2023-06-19 09:12:00
A new exhibition in the Kunsthistorisches Museum tells the story of Petrarch’s poetic love for Laura, centered around an anonymous marble bust of a woman. A little art crime.
This pale young lady is used to being stared at blatantly – and has been for over 500 years. Just looking back has been denied to her for just as long. One notices how difficult it is for her to keep her eyes lowered, covered by the lids as if half asleep. Just who is she? Who was the model for this extremely finely crafted, colored marble bust, which was praised as “undoubtedly the most beautiful sculptural work in the imperial collection”. Above all, who should she represent? is that you Which the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch sang regarding in 366 poems in the lifelong love frenzy of the spurned?
We cautiously circle the glass showcase in the dark of the new special exhibition in the Viennese Kunstkammer in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. This wax-like woman’s portrait rises up in it like in an upright Snow White coffin. A mystery surrounds this beauty; of her own accord, one feels, she won’t reveal anything. Generations of art historians have pored over the interpretation of this sculpture. An Aragonese princess was up for discussion. Or Bianca Maria Sforza, the poor second wife of Emperor Maximilian I, who probably starved to death out of grief. Wondrous resemblance. It was an art historian who suggested a completely new interpretation of the mysterious Renaissance bust in the early 1990s, but this – until the exhibition now – received no response. This Brita von Götz-Mohr had discovered a wondrous resemblance: between the bust and a famous portrait miniature at the beginning of an edition of Petrarch’s love poems, the “Canzoniere”, from the Laurenziana Library in Florence.
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