19th Century, Pair Of Deschi With Portraits Of Petrarch And Leonardo

19th century

Pair of Deschi with portraits of Petrarch and Leonardo

(2) Alabaster, diameter 34 and 35 cm

The pair of alabaster discs features a central cameo with the effigy of Petrarch and Leonardo, probably part of a larger series that had as protagonists illustrious characters in Italian history. On the openwork frame of Petrarch there are portraits of some characters that face each other, combined for centuries, as can be seen from the style of the garments that go through several centuries: from the thirteenth century, in which men wear long-pointed headphones, to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the two characters at the top, the seventeenth century, with the large collars, up to the eighteenth century.

Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) embodies the figure of the intellectual humanist par excellence, all dedicated to the study of Latin conceived as the only form of expression worthy of a man of letters, so as to serve any form of written communication, including the correspondence and the reflection on himself witnessed in the Secretum. A personality made more complex by the obsessive perfectionism, which led him to a continuous and infinite editing of the work that also flaunted to consider as minor and that instead assured him an imperishable fame among posterity, the Chansonnier. But the only aspect fixed in the collective imagination is that of the lover who idolizes the places where his ideal love has blossomed and in which he remained hovering after the death of his earthly object. The dimension of the memory of a love not consumed, made of contemplation and desire, capable of transfiguring the place of encounter or vision, the wailing of an ideal beauty as poetic inspiration are the themes that attract the lovers of the Petrarch myth.
The typical representation of Petrarch, as indeed a whole part of his literary fortune, therefore ends up capturing an absolutely marginal and in part strongly deviant aspect of the public and sought image of the great man of letters.

Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 and died in Amboise in 1519). He personified the Renaissance genius who revolutionized both the figurative arts and the history of thought and science. He presents himself with a letter that represents a kind of curriculum in which he describes his skills as a civil engineer and builder of war machines to the Duke of Milan Lodovico Sforza, who welcomes him. Here are the pictorial masterpieces: the Virgin of the Rocks in the two versions of Paris and London and the practice for the bronze equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza. In 1489-90 he prepared the decorations of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan for the wedding of Gian Galeazzo Sforza with Isabella of Aragon while, as hydraulic engineer, he worked on the reclamation of the lower Lombardy. In 1495 he began the fresco of the Cenacle in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In 1499 Leonardo fled Milan because he was invaded by the troops of the King of France Louis XII and fled to Mantua and Venice. In 1503 he went to Florence to fresco, together with Michelangelo, the Great Council Hall in the Palazzo della Signoria. Leonardo is entrusted with the representation of the Battle of Anghiari, which however will not be completed, because of his obsessive search for artistic techniques to experiment or innovate. In 1513 the king of France Francis I invited him to Amboise. Leonardo will take care of projects for the festivities and will continue with his hydrological projects for some rivers in France.
 
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