anticSwiss 02/10/2021 12:32:46 http://www.anticswiss.com

Alboino's banquet, 19th century oil painting

FOR SALE ANTIQUE DEALER Period: 19° secolo - 1800 Ars Antiqua srl Milano Style: Altri stili +39 02 29529057 393664680856 Height:97cm Width:113cm Material:Olio su tela Price:8000€

DETAILED DESCRIPTION:

19th century forces Rosmunda to drink from the skull of Cunimondo Oil on canvas, 97 x 113.5 cm - with frame 118 x 134.5 cm

The story of Rosmunda, the vengeful queen of the , met a happy revival in the Romantic age, when the Italian culture became the patron of lyrical historicisms and events of tragic teaching. Already in the Renaissance period the poet Giovanni di Bernardo Rucellai, but also Machiavelli in the Florentine Histories and then Giannone, then Muratori and finally Alfieri in the tragedy of the same name, had used the episode to shape characters of extraordinary moral vigor. Rosmunda was the daughter of Cunimòndo, king of the Gèpids, a Germanic tribe that had contributed to the Hun defeat. When Alboin, king of the Lombards, conquered the territory they occupied, Pannonia, he killed Cunimondo and married Rosmunda to obtain the favor of the surviving Gepid soldiers. The Lombard court then moved to Italy, to the government palace already built by Theodoric the Goth in Verona: it was 568. Paolo Diacono (Historia Langobardorum, II, c. 28) narrates that one evening, at a banquet, Alboin forced his wife drinking wine with him directly from the skull of Cunimondo, according to a notorious barbarian custom. The outrage rekindled Rosmunda's soul, who soon plotted "mox" to avenge the murder of her father with the death of her husband ("in husbands necem patris funus avenging exarsit) thanks to the help of her lover Elmichi and most loyal of the king, Peredeo. Regardless of the shadow of the legendary that can be seen in this fraction of the story of Paolo Diacono, the revenge of Rosmunda was one of the many attempts with which the tried, by supporting local groups, to stem the Lombard hegemony in the peninsula Italian. The practice of modeling bones to use them as an object is explained anthropologically in the desire to exacerbate one's victory over an enemy, exploited as a triumphal cup. The oldest skull-cup found comes from the Cough Cave, in the county of Somerset: it dates back to about 14,700 BC, but prehistoric and archaeological sources testify to several other contemporary and slightly later examples.

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In 177 BC Laoshanh, son of the leader of the Mongol , drank from the skull of the enemy king of the ; the custom was maintained in Asian territory during Buddhist and Hindu tantric rituals - the cups are now known as "kapala". Teòfane the Confessor, a well-known Byzantine writer (758-817 / 8) handed down how , Khan of the Bulgarians, had derived from the skull of Nicephorus I the Logothet, emperor of the Constantinopolitan vastness, a cup adorned with precious, after defeating him at Pliska: a miniature of the manuscript Cronache di Costantino Manasse, written between the years 1344-1345 (editio now preserved in the Historical Museum of Moscow), depicts the moment of the banquet with the cup, and the titulus-caption in Middle-Bulgarian Slavonic explains that "Krum of Bulgaria is celebrating his victory over the Emperor Nicephorus ”. In modern times, even Lord Byron had a cupped keeper, believed to be the prior of the friars, modeled a skull found in the grounds of Newstead Abbey, adding an inscription engraved above it. The episode of Rosmunda and Alboino is pictorially documented by a famous painting by Luciano Borzone (1590-1645), now in a private collection; similarly, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna there is a painting made by the Rubens school; Palazzo Labia, in the Rai collection, hosts a Bolognese school banquet as a counterpart to another medieval historical subject. The subject also found continuity in the field of engravings: remember the one performed by Francesco Bartolozzi (1727-1815) on the invention of Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727 or 1732-1785) in a pencil etching manner, preserved in the Civic Graphic and Photographic Collections -Civica Collection of Achille Bertarelli Prints. https://www.anticswiss.com/en/fine-art-antiques/alboino-s-banquet-19th-century-oil-painting-24005

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