I due volti: Plinio il Vecchio fra gotico e umanesimo

The evolution of the image of Pliny the Elder in the Fifteenth century places two iconographic models in dialectics: the late Gothic one, but frequent in the humanistic context, of the bearded old man and the humanistic one of the adult, clean-shaven man. The identified typical cases start from the late Fourteenth century episode (1389) of the Pliny of the Ambrosiana Library, with the first model practiced by Pietro da Pavia in the Petrarchan culture of the Visconti court, to continue with the radically humanistic slant (from 1460) of the Gonzaga Pliny today in Turin, the result of the workshop led by Pietro Guindaleri. The conflict over the writer’s Como or Veronese origins leads to distant comparison: the statues of the two Plinii by Tommaso Rodari for the façade of the Cathedral of Como (1484/1485), with a purely human- istic flavour; and the archaizing one by the lake artist Alberto da Milano for the Loggia del Consiglio in Verona (1476/1493). In this dialectic, the last image from the Nürnberger Chronik (1493), with its interchangeable portrait and Nordic accent, is almost paradoxical.