Temperance

Description The virtue of temperance is personified by a young woman, in over half-length, pouring liquid from one gilt tazza into another. Her sparsely draped figure is seen from the back, in three-quarters view to the right. Her hair is brought around her head in two plaits knotted at the central part. She casts a shadow against a niche imitating jasper, flecked with glazes of dark red, blue and yellow. The iconography of this piece as well as Walters 44.188 is decidedly Italian, not French. It is to be related to the practice of High Renaissance Italian sculptors of placing the cardinal virtues in the niches of tombs, a practice followed in France (cf. E. Panofsky, "Tomb Sculpture," New York, 1964, pp. 74 f.).

Conservation

Date	Description	Narrative
1/04/1955	Treatment	coated; cleaned
5/05/1965	Treatment	cleaned
11/04/1987	Treatment	cleaned; examined for condition

Exhibitions

• Special Loan Exhibition of Enamels on Metal. South Kensington Museum, London. 1874.
• Exposition Universelle. Paris. 1889.

Provenance Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Castle [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; Blenheim Castle Sale, London, June 14, 1883, no. 66; Lucien Cottreau [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; Sale, Paris, April 28-29, 1910, no. 54; J. Pierpont Morgan [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; Henri Daguerre, Paris [date and mode of acquisition unknown]; Henry Walters, Baltimore, 1928, by purchase; Walters Art Museum, 1931, by bequest.

Inscriptions [Signature] at the top: .P.I. (Pénicaud Iunior) [Transcription] at the base: TEMPERANTIA

Credit Acquired by Henry Walters, 1928