Allegory of Gluttony

1590

Medium

Pen and brown ink and brown wash heightened with gold, on yellowish brown prepared paper

Dimensions

30.6 × 20.2 cm

Status

In Museum Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-196116

Here, Gluttony is depicted as a grotesquely haggard old woman. Her canine teeth bite rapaciously into a chicken leg, torn from the pullet she holds in her right hand. To her left, a young man sits perched atop a wine barrel, emptying a colossal glass of wine. A wild boar is seated between the two greedy figures. The scene is set within a vaulted room; there is a large aperture at the back, with countryside beyond. Game birds, in the form of a plucked turkey and a goose, hang from the ceiling. On the right wall, roundels of cheese are piled on a sharply foreshortened shelf. This sheet belongs to a famous series of the Seven Cardinal (or Deadly) Sins, of which five others are known: Lust and Sloth (Musee du Louvre, Paris), Pride and Envy (Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover), and Avarice (National Gallery of Art, Washington). It seems that the set was broken up in the eighteenth century, certainly by 1796 when the Louvre sheets were looted by the French army from the d'Este collection in Modena. The drawings all demonstrate two parallel obsessions of late sixteenth­century court culture: on the one hand with luxury and refinement, and on the other with sin and violent damnatio…