An erotic Vienna bronze, gilded, movable nude, in a bronze "iron maiden". Dates around 1900-1920.
Total height: 25,5 cm, nude lady: 21 cm.
In very good original condition.
Literature: Antique Vienna Bronzes by Joseph Zobel, page n°223.
Vienna bronze by Ernst Hrabalek, page n°26.
History of the Iron Maiden:
Despite its reputation as a medieval instrument of torture, there is no evidence of the existence of iron maidens before the early 19th century.The device, known in German as the "Eiserne Jungfrau", looked very similar to an Egyptian mummy sarcophagus. Wolfgang Schild, a professor of criminal law, criminal law history, and philosophy of law at the Bielefield University, has argued that putative iron maidens were pieced together from artifacs found in museums to create spectacular objects intended for (commercial) exhibition. Several 19th-century iron maidens are on display in museums around the world, including the San Diego Museum of Man, the Meiji University Museum, and several torture museums in Europe.
The most famous iron maiden that popularized the design was that of Nuremberg, first displayed possibly as far back as 1802. The original was lost in the Allied in 1945. A copy "from the Royal Castle of Nuremberg", crafted for public display, was sold through J. Ichenhauser of London to the Earl of Shrewsbury in 1890 along with other torture devices, and, after being displayed at the World's Colombian Exposition, Chicago, 1893, was taken on an American tour. This copy was auctioned in the early 1960s and is now on display at the Medieval Crime Museum, Rothenburg ob der Tauber.