A bust of a Renaissance aristocrat by
great Florentine Renaissance sculptor Donatello has been found
in a museum storeroom in Slovakia, the SME daily reported
Wednesday.
Hidden under the label of “marble bust of a woman by an unknown
artist”, the 15th-century work has been lying in the store room
in Levoca, eastern Slovakia, for decades, it said.
Experts have now described the bust as unique in the world and
it will be put on public display next autumn.
SME reported that after extensive research conducted by art
historian Marta Herucova of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, it
is almost certain that the bust is the work of Donatello and
that it depicts Cecilia Gonzaga.
The work was created in the mid-15th century in Florence and
came to what is now Slovakia thanks to contacts between the
Gonzaga family of Mantua and the noble Csaky family, owners of
the Spissky Hrhov castle, where the bust was originally kept.
The castle later served as a reformatory for girls.
“We know from testimonies that girls played with the bust, which
sometimes served as a ball, and that lines were drawn around its
eyes with a pen,” Maria Novotna, former director of the Spis
Museum, who initiated research on the bust, which was initially
thought to be a 19th-century copy, said at a press conference.
Having arrived at the Levoca museum in 1975, Herucova began
research on the bust in 2019, which also included consultations
with experts from Florentine museums that house other works by
Donatello.
“We spoke with Dr. Giovanni Serafini, who immediately told us
that it is 99.9 percent Donatello,” Herucova said.
In Florence, they compared the bust from Levoca, for example,
with the tombstone of antipope John XXIII.
Herucova also contacted art historian Moritz Csaky, whose family
owned the castle in Slovakia and who remembered the bust.
The work is signed, and according to the SME newspaper, only
seven of Donatello’s known works have this feature.
photo: Donatello’s St Mark at Orsanmichele in Florence
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