Bernardo Strozzi, A Personification of Fame

A young woman, dressed in a dazzling yellow skirt and red bodice, is shown semi-reclining in a dark landscape setting, of which only some rocks and plants in the foreground are visible. Her wings and the trumpets she holds identify her as the allegorical figure of Fame. Normally Fame is shown with a single trumpet or two trumpets of different lengths, intended to symbolise honourable fame and infamy, but here she holds a golden trumpet in one hand and a wooden instrument – a shawm (a forerunner of the oboe) – in the other.

The painting is a relatively late work by the Genoese painter Strozzi, who spent the last few years of his life in Venice. It was there that he was nicknamed ‘il prete Genovese’ (‘the Genoese priest’) because he belonged to the Capuchin Order (though he was granted permission to leave the monastery of San Barnaba in Genoa in 1610 to care for his ailing mother and unmarried sister, and subsequently swapped his monk’s habit for that of a priest). The bright colourful palette and virtuoso brushwork evident on Fame’s skirt and white shirt are typical of Strozzi’s technique. It was precisely these characteristics which led to the work later being wrongly attributed to the eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

No other paintings by Strozzi of this subject are known. We don’t know for whom this picture was painted but the slightly low viewpoint and elongated horizontal format of the canvas suggest that it may originally have been intended as an overdoor. The picture probably belonged to Ferdinando Carlo Gonzaga (1652–1708), the last Duke of Mantua, and was later in the important collection amassed by Girolamo Manfrin (1742–1801) in Venice. The painting is recorded in the Manfrin collection in the nineteenth century, along with a number of other works now in the National Gallery, including a portrait of Marco Barbarigo by a follower of Jan van Eyck; Saint Jerome in His Study by Vincenzo Catena; The Virgin and Child with a Supplicant by Andrea Previtali; The Departure of Ceyx by Vittore Carpaccio; and Giovanni Battista Moroni’s The Vestal Virgin Tuccia.