Lot 131: [ ITALIAN MEDALS ]

LEONE LEONI (c. 1509-1590) Isabella of Portugal (1503-1539), wife of Charles V, silver medal, DIVA ISABELLA AVGVSTA CAROLI V VX (The divine Isabella, wife of Charles V), half-length three-quarter facing bust, wearing an embroidered gown, pendant jewel, and with an elaborately braided coiffure, rev., HAS HABET ET SVPERAT (She has these and surpasses them), the Three Graces attended by two amoretti to left and right, a basket of fruit and overturned water jar on the ground, 124.31g, 75 mm (Attwood 28; Armand I, 168, 25; Middeldorf/Stiebral LVI, this piece), a very fine contemporary cast of high quality, extremely rare in silver

Provenance: 'The Property of a late Collector', Sotheby's, 12 June 1974, lot 201. While in Brussels in 1549, Charles V commissioned two gold medals from Leoni; one of himself, the other of Isabella of Portugal, his wife and the mother of the future Philip II, who had died a decade earlier (a number of references erroneously give the date of her death as 1536). The gold examples have been lost but Attwood (p. 101) cites in Madrid, a 'fine silver example' of the medal of Charles V (Cano, M., Leone e Pompeo Leoni, medallistas de la casa de Austria, Urrea 1994, pp. 162-201). The prototype for the portrait would appear to have been a struck medal (now lost) of Isabella by Leoni, which he mentions in a letter of 1548, and there cites as that portrait's source, 'If I have made it from Titian it is because His Majesty commanded it thus'. But, like Leoni, Titian had never seen the empress, and so yet another painting must have been supplied by the Emperor as the ultimate model. Charles must have found the image to his liking for it is virtually identical to that on a double-sided sardonyx cameo (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) cut by Leoni and mentioned in letters by him in 1550. The portrait, truncated, was also copied on medals by Leoni's former assistant, Jacques Jonghelinck. The elegant reverse of the Three Graces recalls the same antique source as that used earlier by Fiorentino on his medal of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (see lot 110), as well as by Leoni's contemporary Danese Cattaneo, on his medal of Elisabetta Quirini (see lot 150). In his medals of the imperial family, Attwood (p. 88) sees Leoni as setting the standard 'both in their scale, their diameters being about seventy millimetres and their sculptural reverses' to which Jacopo da Trezzo aspired in 'his medals of other family members, such as Philip II and his wife Mary Tudor' (see lots 136-1398).