San Giovanni Battista. Marmo bianco. Fra Giovanni... Lot n° 1

height cm 103. The work is accompanied by a critical study by Dr. Federica Gasparrini who attributes it to "[...]modus operandi of the sculptor Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli" and continues "That of the Forerunner is, moreover, a theme often present in the artist's curriculum, to which he was evidently linked, more than his own religious vocation as friar Servant of Mary, the fact that the Baptist was the former patron saint of Florence and Genoa, where in fact the sculptor was active for a long time before the allocations of Messina. To remind us of this, in addition to the Lives collected by the Genoese patrician Soprani (1674) and later enlarged by the painter Ratti (1768), is also Vasari, who, in the Life dedicated to him (1550), reports of a Baptist sculpted by Montorsoli, when he completed the tomb of Jacopo Sannazaro in Naples and came to Genoa, and commissioned by Andrea Doria to transform the presbytery of the Church of San Matteo (1543 - 1547)". To conclude "[...] A small morphological correspondence has been found with the Baptist in Santa Maria dei Servi in Bologna (1558 - 1562), with respect to which the statue in question, less defined in detail, especially the hair and fleece, is presented as a prototype. In both cases, the musculature - more "titanic" than in the previous Genoese one - is well structured; the neck is tense, eyebrows frowning, the gaze absorbed, while the drapery, which flows from the shoulder along the left side, ripples at the waist and the right arm closes to tighten the chest: all the characteristics, the latter, referable to the full maturity of the sculptor, when, having overcome the anxieties of the first Florentine days, he returns with confidence to the heroic Renaissance and Michelangelo's dream.