Allegory of Peace

The present drawing features a personification of Peace wearing a crown of olive branches and holding another olive branch aloft. She stands triumphantly on the arms of war, which include a helmet, a cuirass, a drum, and a banner. As Jacob Bean and Felice Stampfle observed, the pose in the present study reoccurs in Nicolò’s drawing of The Women Before Coriolanus, now in the Albertina, Vienna.¹ The Morgan study is similar in style and handling to Nicolò’s series of designs of ca. 1552, now in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, featuring angels bearing the instruments of the Passion and which served as designs for enamels executed by Léonard Limosin for the Sainte Chapelle, Paris.² Another study, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, depicts an allegory of Abundance or Peace and may relate to a similar project.³

The Morgan drawing, whose style is still heavily influenced by Parmigianino, is thought to have been executed in the 1540s while Nicolò was active in his native Modena, or very soon after the artist’s arrival in France in 1552. Writing in 1973, Sylvie Béguin considered that its style “very much suggests certain drawings Nicolo made between 1547 and 1550”.⁴

Footnotes:

1. Albertina, Vienna, inv. 14396; New York 1965-66, 65, no. 107.
2. Paris and elsewhere 1994, 82-86, no. 29.
3. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes, inv. 794.1.2517; Modena and Rennes 1990, no. 30.
4. Ottawa 1973, 2: 27.