Tapestry, the Triumph of Death over Chastity, Brussels, 1500-1510

Tapestry woven, with about 6 or 7 warp threads per cm.

Purchased from E. Lowengard, Paris, for £1,000 (Chastity: 440-1883), £1,000 (Fame: 439-1883), £775 os. 6d. (Death: 441-1883)

In his paper published in 1985, Piero Boccardo established that this tapestry and the other two from the same set (museum nos. 439-1883 and 440-1883) can be related to a group of three large tapestries and two smaller fragments documented in Genoa in 1658.
Thomas P. Campbell suggested that the tapestries might have belonged to a set commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey shortly before 1520. He argued their presence in Genoa in 1658 to be significant, because the date ‘would be consistent with a set that had left the British royal collection immediately before or during the Commonwealth sale’. He strengthened his theory with his argument that ‘more than one thousand tapestries, approximately half of the royal tapestry collection, were sold or dispersed between 1649 and 1654, and continental collectors and merchants competed fiercely for the finest. Score of tapestries from the royal collection were acquired by such figures as Cardinal Mazarin and Nicholas Fouquet, while others turned up in collections across Europe in the following decades.’
However, in 2016 Piero Boccardo published newly discovered archival information that shed additional light on the provenance of the three tapestries. Namely, the newly surfaced documents have proven that the three tapestries had in fact reached Genoa already in 1610, when Agostino Durazzo bought ‘pezzi 6 di tapessaria di Fiandra antichi de’ trionfi del Petrarca’ (six old Flemish tapestries of Petrarch’s Triumphs) in Venice from a certain Jew called Baldasar (Baldasar ebreo). It will be Agostino’s son, Marcello Durazzo, who will appear almost half a century later, in the previously published document from 1658, as the owner of the ‘pezzi tre grandi delli Trionfi di Petrarca’ (indicating that the set of six tapestries, as originally acquired in Venice by his father in 1610, has been split by then).
Therefore, the appearance of the Triumphs tapestries in Genoa already in 1610, via Venice, detaches them from the Commonwealth sales and from the circumstantial evidence that associated them tentatively with the English royal collection and from the set of Triumphs listed in Wolsey’s inventory of tapestries, which have also been documented as having a border of the arms of England and Spain sewn to the top (suggesting that Wolsey may have received them as a perquisite from Henry VIII).

This tapestry is from a series of six based on the poem I Trionfi (The Triumphs), written by the Italian poet Petrach between 1352 and 1374. The poem described a series of allegorical visions, and this scene represents the Triumph of Death over Chastity. Its inscription tells that however chaste and completely virtuous man may be, the Fates cut the thread of his life. In the end, there is neither king nor pope, neither great nor small who can escape death.

The Humanist theme, secular yet improving, was popular in King Henry VIII's court, and used as the subject for many types of decorative art as well as tapestries.

441-1883