This is a study for part of Allori’s decoration of the Salone di Leo X of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano near Florence, the artist’s most extensive secular project.

The frescoes had been begun around 1520 at the instigation of Pope Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici), but only one lunette was completed, by Pontormo, and two frescoes on the side walls partially executed by Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio, when work was abandoned at the end of 1521 on the death of the Pope.

In 1578 Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici commissioned Allori to resume the decoration of the room, following a revised iconographic scheme by Vincenzo Borghini, and over the next four years Allori completed the frescoes. The artist took pains to harmonise his work with the earlier phase, extending Sarto’s and Franciabigio’s compositions by quoting figures from other works by those artists. This study is for an overdoor at the centre of one of the long walls. The personifications are of Fortitude, with club and lion; Prudence, with mirror, serpent and double face; and Vigilance, with sun and taper for watching both day and night (and in her cloak the apples of the Hesperides - the subject of Allori’s lunette in the Salone, studied in RCIN 990139). They bestride a dragon, the globe, and military trophies, symbolising the spiritual and temporal triumph of the Medici. The figural portion of the drawing is squared for transfer but corresponds only approximately with the fresco, where the figures fill out and relax their Mannerist poise, the Medici shield and swags with putti expand (at the expense of the wings of Prudence), and the broken pediment is replaced by a fictive inscribed plaque.

Allori’s large project drawing survives in the Uffizi, and includes, on a damaged part of the sheet, the present personifications in reverse order; see H. van der Windt, Burlington Magazine, 2000, pp. 170-75.

The drawing is stamped with a six-pointed star-mark of a type associated with Nicholas Lanier (Lugt 2885), and is inscribed on the verso, in two early hands, Alessandro Allori and Jerom. The 'Jerom' is probably Jerome Lanier, uncle of Nicholas.