Giovanni Battista Moroni, 'The Vestal Virgin Tuccia', about 1555

This picture is unusual among Moroni’s secular paintings: the others that survive are all portraits. It is the only single-figure allegorical painting known by him and is likely to date from about 1560. The woman may be a personification of Chastity but she also represents the Roman priestess of Vesta, Tuccia.

According to legend, when the Vestal Virgin Tuccia was accused of breaking her vows she proved her chastity by carrying water from the River Tiber in a sieve. Moroni shows the sieve as a colander, and the water-line can be seen here just above the holes. The painting is inscribed: CASTITAS / INFAMIAE NUBE / OBSCURATA / EMERGIT (‘Chastity emerges from the dark clouds of infamy’). These lines are from Dictorum et Factorum by the Roman author Valerius Maximus, a book of memorable deeds and sayings that was frequently reprinted during the Renaissance and was available in translation from Latin.

The story is also mentioned by other ancient authors. Saint Augustine, in his book City of God, cites Tuccia’s sieve as something against the ‘laws of nature’ which was accepted by pagans, although their philosophers argued against the immortality of the soul. This passage was sometimes misread to suggest that Tuccia’s miracle foreshadowed Christian ones.

Tuccia was frequently included in series of paintings of virtuous women made between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Another example is Mantegna’s panel The Vestal Virgin Tuccia with a Sieve, which probably came from a piece of furniture, and is part of a group of Two Exemplary Women of Antiquity. Moroni’s painting may have been made as part of a similar series, perhaps for a civic or judicial building, or possibly a convent.

The exposed breasts of Moroni’s Tuccia are puzzling, since Vestal Virgins are usually shown fully dressed and veiled as pagan nuns. She may represent both Chastity and the naked Truth. The stone on which the inscription is painted is also puzzling. The frame is a development of a form found in classical architecture. Moroni used a similar shaped tablet in his Portrait of Lucrezia Vertova dated 1557 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The veined yellow marble insert is a feature seen in sixteenth-century north Italian architecture.

Tuccia’s pose is a mirror reproduction of Christ’s pose in the altarpiece Moroni painted of the Trinity for the parish church of of S. Giuliano in Albino in 1555–6. He may have reused the same full-sized drawing, or cartoon, in reverse. The pose of the head and torso are also very similar to Moretto’s The Vestal Virgin Tuccia of about 1540 (Palazzo Taverna, Rome). Moroni frequently imitated his master Moretto’s compositions or elements from his work.

The setting, manner of painting and the colouring, if not the subject, are typical of Moroni. The holes of the colander are painted with dashes of light paint on dark, and elsewhere with dashes of dark paint with light spots beside them. In one or two places the artist scratched through the wet paint. Although Tuccia’s right hand and the colander are beautifully painted, her drapery is not very detailed.