Template:POTD/2020-03-19

Picture of the day

The Allegory of Faith is an oil-on-canvas painting by Dutch Golden Age artist Johannes Vermeer. Painted in the early 1670s, it is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where it has been since 1931.

The painting depicts a finely dressed woman, representing the Catholic faith, sitting on a platform, with her right foot on a terrestrial globe and her right hand on her heart. She looks up, adoringly, at a glass sphere hung from the ceiling by a blue ribbon. Her left arm rests on the edge of a table which holds a golden chalice, a large book, and a crucifix. Resting on the book is a crown of thorns. At the bottom of the picture is an apple, and near that a snake squashed by a cornerstone. In the dim background hangs a large painting of the crucifixion of Jesus. Much of the symbolism, including the colour of the woman's clothing, her hand gestures, and the presence of the crushed snake and the apple, may have come from Cesare Ripa's emblem book Iconologia.Painting credit: Johannes Vermeer