BENEDICT XV, Pope
Description:
Half-length profile portrait, wearing a red mozzetta and an embroidered red stole over his white robe. Oil on canvas, 34” x 26” (41.3 x 33.5 cm) signed upper left ‘A. Muller Ury Roma 1920’
Location:
Haus Müller-Lombardi (Adolfo Müller-Ury Stiftung), Hospental, Canton Uri, Switzerland.
Exhibitions:
DUVEEN GALLERIES, 720 Fifth Avenue, New York, April 6 – 18, 1925, No. 2
FRENCH & CO. INC., 210, East 57th Street, New York, April 21- May 3, 1947, No. 2.
Bibliography:
Art News, Vol. XXIII, No. 27, New York, April 11, 1925
Art News, Vol. XLVI, New York, April 1947, pp. 45-46
Schweizer Zeitung/American Swiss Gazette, Thursday, April 23, 1925
Giacomo Della Chiesa was born on November 21, 1854. He was elected Pope on September 3, 1914 and died on January 22, 1922.
Despite the date, the picture may have been painted by the artist in New York from a photograph of the Pope as he is not recorded having made two pictures of the Pope in 1920 and the picture at the Catholic University is certainly the primary portrait.
This picture was amongst those sent to Switzerland in 1947 by Otto Müller and belonged to the artist’s nephew, Fredy Müller; he later gifted it to the Urner Altesheim, but in 2009-10 they gifted it to the Adolfo Muller-Ury Stiftung where it was cleaned and restored. The raised right hand looks as if it was retouched by the artist late in his life.
