Bust of Philibert le Beau, Duke of Savoy
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| Bust of Philibert le Beau, Duke of Savoy |
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| Conrat Meit , before 1524 |
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Boxwood carving, 11.6 cm × 11.2 cm × 8.5 cm |
| Sculpture Collection and Museum of Byzantine Art ; Berlin |
The bust of Philibert le Beau, Duke of Savoy or Bust of a Young Man is a portrait bust of the Duke of Savoy, Philibert le Beau, who died in 1504, and was carved from boxwood by Conrat Meit before 1524 . It was commissioned by Philibert's widow Margaret of Austria . Also because of its small size, it is considered a major work of German carving of the 16th century . The bust is in the Bode Museum in the Sculpture Collection and Museum for Byzantine Art Berlin. Other busts of Philibert and Margarete, which are in the Bavarian National Museum in Munich and in the British Museum in London, are related to her .
description
The portrait bust, which is only 11.6 cm high, 11.2 cm wide and 8.5 cm deep, shows Philibert le Beau with his head turned halfway to the left and his mouth slightly open. His elaborate clothing with a fur coat , a net hood over his head and a beret with a wide, notched brim that is inclined to the right, identify Philibert as a member of the upper class. The clothing is typical for the Netherlands between 1515 and 1525. While the net hood worn by men is often depicted over the first half of the 16th century, the beret shown here is particularly widespread between 1515 and 1530. A coat of arms or other insignia of the ducal dignity are not present. Despite its small size, the portrait is so realistic that it appears significantly larger to the viewer of a photograph. The extremely detailed execution of the facial features and the surfaces of the net hood and fur coat make a decisive contribution.
The portrait bust is very well preserved for its age and shows remains of old gilding on the beret. The eyes may have been highlighted in color, adding to the lifelike appearance. However, when compared to an almost identical bust in the British Museum, it shows that it is damaged in several places. In particular, a broken piece was added to the brim of the beret. A medallion that is present on the British Museum figure is missing here. It shows Margaret of Antioch with a dragon, surrounded by the inscription IE · NE · SCAI · . This motif was the reason to incorrectly identify the British busts with Margaret's grandfather Charles the Bold and his fourth wife Margaret of York . The depiction actually points to the House of Burgundy , which became extinct with the death of Charles, but it can be seen here as a connection between Philibert and his wife Margaret of Austria, who came from the House of Burgundy.
background
Philibert le Beau was married to Margaret of Austria since 1501 . After the early death of her husband in 1504, Margarete had the small Brou monastery in Bourg-en-Bresse converted into Philibert's grave. She did not remarry and in 1507 became governor of the Habsburg Netherlands . Until her death in 1530, she was one of the most important art patrons of her time, and her residence in Mechelen became an international center of music, visual arts and politics. Her palace, both in the audience hall and library, and in Margarete's private apartments, housed a collection of works of art and curiosities that made up one of the earliest well-documented art chambers. In addition to the Arnolfini wedding of Jan van Eyck, Margarete owned paintings by Hieronymus Bosch , Jan Gossaert , Michel Sittow and Juan de Flandes . At times her farm employed 150 people, including several artists. In 1514 Conrat Meit became her court sculptor, whose main work was the tombs of Philibert's mother Margaret of Bourbon , Philibert II of Savoy and Margaret of Austria in the choir of the monastery church in Brou.
Since all of Meit's portraits of the Duke of Savoy, from the wooden busts to the tomb, were created ten or more years after his death, and Meit did not know him, the depictions must have been created according to the description by Margarete or from existing portraits. Margarete commissioned a large number of portraits of herself, her late second husband or the couple. She showed herself to be a good connoisseur of contemporary portrait conventions and was portrayed in two different ways. Together with Philibert, she was portrayed as youthful as him and in courtly clothes. As a result, as the loyal consort of the Duke, she kept his memory and the memory of their marriage alive. In doing so, she also pursued her own political interests and those of her family, since her marriage to Philibert, which was so illustrated, and the decision not to remarry, established her worldly power. The second form of her portraits shows her alone as an influential woman, Duchess of Savoy and governor of the Habsburg Netherlands. These individual portraits show her in the simple clothes of a widow and at an advanced age, as the regent of the Netherlands. Margarete attached particular importance to making the representations of her family members and herself as realistic as possible. In 1521 , Albrecht Dürer took a portrait of the deceased Maximilian I back with him, which was intended as a gift, as Margarete was very dissatisfied with the representation.
