An allegorical portrait of Dante, painted in 1532‒1533 by the Medici court artist Agnolo Bronzino, will be on show in Moscow at the Voznesensky Centre until 20 February, in an exhibition curated by the Pushkin Museum's chief research fellow Victoria Marko
An allegorical portrait of Dante, painted in 1532‒1533 by the Medici court artist Agnolo Bronzino, will be on show in Moscow at the Voznesensky Centre until 20 February, in an exhibition curated by the Pushkin Museum's chief research fellow Victoria Markova. The painting, which was considered lost until 1999, was acquired in 2020 by the Leonid Boguslavsky Foundation and has already managed to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Hermitage.
In the portrait Dante holds a manuscript of the Divine Comedy, open at a page with a passage from Canto XXV of Paradiso:
«With other voice, with other fleece, I shall
Return a poet, and at my baptismal font
Take the crown…»
With his right hand Dante points to Florence, awakening from the darkness, with the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore; beneath his hand the flames of hell blaze, while in the sky a sun rises, illuminating the mountain of purgatory and the spheres of heavenly paradise.
