The Triumphs of Love, Chastity and Death

The Triumphs of Love, Chastity and Death, painted around 1450 and held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, is the companion panel to The Triumphs of Fame, Time and Eternity—together the two panels illustrate all six of Petrarch's Trionfi in sequence. Love triumphs over the human heart; Chastity overcomes Love; Death defeats all human achievement. The cassone panels were made as a pair, presumably for the same wedding commission, and represent one of the most complete Petrarchan programmes surviving in this decorative format. Petrarch's Trionfi were immensely popular in Florentine secular art as subjects appropriate to wedding furniture celebrating the transitions of human life.

As the first three triumphs, this panel opens the allegorical sequence with the most human and emotionally immediate subjects—Love with his bound captives, Chastity in triumph, and Death on his dark cart. Pesellino differentiates the three episodes through landscape setting, figure grouping, and the chromatic character of each allegorical vehicle.