#voluptuousness

Here the Virtue is Temperance, shown as a young woman wearing an armoured breastplate and leaning on an elephant, then regarded as strong but cautious animals. Beside her stands Sobriety and together they triumph over Sloth (languishing on the left), Envy (in the centre) and Hunger (to the right, chewing on a bone). The figures flying above the scene are probably Voluptuousness (holding a winged sphere and fish hooks), Youth (in the centre) and Tranquility (with a cornucopia and a white bird in a nest).

Vincenzo Irolli was born in Naples. He enrolled at the Naples Institute of Fine Arts, where his masters included Gioacchino Toma, in 1877 and graduated three years later. The work he presented regularly at the exhibitions of the Naples Società Promotrice di Belle Arti as from 1879 comprised portraits and genre scenes. In 1884 in Turin, he exhibited Amore e dovere and Le Maddalene d' oggi; in 1880 in Milan and in 1887 in Venice, he exhibited numerous drawings from reality.  Alongside intense maternal figures, portraits of children and colorful scenes of everyday life, he also depicted religious subjects, as in the ten works presented at the Mostra di Arte Sacra of 1936 in Naples.

Date: 1747