Paolo Veronese, 'Scorn', about 1575

This is one of a series of four paintings by Veronese that concern the trials and rewards of love, although their precise meanings remain unclear. The titles are not original and were given to the paintings in 1727. The compositions are designed to be seen from below, so we know the pictures were intended for a ceiling or a series of ceilings.

The paintings were recorded in 1648 in the collection of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague. We do not know who commissioned them, but it is most likely that the patron of the Four Allegories of Love was Italian and that the paintings were still in Italy in the 1620s, when Anthony van Dyck recorded two of the compositions in his Italian sketchbook (British Museum, London). It is possible that the paintings were made for the parallel suites of rooms of a husband and wife, two for the reception room and bedchamber of the man and two for the equivalent rooms of his spouse.This painting and Respect arguably seem particularly intended for a male viewer.

This painting is the most difficult to interpret of the series. A naked man is lying on an entablature beneath a ruined classical structure, which is decorated with two sculptures, one a limbless satyr or faun (half-man, half-goat), the other a standing figure holding panpipes in a niche. In classical mythology such creatures were associated with raw sexuality. Cupid is standing on the man’s chest, beating him with his bow. Its string has snapped, suggesting that love itself is broken. Cupid seems to be chastising the man for his devotion to hedonistic sexuality.

A bare-breasted woman looks down on the man as she is lead away by another woman holding an ermine (the white animal has a black-tipped tail). During the Italian Renaissance, the ermine was an emblem of purity and moderation, as well as of pregnancy and childbirth, as the animal was believed to protect pregnant women. Leonardo employed the ermine as a symbol to express these concepts in his portrait Lady with an Ermine (National Museum, Kraków).

The two women with joined hands may be understood as an illustration of how love encompasses, but is also split between, desire and devotion. The two women may represent earthly and celestial love, holding hands because they are both essential and in synthesis. The stone satyr appears to symbolise bestial love, which is inadmissible in a virtuous life. Although this painting was given the title Scorn in 1727, its subject seems to relate to contemporary Neoplatonic ideas about love, as also expressed in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love of about 1514 (Galleria Borghese, Rome).

A sheet of figure studies in pen and ink by Veronese for this series of paintings exists in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The five different positions in which the naked man in Scorn is drawn shows the attention Veronese gave to problems of foreshortening, perhaps using a wax model of the figure to help resolve the pose.