Incostanza. An Allegory of Fickleness

Janssens's Allegory of Fickleness (Incostanza) of 1617, held in the Statens Museum for Kunst, belongs to a genre of single-figure moral allegory closely related to Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (1593), the standard handbook of allegorical personification that every educated painter in the early seventeenth century consulted. Fickleness — a feminine virtue whose attributes included a spinning top, unstable footing, or changing garments — was a subject of interest in the neo-Stoic philosophical circles that van Veen and his contemporaries frequented. Janssens renders the personification as a large-scale female figure with the physical grandeur he brought to all his allegorical subjects. The work demonstrates the overlap between the emblem tradition, philosophical moralizing, and the luxury art market in Antwerp: wealthy collectors wanted allegorical works that displayed learning, moral seriousness, and pictorial beauty simultaneously.

Canvas with a monumental half-length or three-quarter allegorical figure exhibiting attributes associated with inconstancy: windswept or disordered drapery, unstable posture, possibly a spinning top or turning wheel. Janssens's warm light and sculptural flesh modeling give moral abstraction physical presence. The figure may glance aside or over her shoulder, embodying the very inconstancy she represents through the direction of her attention.