Two women and a child, a fragment

This composition is a conflation of three independent compositions. The two women with their backs to the viewer are direct quotations from Paolo Veronese's The Choice between Virtue and Vice (c.1565; New York, The Frick Collection) and Unfaithfulness, one of the four canvases from Veronese's Allegories of Love (c.1575; London, National Gallery). The child is taken from Correggio's celebrated picture of Danaë, painted in circa 1581 and now in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. All three works were in the collection of Emperor Rudolph II and were among the pictures looted from Prague for the Swedish crown in 1648. They eventually entered the celebrated collection of Philippe d’Orléans (1674–1723), Duke of Orléans, in Paris, where they were likely copied by the author of the present work, before being sold in 1800.