Almost two decades of detective work, triggered by a Latin poem found in the Vatican archives, has led experts to conclude that a statue that had stood unnoticed for five centuries in a small southern Italian town is the work of a Renaissance master.
A new book by an Italian gallery director attributes the life-size statue to the 15th century artist Andrea Mantegna, whose paintings demonstrate a special genius for the creation of three-dimensional illusions.
Until recently, none of Mantegna’s sculptures was thought to have survived. David Landau, who chaired the 1992 exhibition of Mantegna’s works at the Royal Academy, said he had not yet studied the stone carving at first hand. But Landau added: ”When I saw the photographs I thought the claim was a very possible one. I certainly think it’s something to be taken seriously.”
The statue, of Saint Euphemia, stands behind a dusty glass panel on a high ledge in the cathedral at Irsina, a town 80km from Bari that now has a population of less than 7 000. St Euphemia, the patron saint of Irsina, was a young aristocrat from modern-day Turkey who was thrown to wild beasts in about 307 after she had refused to make a pagan sacrifice.
The carving shows her with one hand in the mouth of a lion — the pose used for a painting of St Euphemia by Mantegna in 1454 which hangs in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples.
Clara Gelao, the author of the new book and director of the provincial art museum in Bari, said she had first noticed the statue in 1978.
She was struck by its ”very high quality”, but thought little more about it until nine years later when she learned of a Latin poem found in the Vatican by a local priest, Father Nicola Di Pasquale.
The poem, written in 1592 by the then Archdeacon of Irsina, listed a series of donations that had been made to the cathedral 150 years earlier by Roberto de Mabilia, the rector of a church in Padua, where Mantegna was then working.
The gifts included a bone reputedly belonging to St Euphemia, which persuaded Irsina to adopt her as patron when it was made a cathedral town in 1452, and a painting of the saint ”by the excellent hand of Andrea to whom has been given the honorary name of Mantegna”.
It was clearly a reference to the work on display in Naples.
”Until then, its provenance was unknown,” said Dr Gelao. No one had realised that the painting once hung in Irsina cathedral.
The poem added that De Mabilia had given the cathedral two statues. Dr Gelao remembered the one reminiscent of the Naples painting.
”I started to look at it with new eyes,” she said. She travelled to Padua and found in the archives that De Mabilia was a native of Irsina who had studied in Padua and found a living there after he graduated.
Her researches since then have shown the statue in the cathedral has many stylistic and technical characteristics typical of Mantegna.
They have also a shown that it is strikingly similar to a figure in an altarpiece he painted in Padua between 1453 and 1454.
”It is as if the figure had stepped out of the picture to become a statue,” she said.
Dr Gelao’s claim was first published at the end of last year, but it only received wider publicity this month when it was reported by the Art Newspaper.
Mantegna would have been about 23 when the statue was executed. But, by that age, he was already a recognised talent.
Landau said that acceptance of the attribution could ”refocus the minds of art historians on the possibility that he did more [sculpture]”. He added: ”Maybe there is a corpus of Mantegna sculptures that has been wrongly attributed to others”. – Guardian Unlimited Â