About This Artwork

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition History

Northridge, CA, California State University Fine Arts Gallery, "A Collection without Walls: Problems in Connoisseurship," 3 October – 31 October 1976, no. 23.

Publication History

A. Venturi, Storia dell’Arte Italiana, vol. VII, part 3, p. 215. [mentions what is presumed to be a lost work by Andrea Mantegna of The Triumph of Love.]

Emile Molinier, Les Bronzes de la Renaissance: Les Plaquettes 2 (Paris, 1886), p. 163, no. 683.

Prince D’Essling and Eugène Müntz, Pétrarque (Paris, 1902), pp. 180, 276.

Robert Eisler, "Die Hochzeitstruhen der letzten Gräfin von Görz," Jahrbuch der K.K. Zentral-Kommission 3, 1 (1905), pp. 135–36.

Eduard Coudenhove-Erthal, Die Reliquienschreine des Grazer Doms und ihre beziehung zu Andrea Mantegna(Graz, 1931), pp. 18–21, 34–35, figs. 26–27.

Charles de Tolnay, The Tomb of Julius II (Princeton, 1954), pp. 27, 194, fig. 244.

Giovanni Caradente, I Tironfi nel Primo rinascimento (Italy, 1963), pp. 92, 94, 135–36, no. 202, fig. 90.

Hans Kure and Hugo Schnell, Dom und Mausoleum in Graz (Munich, 1969), pp. 8, 11.


For comparison, see:

A. Venturi, “Les ‘Triomphes’ de Pétrarque,” Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne, XX (1906), pp. 81-93, 209-21.

Paul Schubring, Cassoni: Truhen und Truhenbilder der italienischen Frührenaissance: ein Beitrag zu Profanmalerei im Quattrocento (Leipzig: K.W. Hiersemann, 1915), p. 155, pl. CXXXII.

*Fritz Knapp, Andrea Mantegna: des Meisters Gemälde und Kupferstiche (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1926), p. 172 (ill.) [Mantegna’s painting of Love, with a nearly identical composition as the Art Institute’s bronze.]

Enciclopedia italiana de scienze, lettere ed arti (Roma: Istituto Giovanni Trecani, 1929–39), p.357 (ill.).

Giovanni Mariacher, Bronzetti Veneti del Rinascimento (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1971), no. 63 [The Triumph of Love at the Louvre, thought to be a 19th C copy.]

*Alexandra Ortner, Petrarcas < in Malerei, Dichtung und Festkultur (Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 1998), pp. 44–48, 101–109, figs. 18–20, 26, 28, 32–36, 44, 48, 51–56, 63, 76–78, 84, 87, 94–99.

P. W. Hartmann, Elfenbeinkunst (Wien: P. W. Hartmann, 1999), p. 49, fig. 34.

*Margaret Ann Zaho, Imago Triumphalis: The Function and Significance of Triumphal Imagery for Italian Renaissance Ruleers (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004), pp. 1–6, 33–45.

Ownership History

Possibly private collection, United States, since c. 1900 [according to copy of signed invoice from Loewi-Robertson, 30 November 1977, in curatorial file]. Robert Mehlman, New York, by 1974 [according to Kay Robertson, telephone conversation, 22 November 2002, notes in curatorial file]. Sold by Robert Mehlman to Loewi-Robertson, Inc., Los Angeles and Charles Dent, Breiningsville, Penn, by 1974 [according to Robertson conversation cited above; and Northridge 1976 exh. cat., p. 17]. Sold by Loewi-Robertson, Inc., to the Art Institute, 1977.