Small-format secular sculptures such as the busts of Philibert and Margarete were virtually unknown in northern Europe at the beginning of the 16th century. The first copies came with artists such as the Florentine sculptor and medalist Pietro Torrigiano from Italy, where they had found widespread use among art lovers. Torrigiano worked temporarily at Margarete's court from 1509 to 1510, where he repaired a small terracotta bust of Mary Tudor .
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The supposed motto IE · NE · SCAI · on the beret of the Duke's figure in the British Museum has been the subject of extensive research which has not yielded any results in the genealogical works of the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. It may be a Gallicism , as JE NE SAIS is the equivalent of I DON'T KNOW . A four-line priam is built on this line , the oldest sources of which were written in the 15th century by Konrad Bollstatter and Martinus von Biberach . The motif is much older, but formed an important element of Catholic piety in Margaret's time. Martin Luther expressly rejected it because it was not compatible with the Christian assurance of salvation. Margarete's father, Emperor Maximilian I , was wrongly assigned the lines as the “motto”.
I live and
do n't know how long, I die and
don't know when, I far and don't know what,
I am surprised that I am [so] happy.
(After Martinus von Biberach)
Provenance
In addition to the bust of Philibert le Beau, Duke of Savoy, Meit's small works include a bust of Margarete in the habit of a widow made of pear wood, carved around 1518 and exhibited today in the Bavarian National Museum . An inventory drawn up in 1523 lists a pair of wooden busts for Margarete's private apartments, which are probably the ones in Berlin and Munich.
After Margareta's death, her estate was scattered. The origin and meaning of objects such as the small-format wooden sculptures Conrat Meits, which were not labeled, were often forgotten. This turned them into anonymous collector's items, of which not even the carver was known. The bust of Philibert le Beau, Duke of Savoy ended up in the Royal Chamber of Art in Berlin founded by Joachim II . There it was ascribed to Albrecht Dürer as the bust of an unknown person in an inventory from the 17th century. At a later point in time it came to the sculpture collection and Museum of Byzantine Art , which is now housed in the Bode Museum .
further explanation
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Portrait busts of Philibert le Beau and Margaret of Austria, Conrat Meit, 1515 to 1525, boxwood, Waddesdon Bequest , British Museum
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Margaret of Austria often had copies of her portraits made to give away. A portrait of Margarete painted around 1520 by Bernard van Orley was considered an official portrait and was given at least nine times as a copy, sometimes with slight deviations, to people in the vicinity of their court and sent further times to ruling families throughout Europe. The British Museum has further busts of the couple made of boxwood, with heights of 11.8 cm and 9.2 cm. While the portrayal of Philibert as a young man in the Berlin and London busts is largely identical, Margareta is portrayed with the Munich figure as a widow, and with the London version as a young woman in courtly clothes. The British busts of Philbert and Margaret can be seen as counterparts . They were probably given as a gift by Margarete and were in the Kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague at the end of the 17th century . They later came to the Austrian sculptor and medalist Joseph Daniel Böhm . At the auction of Böhm's estate in 1865, they were acquired for Anselm Salomon von Rothschild by the Austrian art dealer Georg Plach . His son Ferdinand James Anselm von Rothschild bequeathed his art collection to the British Museum in 1898, which he named Waddesdon Manor The Waddesdon Bequest after his residence . The collection is managed under this name to this day, and its most important pieces include the two portrait busts of the Duke and Duke of Savoy.
Before 1516, Margarete had two marble busts of the ducal couple set up in her library, which are now lost. However, their existence is well documented by inventories and contemporary descriptions. They were made by Conrat Meit, and the smaller wooden figures in the British Museum could be drafts. Margaret's marble bust will then have resembled the wooden figure in the British Museum showing Margaret as a young wife. The last evidence of the marble busts is an inventory made in 1659 of the Palace of Coudenberg in Brussels. The busts may have been destroyed when the palace burned down in 1731.
