The Triumphs of Fame, Time and Eternity

The Triumphs of Fame, Time and Eternity, painted around 1450 and held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, is a cassone panel illustrating three consecutive sections of Petrarch's Trionfi—the allegorical poem in which Fame conquers Death, Time conquers Fame, and Eternity conquers Time. Petrarch's Trionfi were among the most popular literary subjects for cassone panels in fifteenth-century Florence, providing allegorical sequences particularly appropriate for wedding chests—objects associated with the beginning of a new domestic chapter and the transition between temporal states. This panel is one of two companion works at the Gardner; the other depicts the first three triumphs.

The Triumphs required depicting allegorical processions—triumphal carts drawn by symbolic animals with personifications as riders—against landscape backgrounds. Pesellino follows the established cassone iconography for this subject while adding his characteristic delicacy of figure drawing and his refined colour in the drapery and sky areas.