A Murder, a Mummy, and a Bust: The Newly Discovered Portrait of Simon of Trent at the Getty

Abstract

This essay presents conservatory and iconographic evidence for a new identification of a marble bust in the Getty Museum’s collections. The unusual object, hitherto identified as the early Christian child martyr Saint Cyricus, bears marks which indicate that it is in fact the only known marble portrait of Simon of Trent, a two-year-old Christian boy whose dead body was found on Easter 1475 in a sewer underneath a Jewish family’s house in Trent, Italy. What followed is known as one of the most appalling blood libels against Jews in Early Modern Europe. The incident set in motion an unprecedented visual and written propaganda campaign, which, with the help of the printing press, quickly established a major cult around the alleged child “martyr.” The Getty bust, a portrait of the dead child in the pose of a martyr, must have played a significant role in Simon’s quickly spreading cult in late fifteenth-century Europe.