Alfonso Lombardi a Santa Maria della Vita: per una rilettura stilistica

After having spent the first years of his career as a sculptor at the court of Ferrara, Alfonso Lombardi moved to Bologna in about 1519. There, before 1522, Lombardi completed a large-scale terracotta statuary group of the Funeral of the Virgin for the confraternity of Santa Maria della Vita. In his crafting of this work the sculptor succeeded in reinventing the language of sculpture according to the canons of Roman-inspired figurative culture of the first two decades of the sixteenth century, known in Emilia above all through the circulation of drawings and prints. An attentive stylistic study enables us to read the Funeral of the Virgin through the lens of Alfonso Lombardi’s training in Ferrara, appropriately setting the work in the context of Emilian Raphaelism around 1520. A remarkable aspect of these statues is the naturalistic handling of expressions and flesh passages, now more appreciable through a new series of photographs.