Giorgio Vasari’s educational background and association with Renaissance humanists engendered his familiarity with the texts and imagery of classical, emblematic, and mythographic traditions. Vasari’s composition of images as a compendium of iconography for a decorative program was in the vein of the literary practices of Andrea Alciato (1482-1550), Pierio Valeriano (1477-1558), and Vincenzo Cartari (1531-1590), and followed Paolo Giovio’s advice on how to depict an emblematic image or impresa  (Giovio, 1559, p. 9). For Giovio (1483-1552), an impresa or badge must contain a figure and motto, its meaning should be clear and precise, the imagery must be pleasant to look at, and the motto must be brief, inventive, and unambiguous. But sometimes Vasari did not follow his advice, relying more on the Renaissance Neoplatonic notion of a concept postulated by the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). In De vita coelitus comparanda (How Life Should Be Arranged According to the Heavens)  (Ficino, 1489; 1561-1563; 1996, pp. 7-19; Kerrigan & Braden, 1989, pp. 101-115). Ficino discusses the use and the magic potency of images by deliberating on the virtue of imagery, what power pertains to the figure in the Heavens and on Earth, which of the heavenly configurations are impressed on images by the ancients, and how the images are employed in antiquity  (Gombrich, 1972, p. 172; Chastel, 1996, pp. 81-89; Moore, 1990, p. 20, 137, 181; Bull, 2006, pp. 7-36). Vasari assimilated these concepts visually in the fresco painting of the Bride with a Rake (1548), located in one of the rooms in his house in Arezzo, the Chamber of Fortune (Chamber of Virtue), where he composed a paradoxical iconographic image—the subject of this essay. This essay is composed of two parts: an introduction to the location of the painting in the Casa Vasari in Arezzo and an iconographical and iconological interpretation of the imagery. 

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