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.