VASARI, Giorgio
(b. 1511, Arezzo, d. 1574, Firenze)

Patience

1542
Oil on panel, 79 x 188 cm
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

This allegorical figure is one of the surviving works from Palazzo Corner Spinelli in Venice, for which Vasari painted thirteen paintings, which are now dispersed in various collections or are lost.

Foreshortened to be viewed from below, all the allegorical figures appear to lean over an invisible parapet, their consummately elegant figures silhouetted against the sky. Venetian painters must have studied the work with great interest, not least the young Veronese for his small ceiling in the San Sebastiano sacristy. And Vasari himself had difficulty matching the felicitous and refined formal elaborations of his Venetian project.