An Allegory of Passion

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An Allegory of Passion

Creator

Hans Holbein the Younger

German Artist · 1497–1543

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Hans Holbein was a painter, draftsman, and designer who came from a family of artists. He trained in his father's studio in Augsburg before moving to Basel, Switzerland. In Basel, Holbein worked on house decorations, portraits, and woodcuts. He soon became a teacher in the painters' guild in Basel and was very active painting altarpieces and designing stained-glass windows.At the age of twenty-nin

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Date
about 1532–1536
Medium
Oil on oak panel
Culture
German
Department
Paintings
Institution
Getty Museum
Object ID
c64f37d3-c55b-477c-a01c-d3cfce08ccd1

The painted roundel in the center of this diamond-shaped wood panel features a rider in classical attire on a galloping white horse. A panel of this format usually depicted a coat of arms, but here it was adopted for a personal emblem. The unbridled horse-symbolic of vigor, ambition, or passion-carries a rider whose individualized features suggest it might be a portrait. Below, a cartouche holds the Italian inscription *E cosi desio me mena* (And so desire carries me along) taken from Petrarch's *Canzoniere* , written about 1342. The patron who commissioned the panel was probably a scholar and a humanist familiar with this text. The *Allegory of Passion* has a rich history of ownership. On the back of the panel is the monogram *HP* , which stands for Henry, Prince of Wales, the older brother of Charles I and one of the first serious art collectors in England. Richard Symonds, a British diarist, next mentioned the painting as being seen in the "Closett of the Lady Anne Mary Howard" at Arundel House in London in 1653.

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