Petrarch & the bust of Francesco Laurana

Jacob Burckhardt empathically described Petrarch as ‘one of the earliest fully modern men’. The poet was also of seminal importance for the visual arts of the Renaissance, for example for early landscape painting, for the iconography of the ‘Uomini Famosi’, the scholar's portrait and the canon of female beauty. Francesco Laurana's unique bust in the Kunstkammer has been interpreted in very different ways since its ‘discovery’ by Wilhelm von Bode in 1888. In the context of the reception of Petrarch in the 15th century, the lecture explores the question of how much the Viennese bust owes to Petrarch's famous sonnets to his beloved Laura or whether it is perhaps even an ideal portrait of Laura.