Ars Antiqua Abstract Sculptures

19th century Pair of desks with portraits of Petrarch and Leonardo (2) Alabaster, 34 and 35 cm diam The pair of alabaster discs features a central cameo with the effigy of Petrarch and Leonardo, probably part of a larger series that featured illustrious characters from Italian history. On the openwork frame of Petrarch there are portraits of some characters who face each other, combined for centuries, as can be seen from the shapes of the garments that span several centuries: from the thirteenth century, in which men wear long-tipped bonnets, to the fifteenth century and Sixteenth century, the two characters at the top, in the seventeenth century, with wide collars, up to the eighteenth century. Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) embodies the figure of the humanist intellectual par excellence, entirely 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 letters and the reflection on himself witnessed in the Secretum. A personality made more complex by obsessive perfectionism, which led him to a continuous and infinite editing of the work which he also flaunted to consider as minor and which instead ensured him an undying fame among posterity, the Canzoniere. But the only aspect fixed in the collective imagination is that of the lover who idolizes the places where his ideal love blossomed...

Tuscan school, 17th century Madonna with Child - from the Impruneta Tondo Measures: Polychrome terracotta, 65 x 46 x 10 cm This polychrome terracotta relief, gently jutting...