Allegorical Figure of Spring

With a spray of flowers that seems to grow from her womb, this voluptuous young woman personifies spring, the season of birth and nature’s reawakening. Along with three companion paintings representing the other seasons, the painting once adorned the ceiling of the Palazzo Barbo in Venice. When the writer Carlo Ridolfi saw the paintings in 1648, he described them as a “capriccio of dreams”—a musical ensemble filled with “things that come into the minds of men while they are dreaming.”

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