Lucia Brunacci

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Lucia Brunacci 1873 as Medea at the urn , Kunsthistorisches Museum

Lucia Brunacci (* 1848 in Rome ; † March 25, 1931 ibid) was from 1867 the model and soon the muse and lover of the German painter Anselm Feuerbach in Rome. After Anna Risi , she was his second and last model there. Both women stimulated Feuerbach's artistic activity, and with both of them he realized his most famous creations.

Life

The judgment of Paris , Hamburger Kunsthalle

Brunacci grew up as the daughter of the innkeeper Giuseppe Brunacci in the Roman district of Trastevere . As a minor, she was married to Cesare Preti on November 9, 1865, the "often drunk" owner of a tavern in Via dei Greci in Rome. The couple had twins by Romulus and Remus on the names Romulo and Remo were baptized. She was allowed to keep her son Remo, while Romulo had to be given to relatives, where he died early.

Resting nymph , Germanisches Nationalmuseum

At the end of the winter of 1866/67 she received a message from a friend that the German painter Anselm Feuerbach had discovered her and her son in the Piazza Barberini and that she would like to see them as a model in his studio for a fee. In order to be able to pay the wet nurse Remos with the money, she went there without registering. Feuerbach did not open the door for her, but the next day he visited her in her apartment, arranged a meeting and a knock signal for his studio in Via S. Nicola da Tolentino 2.

He liked Brunacci because she fulfilled his ideal of beauty . She had regular, classic features and thick black hair. Compared to Anna Risi, his "Nanna", who had left him in autumn 1865 because of a rich Englishman, she was softer in her forms and less heroic in her expression. He explained to her that he would keep her as a model forever if she promised not to serve as a model for any other painter.

Farewell to Medea , Neue Pinakothek

A love relationship developed between the two of them, but no longer in the passion that he had been able to bring to “Nanna”. When Brunacci's husband got wind of it, he threatened to cut off her long hair. Another time he bit her nose, causing it to swell and scarring the wound. Feuerbach then reported the husband to the Roman police and demanded that his model be protected against the rudeness of her husband. He has several pictures in the works that would be lost if something happened to her. Afraid of the ad, Cesare Preti finally stopped doing further stunts so that Brunacci and her son could visit Feuerbach every day between eleven and two o'clock and they could have lunch together. Soon they also went on Sunday excursions, for example to the Via Appia Antica or to Anzio by the sea, where Feuerbach sketched them and Remo for the picture motif Medea .

Iphigenie II , State Gallery Stuttgart
Iphigenie III , Museum Kunstpalast

Brunacci also encouraged Feuerbach to make further versions of his Iphigenia motif. In December 1868 he wrote to his stepmother Henriette : “The evening before yesterday I completely completed your Iphigenia. I do not want it to be made public, but to stay with us. The picture is of such delightful enthusiasm in its simplicity that you can sit in front of it for days, just as it keeps me spellbound in the armchair. ”Another well-known motif for which Brunacci sat as his model from 1867 to 1873 was The Battle of the Amazons .

Feuerbach took care of the education of his beloved. So he explained the antiquities of Rome to her on excursions and gave her books to read, such as Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor . He also gave her plenty of gold jewelry, which Brunacci took to the pawnshop as soon as she had financial problems. She looked after his studio when he was away, especially in the summer months when he visited his stepmother in Heidelberg.

In 1873 Feuerbach moved to Vienna, from whose Academy of Fine Arts he had been appointed professor. Since then he has been commuting between Vienna and Rome. In 1876, after pneumonia and a nervous crisis in Vienna, he submitted his departure and moved to Venice . In 1877 he stayed in Rome again for a while. When the lease for the Roman studio expired in the fall of 1877 and Feuerbach was determined to leave Rome for the time being, he gave Brunacci his few pieces of furniture, a stove, pictures, sketches and a large box with letters from his mother and friends for safekeeping their apartment. Every few weeks he would send her letters containing money in support of her. The letter expected for New Year 1880 ultimately failed to materialize. A few days later, Brunacci was approached on the street by another model, why she wasn't wearing mourning clothes if she didn't know that Feuerbach had died.

Feuerbach's stepmother exchanged a few letters with Brunacci after the sudden death of her son. In 1881 she sent a lady to her to negotiate the repurchase of a painting that was still with Brunacci. After that, their traces are lost until the turn of the century, when the German archaeologist Paul Hartwig happened upon Brunacci, "Feuerbach's Medea", in her fifties while on a foray into Rome. At that time she lived near the Roman city wall on the upper floor of a house in the Vigna del Bufalo , which had once belonged to a nobleman from the del Bufalo family. He summarized the impressions of this encounter in a book published in 1904.

In her eighties she finally received a visit from the German art historian Walter Bombe . In "extreme poverty and neediness" she lived in a tenement house in eastern Rome, at Viale Regina Margherita 302, abandoned by her husband. Her "good son" Remo was ill. The landlord of her apartment was about to move her out after twenty years. She already wanted to have made an attempt to end her life with strychnine . Bombe reported on the encounter "shaken" in the magazines Scherl's Magazin and Die Kunst für Alle . When this report appeared in October 1931 and August 1932, Brunacci had died at the age of 82.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hermann Uhde-Bernays : Feuerbach. The master's painting in 200 illustrations . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1913, p. XXXIII
personal data
SURNAME Brunacci, Lucia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian model and muse
DATE OF BIRTH 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH Rome
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 1931
Place of death Rome