These four paintings by Paolo Veronese concern the trials and rewards of love. Their precise meaning has been much debated and is still unclear. The titles are not original but were first used in the early 17th century. The scenes are not necessarily meant to be arranged in a particular order, and there is no obvious narrative development.
Veronese designed the compositions to be seen from below. This suggests the paintings were intended as ceiling decoration, as was often found in Venetian palaces. Each painting has a strong diagonal composition, and all of them are lit from the same direction to create a visual unity. The lower parts of the canvases seem to have been cut. In several cases the feet of the figures are no longer visible.
We do not know who commissioned the series, but the characters’ costumes and hairstyles suggest it was probably a wealthy Venetian patron in the mid-1570s. The paintings seem to have still been in Italy in the 1620s, when Van Dyck (1599–1641) documented two of the compositions in his Italian Sketchbook.
