Provenance: Private collection, Milan.

The subject of the painting represents the complex and erudite allegory of Gratitude or the "Grateful memory of the benefits received", as reported in the "Iconologia" by Cesare Ripa (circa 1555-1622): a girl appears sitting on the terrestrial globe, between an eagle and a lion (noble animals of air and earth to which mythical or biblical episodes of gratitude are linked), crowned by a juniper branch (evergreen, and therefore a symbol of the durability of memory), while holding a large nail in her hand and a stone table. On it, we read "Clavo trabali figere beneficium": Engrave the benefit with a beam nail.
The subject, rare and probably attributable to the cultured Roman context between the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th, can be compared to another "Allegory of Gratitude", similar in composition but without the terrestrial globe, painted in 1705 by Pier Leone Ghezzi as a gift to the Accademia di San Luca of which he had just joined.