Maturity

This tapestry belongs to a set of eight on The Arts and Sciences in the Colección Santander, which must in turn have been part of a larger group of which some are now missing. The different size of the individual tapestries is due to the fact that they were woven for specific locations, forming what was known in Brussels as a chambre en tapisserie.

Seated in a landscape, a male figure wearing a cuirass, symbol of wisdom, holds up a sundial in his left hand. The implied message here is that the passing of time turns the flighty youth into a mature and wise man. Like "Architecture and Rhetoric forged from Man’s Maturity and Temperance the long", narrow format of this tapestry suggests that it would have been hung between doors or windows, assuming that the two panels were not simply fragments of larger ones.

All the tapestries in the set involve two themes: a moral one relating to the life of man, his virtues and vices, and an exaltation of the Arts, encompassing the Liberal Arts and the so-called Fine Arts.