[3] With them are associated some allegorical figures—a child who represents the God of Love carrying his bow and arrows; a woman with a wreath round her hair, who lays a hand on her breast with a deprecating gesture; and farther to the back, seen strongly foreshortened, the head of a youth, who is holding up a basket laden with flowers.

[7] Amor himself, the Goddess of Victory, and Hymen console the grieving lady, who gazes meditatively into a crystal ball she holds in her hand, the symbol of the transient nature of all things human.

[3]Charles Ricketts imagines that the woman who holds a crystal may represent Wisdom or Prudence, and the attendant figures with flowers and wreaths and darts may be the pleasures upon which the armoured warrior turns his back.

[10][2] Two early copies in the British Royal Collection may have been painted for Charles I directly from the Titian by Michael Cross (Miguel de la Cruz), a copyist employed by the King in Spain.

[2] Another version is held by the It has been suggested that the general composition of The Beloved, a painting of 1865-66 by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), now in Tate Britain, was influenced by the Titian.

[13] The two ladies, as is often the case with popular pictures, have in his view been "terribly retouched", and some damage has happened to the exposed bosom of the woman who holds the crystal, some abrasure of the pigment, due possibly to the removal of an added drapery which at one time may have covered it.