[1] This picture and the Allegory of Virtue were painted as a pair for the studiolo of Isabella d'Este, with Vice probably the second of the two to be completed.

[2] Influenced by the Laocoon (as is Correggio's treatment of Saint Roch in his San Sebastiano Madonna and Four Saints), the central male figure is sometimes identified as a personification of Vice but sometimes as Silenus (possibly from Virgil's Eclogues 6, where a sleeping Silenus is tied up by the shepherds Chromi and Marsillo and forced to sing by them and the nymph Egle) or Vulcan.

This misunderstanding may have contributed to an Apollo and Marsyas (actually by the studio or circle of Bronzino) being historically misattributed to Correggio.

In 1542, after Isabella's death, they were both recorded as hanging on either side of the entrance door "in the Corte Vecchia near the grotto", with Vice on the left and Virtue on the right.

After his execution it was purchased by cardinal Mazarin in 1661 and later by the banker Everhard Jabach,[4] who later sold it to Louis XIV in Paris, reuniting it with Virtue.