The inscription on the base of this bust tells us that the subject is Beatrice of Aragon, the daughter of the King of Naples. After a two-year-long negotiation, Beatrice married Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, in 1474. The portrait may have been made during the engagement, when she was about fifteen years old. Since she’s identified as “the Divine Beatrice of Aragon,” the bust must pre-date her coronation as Queen of Hungary in 1476.
The original gilding and polychromy have been removed, but the texture of the marble changes from one area to the next, with the sitter’s flesh, locks of hair, and garments responding to light in different ways.
All that remains of the heraldic decoration of Beatrice’s neckline—which is now worn but once featured hills, lilies, and flower buds—are two ermines, an allusion to the Order of the Ermine, the most prestigious chivalric order of the Kingdom of Naples.
Beatrice of Aragon
Beatrice (1457−1508), daughter of Ferdinand I, King of Naples, had suffered through several attempts to marry her off before she became the third wife of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary. An outstanding soldier and statesman, Matthias presided over a court that was a magnet for artists and writers. Beatrice herself was well-educated and fluent in languages, with strong artistic and intellectual interests. She remained in Hungary until 1501, long after her husband's death in 1490. She died, childless, in Naples. Laurana probably portrayed Beatrice before her marriage and coronation in 1476. Indeed, her delicate features look almost childlike, although hints may be detected already of the thickening nose and double chin so pronounced in the more mature likeness of her in the Museum of History, Budapest. It is possible that the portrait bust was prepared for one or another of Beatrice's prospective bridegrooms.
Although recent archival discoveries have enlarged Laurana's slender dossier, the chronology of his peripatetic career has many gaps. Attempts to identify examples of his early sculpture in Dalmatia have unearthed promising but inconclusive candidates. And although he is recorded in Naples in 1453, probably working on the entrance archway of the Castelnuovo, his possible contributions to that complex are conjectural. Dated medals by Laurana place him at the court of Rene of Anjou from 1461 to 1466, while documented sculptures reveal that he was working in Sicily on various projects in 1468 and 1471, that he was in Naples in 1474, and that shortly thereafter he returned to France, where he seems to have spent most of his remaining years.
Because much of Laurana's work at these scattered sites has been lost and most of the larger surviving monuments are in locations seldom visited by the average traveler, he is best known for his idealized marble busts of women. The formal abstraction characteristic of these busts derives in part from late Gothic sculpture—from such works as Multscher's Reliquary Bust, the Barbet Angel, and the medieval reliquaries of Laurana's native Dalmatia. But his simplified shapes go beyond inherited tradition and seem the result of a conscious, consistent striving toward a geometric perfection of form that relates his work to such Italian Renaissance artists as Piero della Francesca.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Charles Timbal, Paris (said to have been bought in Florence c. 1855–60). Gustave Dreyfus, Paris (bought for 3,000 francs from Timbal in 1871). Purchased by Duveen with the remainder of the Dreyfus collection in 1930. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., New York. Bequeathed by him to The Frick Collection, 1961.
Source: The Frick Collection: Drawings, Prints & Later Acquisitions. Volume IX. New York: The Frick Collection, 2003.
