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This picture, painted in fresco (directly onto wet plaster) was part of the decoration of a room in the palace of the ruling Petrucci family of Siena. Two others survive in the National Gallery’s collection.

Love – the naked youth with multi-coloured wings – is chased, captured and finally bound by Chastity, symbolised by a virtuous woman dressed in white. She is Laura, the hero of The Triumph of Chastity, a poem by the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch. For Petrarch, Laura was the model of female beauty and virtue; she exemplified the power of Chastity to conquer the wild lust of erotic love.

The frescoes were made to celebrate a family wedding, and so chastity – seen as essential within marriage, the cornerstone of Renaissance society – was a fitting subject.