Margarete paid Conrat Meit on January 5, 1518 for two wooden faces according to our appearance , i.e. for her own portrait busts. In the Bavarian National Museum in Munich is the 7.47 cm high portrait bust of Margarete shown above, which is probably identical to the one found in her private apartments in 1518. It bears the inscription MARGARETA GUBERNATRIX BELGIAE on the underside . The habit of the widow largely rules out that this bust is the counterpart of a bust of Philibert. Another bust of Margarete, possibly the second one paid for in 1518, was owned by the Rothschild family in 1958. At the time it was presented on loan in an exhibition at Brou Monastery. Its current owner is unknown.
reception
For a long time, art historical research only took note of the small wooden sculptures by Conrat Meits. In a review by Wilhelm Bode of another work ascribed to Meit , all four wooden sculptures are mentioned. Bode describes the Munich bust of Margarete as that of the ugly sister of Philip the Beautiful in her undressed widow's costume , while he perceived the busts of the British Museum and the Berlin Sculpture Collection as much more pleasant because of the depicted youth and the attractive facial features. He counts the carvings among the most important masterpieces of German small-scale sculpture. Bode rejects earlier assumptions that one of the figures could be copies, and attributes all four to Conrat Meit himself.
On June 21, 1967, the Landespostdirektion Berlin issued a 10 pfennig postage stamp in the series Berliner Kunstschätze . The stamp, designed by the Berlin graphic artist Ernst Finke, shows the right-facing bust of a young man and was published with an unusually high circulation of 30 million pieces.
Web links
- Portrait of Philibert le Beau, Duke of Savoy , description in the object catalog of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Wilhelm Bode: The painted clay bust of a laughing child in Buckingham Palace and master Konrad Meit . In: Yearbook of the Prussian Art Collections Berlin 1901, Volume XXII, Book IV, pp. 4–16, digitized version , special edition .
- ↑ a b Portrait bust , portrait bust of Philibert of Savoy in the British Museum's object catalog, accessed on October 8, 2019.
- ↑ a b c d Dagmar Eichberger: A Renaissance princess named Margaret. Fashioning a public image in a courtly society . In: Melbourne Art Journal 2000, Volume 4, pp. 4–24, digitized .
- ↑ Eichberger, Dagmar: A Cultural Center in the Southern Netherlands: the Court of Archduchess Margaret of Austria (1480-1530) in Mechelen . In: Martin Gosman, Alasdair MacDonald and Arjo Vanderjagt (eds.): Princes and princely culture, 1450-1650, vol. I . Brill, Leiden and Boston 2003, ISBN 90-04-13572-3 , pp. 239-258.
- ↑ a b c d e Dagmar Eichberger and Lisa Beaven: Family Members and Political Allies: The Portrait Collection of Margaret of Austria . In: The Art Bulletin 1995, Volume 77, No. 2, pp. 225-248, doi: 10.1080@00043079.1995.10786632 .
- ^ A b c d e Jens Ludwig Burk: Conrat Meit: Margaret of Austria's court sculptor in Malines and Brou . In: Author collective: Brou, un monument européen à l'aube de la Renaissance. Actes du colloque scientifique international de Brou, 13 and 14 octobre 2006 . Éditions du patrimoine, Paris 2007. Digitized .
- ↑ a b Dagmar Eichberger: Margaret of Austria's portrait collection: female patronage in the light of dynastic ambitions and artistic quality . In: Renaissance Studies 1996, Volume 10, No. 2, pp. 259-279, doi: 10.1111 / j.1477-4658.1996.tb00359.x , digitized .
- ↑ Portrait bust , portrait bust of Margaret of Austria in the British Museum's catalog of objects, accessed on October 8, 2019.
- ↑ Charles Hercules Read: The Waddesdon Convenient. Catalog of the works of art bequeathed to the British Museum by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild, MP 1898 . The British Museum, London 1902, p. 123 and panel LIV, digitized .
- ^ British Museum (ed.): The Waddesdon comfortably. The collection of jewels, plate, and other works of art, bequeathed to the British Museum by Ferdinand Rothschild . Clowes and Sons, London 1899, p. 47 and panels XIV and XV, digitized .