Wax bust of flora

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The wax bust of the Flora
Sculpture Collection and Museum for Byzantine Art, Berlin

The wax bust of Flora is a sculpture that was acquired by the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin in 1909 as a work by Leonardo da Vinci and subsequently caused a hitherto unprecedented press dispute over its authorship.

description

The figure represents the goddess Flora , the goddess of flowers in Roman mythology . The bust shows the half-portrait of a young woman with bare torso, with a scarf tied around her left shoulder and waist. The head is tilted slightly to the right shoulder, the face shows a smile. The bent forearms have broken off.

The 67.5 cm high sculpture is made of wax, which - as research has shown - contains whale rat and stearin , and is partially painted. It belongs to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and is part of their Sculpture Collection and Museum of Byzantine Art department with inventory number 5951.

The authorship of the sculpture is still not fully clarified; It was probably made in 1846 by the English sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas (1800-1883).

history

In July 1909 Wilhelm von Bode , general director of the Berlin museums, bought the wax bust of Flora for 185,000 gold marks through Willy Gretor from the London art dealer Murray Marks (1840–1918), believing that it was a work of Leonardo. Right at the beginning of their exhibition in Berlin, the English press revealed on the basis of eyewitness reports that the sculpture exhibited in Berlin's Kaiser Friedrich Museum was a forgery created in 1846 by Richard Cockle Lucas. Due to the tensions between the German Reich and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland , the revelations in the English press led to a violent journalistic exchange of blows, in the course of which over 700 articles on the topic were addressed over several years, most recently in the 1930s.

The wax bust was exhibited there continuously from its acquisition by the Kaiser Friedrich Museum until 1939. Then it was relocated to the Friedrichshain flak tower. As the fighting of the Second World War drew closer and closer to Berlin, the sculpture was brought to the Kaiseroda-Merkers potash mine in Thuringia in the spring of 1945 , where it fell into the hands of the Americans. They took them to the Central Collecting Point in the building of the former State Museum in Wiesbaden . The sculpture did not return to Berlin until 1966, where it was exhibited in the Dahlem Museum from 1966 to 1997 . Since 2006 it has been shown in the renovated Bodemuseum in Berlin.

examination

Initially, art-historical style comparisons attempted to suggest the creation of the wax bust, if not Leonardo himself, then at least suggesting his “circle”. In the course of the history of their research, scientific methods based on the latest state of the art were increasingly used. The wax bust of Flora was the first sculpture to be examined using X-rays . The Walrat, subsequently discovered in chemical samples, proved the material to be too old for the authorship of the sculptor Lucas and too young for Leonardo. In 1986 chemical analyzes showed that the wax contained synthetically produced stearin, a substance that was first produced in 1818; This provided proof that the wax bust could not be assigned to Leonardo and his surroundings .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Short biography on the website of the V&A Museum
  2. ↑ According to Manfred Reitz 160,000 gold marks, on the trail of time . (PDF; 291 kB) p. 15ff.