Allegory of the Course of Human Life (Choosing Virtue) 1570 or before Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus Netherlandish This drawing is the only surviving of Stradanus’s designs for the six-part print series The Course of Human Life, engraved by Petrus Jalhea Furnius and published by Hieronymous Cock in Antwerp in 1570 (see , , , , , and [6]). These works relate to a tapestry cycle for which Stradanus produced cartoons eleven years earlier, in 1559. Known as the Life of Man, this cycle was one of numerous tapestry projects executed for

Allegory of the Course of Human Life (Choosing Virtue) 1570 or before Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus Netherlandish This drawing is the only surviving of Stradanus’s designs for the six-part print series The Course of Human Life, engraved by Petrus Jalhea Furnius and published by Hieronymous Cock in Antwerp in 1570 (see , , , , , and [6]). These works relate to a tapestry cycle for which Stradanus produced cartoons eleven years earlier, in 1559. Known as the Life of Man, this cycle was one of numerous tapestry projects executed for the Florentine duke Cosimo I de’Medici in which the artist played a significant role. Born and trained in Flanders, Stradanus was working in Florence and producing cartoons and other works for the Medici court most likely as early as the 1540s.[1] Some of his earlier tapestry designs and paintings were engraved, but it was only in the later 1560s that he began actively to produce designs for prints. The present sheet, as one of his earliest dedicated drawings for a print series, thus represents an important moment in Stradanus’s development as one of the most prolific and versatile print designers of the sixteenth iconographic program of the thirteen Life of Man tapestries, which probably originally hung in Cosimo de’Medici’s winter dining room in the Palazzo Vecchio, and of which only four weavings survive (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa; Musée national de la Renaissance, Ecouen; and Mobilier national, Paris), is presumed to have been conceived by Giorgio Vasari, who directed the decoration of the duke’s Florentine palazzo and whose quick sketches Stradanus regularly translated into fully-realized cartoons. The cycle’s overtly moralizing content—an allegorical representation of a virtuous man’s life from birth to death and salvation—is based on a written invention by the humanist scholar Cosimo Bartoli

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