Bust of Michelangelo
- Object belonging
- One's own
- Category
- Bronze sculpture
- City
- Rome
- Location
- Museo Nazionale del Palazzo di Venezia
- Specific location
- Room 17
- Inventory
- PV 10806
- Material and technique
- Bronze, natural brown patina, black varnish
- Author
- Central Italian School
- Dating
- c. 1572
- Dimensions
- 24 x 21.5 x 9.5 cm.
- Origin
- Auriti Collection (1963)
- Image copyright
- SSPSAE e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma
Short description
The numerous bronze portraits of Michelangelo are almost always attributed to Daniele da Volterra, or are derived from the portrait executed by Volterra the day after Michelangelo’s death, using his death mask. The work was still not complete when Daniele died in 1566, though an inventory in his house recorded that there were six portraits of Michelangelo in his house, and at least four of those were complete busts. The Palazzo Venezia version is somewhat smaller than the other portraits. A portrait previously in the Simon Collection, and now in the Martin Liebermann Collection in Berlin, also derives from the same model. Santangelo believed that the facial features were modelled on Michelangelo’s death mask and are “almost identical” to those in the marble bust on the artist’s tomb in Santa Croce in Florence, which was sculpted in 1574 by Battista di Domenico Lorenze. The only difference is in the mantle, which is “reduced to a simple tunic with a large collar.”
Pietro Cannata
Bibliography
L. Planiscig, La Collezione Giacinto Auriti, Vienna 1931, no. 37; A. Santangelo, Museo di Palazzo Venezia. La Collezione Auriti, Rome 1964, pp. 26-25; N. Penny, Catalogue of European sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum: 1540 to the present day, Oxford 1992, no. 109, pp. 159-161.
