Zofia Zamoyska on Her Deathbed (plaster model for her tomb)

Countess Zofia Zamoyska, born into the Czartoryski family, one of the great houses of Poland, had travelled abroad for her health and died of tuberculosis in Florence in February 1837, at 58. Her husband and her children ordered a tomb from Bartolini at once, and within four months this model of her on her deathbed was ready. She lies on a bed of classical design, her head on the pillow and her hands joined in her lap, under a burial cloth that falls in loose, crumpled folds. The cloth is what worried the family. In June 1837 one of her sons wrote to the sculptor that those untidy folds were unworthy of his mother's dignity. They stayed. When the tomb was cut in marble, Bartolini carved only her head himself and left the rest to his workshop. The finished monument was placed in 1844 in the Salviati chapel of the basilica of Santa Croce, where she still lies with the same rumpled sheet.