The Combat of Love and Chastity

Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora was a Florentine painter and illuminator active around 1445–1497, associated with the Ghirlandaio circle and known for both panel paintings and manuscript illumination. The Combat of Love and Chastity, now in the National Gallery, London, depicts an allegorical subject drawn from Francesco Petrarch's Triumphi — a series of allegorical poems in which personified virtues and forces combat one another. The theme of Chastity triumphing over Love was a popular humanist subject resonant with Neoplatonic ideas about the hierarchy of the soul's faculties. Such allegorical paintings were typically made for patrician studioli or as wedding gifts, where they encoded moral and philosophical messages appropriate to the educated elite of late fifteenth-century Florence. The subject links del Fora's panel to the rich tradition of Florentine literary-allegorical painting exemplified by Botticelli.

Del Fora employs the decorative linearity characteristic of Florentine allegorical painting, with elegant, rhythmically posed figures whose draperies flow in patterned waves. The allegorical figures of Love and Chastity are rendered as personifications with their traditional attributes, set against a landscape or architectural background that gives the combat a theatrical, staged quality.