An Allegorical Female Figure with Cupid Cesare Dandini

The subdued elegance in the Florentine master’s style is closer to that of his mannerist predecessors than his baroque contemporaries. Dandini painted a large number of similar half-length or three-quarter-length portraits for his clients. In this case, however, we cannot be sure if the work is an idealised likeness of a specific person or a purely allegorical composition. Even the meaning of the painting is uncertain, for we do not know what the footed bowl held by the winged putto, or the branch of jasmine symbolise. All we can be sure of is that the hourglass refers to mortality, which makes it highly likely that the essence of the allegory is the exaltation of beauty and youth, which the painter has combined with melancholy for the fact that both must fade.