Allegory of the Course of Human Life (Choosing Virtue)

This drawing is the only surviving of Stradanus’s designs for the six-part print series The Course of Human Life, engraved by Petrus Jalhea Furnius and published by Hieronymous Cock in Antwerp in 1570 (see 17.3.3424, 17.3.3425, 17.3.3428, 17.3.885-18, 17.3.885-19, and 49.95.872[6]). These works relate to a tapestry cycle for which Stradanus produced cartoons eleven years earlier, in 1559. Known as the Life of Man, this cycle was one of numerous tapestry projects executed for the Florentine duke Cosimo I de’Medici in which the artist played a significant role. Born and trained in Flanders, Stradanus was working in Florence and producing cartoons and other works for the Medici court most likely as early as the 1540s.[1] Some of his earlier tapestry designs and paintings were engraved, but it was only in the later 1560s that he began actively to produce designs for prints. The present sheet, as one of his earliest dedicated drawings for a print series, thus represents an important moment in Stradanus’s development as one of the most prolific and versatile print designers of the sixteenth century.


The iconographic program of the thirteen Life of Man tapestries, which probably originally hung in Cosimo de’Medici’s winter dining room in the Palazzo Vecchio, and of which only four weavings survive (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa; Musée national de la Renaissance, Ecouen; and Mobilier national, Paris), is presumed to have been conceived by Giorgio Vasari, who directed the decoration of the duke’s Florentine palazzo and whose quick sketches Stradanus regularly translated into fully-realized cartoons. The cycle’s overtly moralizing content—an allegorical representation of a virtuous man’s life from birth to death and salvation—is based on a written invention by the humanist scholar Cosimo Bartoli (1503-1572) and seems to have been intended to reflect the duke’s own beneficence and piety.[2] The prints, each of which includes an explanatory caption in Latin, treat the same subject matter. Based on the surviving tapestries, it is clear that Stradanus re-used much of the same imagery but made some compositional and iconographic changes for the prints, in addition to condensing the program into six scenes. Here, in the drawing for the penultimate print in the series, Choosing Virtue (17.3.885-19), personifications of the four cardinal virtues—Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance—help a young man dismount his horse and protect him from the arrows of Envy, who emerges from a flaming pit at left. In the middle distance, three figures representing Innocence, Faith, and Divine Love accompany the same man on a path toward Religion and Piety, who await him in the left background. These last two figures reappear twice in the subsequent and final print in the series, Old Age and Death (49.95.872[6]): in the foreground, where they stand beside the man as he prays at an altar, and in the celestial scene in the background, where they strip him naked before God. The interest in the transition from one scene to the next evident in these early prints anticipates the exceptional narrative continuity that characterizes Stradanus’s later series.


The present drawing exhibits Stradanus’s characteristically energetic pen work, which accentuates the figures’ fluttering drapery. Ample amounts of wash and white heightening, along with some hatching in pen and point of brush, serve to model the figures. The absence of incised lines, in combination with the cursory rendering of the landscape, suggests that there existed a subsequent drawing used by the engraver to transfer the design to the printing plate.

(JSS, 7/5/18)


[1] See Lucia Meoni, "The Medici Tapestry Works and Johannes Stradanus as Cartoonist," in Stradanus 1523-1605: Court Artist of the Medici, ed. Alessandra Baroni and Manfred Sellink (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 31-58.


[2] Henk Th. van Veen, Cosimo I de’Medici and His Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, trans. Andrew P. McCormick (Cambridge University Press, 2006): pp. 38-39. For another interpretation of this tapestry cycle, see Valerie Fisscher, "Iconografie van de wandkleedcyclus ‘Vita dell’uomo’ in het Palazzo Vecchio: een hypothese," Incontri 13, no. 4 (1998), pp. 155-69.