Ginevra (fragment)

Hiram Powers, born Woodstock, VT 1805-died Florence, Italy 1873 · revised 1863

The cult of youth had always been irresistable to artists and collectors alike. Ginevra depicts a fifteen-year-old bride, a tragic character from Samuel Rogers' popular poem Italy (1822), who dies on her wedding night after inadvertently locking herself in a trunk while playing hide-and-seek with her betrothed. Powers produced at least seven examples of Ginevra, his first ideal bust, before revising the composition in 1863 to eliminate the cascading curls of hair that were expensive to produce in marble.