Richard Cockle Lucas#The .22Flora.22 bust

The wax bust of Flora is a sculpture that was purchased in 1909 by Berlin's Kaiser- Friedrich- Museum created as a work of Leonardo da Vinci and as a result a hitherto unprecedented press controversy over its authorship.

The wax bust of Flora (external weblink)

• Sculpture Collection and Museum of Byzantine Art, Berlin

Description

The bust shows the half portrait of a young woman stripped to the waist, with one wrapped around the left shoulder and the waist scarf. The head is slightly tilted to the right shoulder, his face showing a smile. The angled forearms are canceled.

The 76.5 cm high sculpture is made of wax, which - as proven studies - contains spermaceti and stearin, and is partially painted. It belongs to the possession of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation and is located in the Department of Sculpture Collection and Museum of Byzantine Art with the inventory number 5951st

The authorship of the sculpture is still not entirely clear; probably it was made ​​in 1846 by the British sculptor Richard Cockle Lucas.

History

In July 1909 earned Wilhelm von Bode, director general of the Berlin museums, the London art dealer Murray Marks the wax bust of Flora for 185,000 gold marks in the belief that it was a work of Leonardo. Right at the start of her exhibition in Berlin revealed the British press based on eyewitness accounts, that it was a 1846 Richard Cockle Lucas created forgery in the exhibited in Berlin's Kaiser- Friedrich- Museum sculpture. Because of the tensions between the German Empire and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the revelations of the British press led to a severe journalistic slugfest, in the course of which, last still accepted over several years in the 1930s, more than 700 articles of the topic.

The wax bust was exhibited since its acquisition by the Kaiser- Friedrich- Museum until 1939 through there. Then it was outsourced in the Friedrichshain flak tower. When the hostilities of World War II Berlin ever approached, the sculpture was taken in spring 1945 in the potash mine Kaiseroda - flag in Thuringia, where it fell into the hands of the Americans. This they managed to Central Art Collecting Point in the former State Museum in Wiesbaden. Only In 1966, the plastic back to Berlin, where it was issued from 1966 to 1997 permanently in the Dahlem Museum. Since 2006 she is shown in the renovated Bode Museum in Berlin.

Investigation

First tried art historically-oriented style comparisons, the emergence of the wax bust, if not Leonardo himself, but to suggest its " radius ". Over the history of their exploration and scientific methods were used according to the most recent version increasingly. Thus, the wax bust of Flora was the first sculpture, which was subjected to an examination by X-rays. The spermaceti hereafter discovered in chemical samples showed the material to be too old for authorship of the sculptor Lucas and too young for Leonardo. 1986 resulted in chemical analysis, that the wax synthetically produced stearin contains a substance which was manufactured for the first time in 1818; thus served to prove that the wax bust Leonardo and his circle can not be assigned.