Bronzino” is Agnolo di Cosimo, also known as Bronzino. He was an Italian Renaissance painter whose work includes a number of portraits.
To me, I think the two tailed siren and basilisk could also represent heraldry, as those mythical animals were used in family coats of arms, particularly from Italy. I’m excited about this painting, for it’s only the second time I’ve seen a two tailed siren in an oil painting.
Thank you to @neritesanteros for bringing this painting to my attention!
If we look at the two tailed siren in detail, we see she has a skirt of some type, long flowing hair, and her two tails could end in fins or perhaps in vegetation. She reminds me a bit of this Roman period mosaic in Turkey.
Sources
The siren sonnet:
Petrarch, poem 167, page 312: Petrarch. Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics. Translated by Robert M. Durling. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976.
Sonnet 203 is on page 348-349.
Photo and some information via Bonham's.
Additional information from Christie's.
