ANIMAL LIFE IN ITALIAN PAINTING 



Lotto, The love of pets in Renaissance Italy does not seem 



to have been confined to the men/ but we should hardly 

 have expected to find the marten family adopted as ladies' 

 pets. Two portraits in which this animal is painted 

 will be mentioned later, and another, a bust of a middle- 

 aged woman, by Lorenzo Lotto, is in the Bergamo 

 Gallery. She is represented as nursing a marten which 

 has wriggled its head down, and shows its strong 

 cusped teeth. A slight chain is round its neck. 



Sacchetti, speaking of the extravagance of women, 

 as satirists have always done in ages of luxury, says, 

 " They wear around their necks a collar, to which are 

 attached all sorts of little beasts that hang down into 

 their breasts." Whatever the exact meaning of this 

 may be, it points to the fact that even before the 

 end of the fourteenth century the keeping of pets had 

 become something of a craze. ^ In the Trmmph of 

 Chastity (Rome, Rospigliosi Gallery) an ermine, the 

 stoat in its white winter coat with black-tipped tail, 

 stands on the broad bosom of Chastity (not very sym- 

 pathetically painted) as she chases away Venus, Cupid, 



' Hubertus describes how Frederick, riding into Innsbruck, met a lady 

 leading a large tame stag with splendid horns. — Gentlemen Errafti, p. 344. 



Fashionable amusements, then as now, spread rapidly among the 

 " governing classes " of Europe. 



* See Dr. Guido Biagi, The Private Life of the Renaissance Florentines, 

 p. 38. 



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