The Veiled Rebecca or The Veiled Rebekah is a marble sculpture created by the Italian neoclassical sculptor Giovanni Maria Benzoni.

The Veiled Rebecca
Italian: Rebecca Velata
The Veiled Rebecca displayed at the Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, India
Artist	Giovanni Maria Benzoni
Year	1863
Type	Sculpture
Medium	Marble
Dimensions	160 cm × 58 cm × 50 cm (64 in × 23 in × 19.5 in)

History and description

Benzoni first executed the work in 1863 for Robert Winthe of London.[1] It depicts the scene from the Hebrew Bible when a modest Rebecca covers herself with a veil upon meeting her future husband, Isaac (Genesis 24:65).[2]

Veiled women were a popular sculptural motif among Benzoni and his peers in 19th-century Italy for a number of reasons. The first was that these works highlighted the artistry of the sculptor since achieving the illusion that stone is fabric clinging to a body requires a high level of skill. Secondly, a veiled woman had become an allegory for Italian unification.[3]

Benzoni's workshop made a number of copies of The Veiled Rebecca. A 19th-century English art journal noted that:[4]

Benzoni, the fashionable Roman sculptor, whose studio has been visited by a number of crowned heads, exhibits in his suite of showrooms, several replicas in different sizes of his Diana, his veiled Rebecca before her meeting with Isaac, the 'Four Seasons,' &c.

Copies

Copies of The Veiled Rebecca can be found at these museums:

• High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Listed in the catalog as The Veiled Rebekah and dated 1864.[2]
• Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Dated c. 1866.[5]
• Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan. This smaller version (113 cm tall) is listed in the catalog as The Veiled Lady and dated 1872.[6]
• Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, India. Dated 1876 (three years after Benzoni's death).[7]
• Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mount Vernon, Illinois.[8]

Gallery

• 
  Detail of the statue at the Salar Jung Museum
• 
  The Veiled Rebekah at the High Museum of Art

See also

• Vestal Virgin Tuccia, 1743 sculpture
• Modesty, 1752 sculpture
• Veiled Christ, 1753 sculpture
• Veiled Vestal 1847 sculpture
• The Veiled Virgin, mid-19th century sculpture
• The Veiled Nun, c. 1863 sculpture

Notes

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Veiled Rebecca.

• MH (1872). "Art in Rome, 1872". The Art-Journal. London: George Virtue. 34: 131–132. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
• Petrucci, Francesco, ed. (2005). Papi In Posa: 500 Years of Papal Portraiture. Gangemi Editore. ISBN 8849208766.