Portrait of Giulia Marini in three poses

Franz Adolf von Stürler 1835

In this unusual portrait Franz Adolf von Stürler portrays Giulia Nuti, wife of his friend and painter Antonio Marini, in three different poses. An amateur painter, Giulia Nuti Marini maintained an artistic and personal association with the French painter, to whom she was united by a very special friendship.

Technical information

Author: Franz Adolf von Stürler
Title: Portrait of Giulia Marini in three poses
Date: 1835
Material and technique: Oil on copper
Size: 109x76,5 cm
Location: Palazzo Pretorio Museum
Third Floor

Von Stürler portrayed the amateur painter Giulia Marini (1800-1869) in 1835 as an enlarged miniature, with the young woman's face seen from the front, in foreshortening and in profile, framed by the black curls of her hair, according to a Romantic-style portrait model, similar to that of other intellectual heroines of the time. The meticulous attention to detail is rendered very well in the painting by a “Nordic” Dutch-inspired light, which shows off the curly hairstyle and the collar bow.
Franz Adolf von Stürler was a pupil of the famous Ingres in Paris and a friend of Lorenzo Bartolini. Together with Luigi Mussini, he founded a private drawing school during his years in Florence, where he bonded with the Marini couple. He resumed the purist lesson in his original reinterpretation of the decorative concepts proposed by examples of Tuscan Gothic.
Also exhibited in the same room by the same artist are the works Renato d'Angiò and Isabella of Lorraine, representative of the neo-Gothic taste of the period, and a Male portrait. Another portrait of Giulia, also by Stürler, is kept in the Town Hall.