Laura in der Kirche

'Laura in der Kirche' (Laura in the Church), painted in 1865 and held in the Schack Collection in Munich, depicts Petrarch's idealized beloved in a church setting — a subject that connects two of Feuerbach's central passions: Italian literary culture and the melancholy female figure as vehicle for reflective beauty. Petrarch first saw his Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire in Avignon on Good Friday, 1327, a moment the poet returned to obsessively in his Canzoniere. Feuerbach, living in Rome with his model and muse Anna Risi (called 'Nanna'), found in the Laura subject a vehicle for his own experience of idealized love and impossible aspiration. The Schack Collection, assembled by the Munich patron Adolf Friedrich von Schack, was dedicated to contemporary German artists working in a Romantic and classical vein, and Feuerbach was among Schack's most important proteges; several key works from his Italian period are preserved in this collection specifically because of Schack's sustained.

The church interior setting required Feuerbach to render the specific quality of light in a sacred space — diffused, indirect, filtered through high windows — which gave his characteristic warm, amber-toned flesh a particular spiritual luminosity.