Venetian sculptor active in the early 15th century
MOURNING VIRGIN AND SAINT JOHN EVANGELIST
painted wood, Virgin height 144 cm, Saint John height 140 cm
Reference Literature
A. Markham Schulz, Woodcarving and Woodcarvers in Venice 1350-1550. Florence 2011.
The two figures, as realistic as they are monumental – in part due to their almost life-size dimensions – in all probability belonged to a group installed in a chapel, against walls so painted as to best render the scene of the death of Christ on Calvary; that is, with all the elements mentioned in the Gospels and with that all-encompassing theatricality which since medieval times has accompanied commemorations and re-enactments of sacred events.
Like the Christ in the previous lot, the two sculptures are datable to the early 15th century and can be attributed to the circle of Antonio Bonvicino. A markedly realistic expressiveness is readable in the dramatic figures of Saint John and the Virgin. The artist’s penetration of his subjects’ psyches, so clearly evident in the expressions of the two mourners, as well as the plays of planes and curves of the carved drapery, which are only exalted by the polychromy still surviving on large portions of the clothing, lead us to hypothesise the influence of coeval Nordic sculpture; notably that of Claus Sluter (Haarlem, ca. 1340 – Dijon, ca. 1405), a master in the art of uniting monumentality, dynamism, and physiognomic investigation.
