Gallery Label This painting probably represents Sapphira who, with her husband Ananias, held back some of the money raised for the early Christian community in Jerusalem. Both died when Saint Peter revealed their deception (Acts 5: 1–11). Sapphira appears in Dante's "Purgatory" as an example of Avarice. She is shown here holding a money bag, surrounded by jewels and other objects of her greed, while a skeleton menaces her from behind. A related drawing in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, includes other figures and suggests that the painting is a fragment.
Notes A drawing of the same subject, Avarice, with additional figures at the left, is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The drawing is one of a series of the Seven Deadly Sins that includes Lust (dated 1590) and Sloth (both Musée du Louvre, Paris), Envy and Vanity (both dated 1590, Kestner Museum, Hanover), and Gluttony (location unknown, at C. G. Boerner in 1935). It is possible that a drawing of Virtue battling the Vices (Albertina, Vienna) is also related to this series.
Provenance [Stair Sainty Matthiesen, London and New York, until 1985; sold to Seiler, Bradbury, and Friedman]; Eric Seiler and Darcy Bradbury, and Edward A. and Karen S. W. Friedman, New York (1985–91)
Exhibition History London. Matthiesen Fine Art Ltd.. "Around 1610: The Onset of the Baroque," June 14–August 16, 1985, no. 5 (as "Allegory of Avarice: Sapphira," by Jacopo Ligozzi).
References Jaynie Anderson in Around 1610: The Onset of the Baroque . Exh. cat., Matthiesen Fine Art Ltd. London, 1985, pp. 27–29, no. 5, ill. (color), publishes the painting and relates it to the drawing dated 1590 then in a private collection and now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington; suggests that the painting may have been cut at the left and that the biblical narrative of Ananias and Sapphira (Acts IV, 34–37) is represented as an allegory of Avarice.in La pittura in Italia: il Seicento . revised and expanded ed. Milan, 1989, vol. 2, p. 787, believes this work attests that Ligozzi translated his drawings of the Seven Deadly Sins (1590) into paint.From Studio to Studiolo: Florentine Draftmanship under the First Medici Grand Dukes . Exh. cat., Allen Memorial Art Museum. Oberlin, Ohio, 1991, p. 109, notes that the painting appeared in 1985; suggests that the subject of the related drawing is not Sapphira but instead conforms to the theme of Death and the Miser as portrayed in Northern European Ars Moriendi.Jacopo Ligozzi: Le vedute del Sacro Monte della Verna, i dipinti di Poppi e Bibbiena . Exh. cat., Castello dei Conti Guidi. Poppi, 1992, pp. 28, 43 n. 105, fig. 18, as location unknown, dates the painting around 1590; states that the drawing of the same subject should be seen as related to but not preparatory to the painting; compares it with a painting of the Redemption in Locko Park; rejects the suggestion that the story of Ananias and Sapphira is represented.
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