Virgin and Child Jacopo Sansovino

In the early 1510s, a competition was announced in Florence for the making of a marble statue of “Our Lady” (the Virgin Mary), which would decorate the facade of what was then the Mercato Nuovo building. Participants in the competition included Baccio Bandinelli (1493–1560) and Jacopo Sansovino, as well as other sculptors from Florence and elsewhere, including Baccio da Montelupo (Bartolomeo di Giovanni d’Astore dei Sinibaldi, 1469– 1523), who had already made a name for himself as the creator of several major works, and Zaccharia Zacchi (1473–1544), a native of Arezzo who was residing in Volterra and who tended to make terracotta statues.

Although born in Florence, Sansovino had returned to the city only shortly before the announcement of the competition. He had come from Rome, the Eternal City, where he spent most of his time, alongside sojourns in Venice. He was linked to his native city by just two periods of artistic activity: the first period was 1502–1505, when he had studied in the workshop of the sculptor Andrea Sansovino (whose name he later adopted, as a mark of his respect for his former teacher), and several years during the period 1510–1518. One of the works completed during the latter period was a statue of the Virgin Mary, which he then submitted as model for the statue competition.

The statuette in Budapest is special not only because it is made from wax, being in fact the oldest of the surviving wax models. A further special feature of the statue is its modelling: it was made without an internal frame. The Virgin’s richly pleated dress was modelled from canvas dipped in stucco, to which a further layer of wax was added. Gilded wax covers the entire surface of the statue.

Sansovino, when making his statues, tended to make models rather than drawings, modelling so not only from wax but also from clay, a material often used for this purpose. In his work on the lives of artists and sculptors, entitled Le Vite, Giorgio Vasari mentions no fewer than ten models made by the sculptor Sansovino, emphasising that his models were held in the same esteem as his finished works. Proof of all this is that the papal chancellor, Giovanni Gaddi, began to collect the models by Sansovino even while the artist was still alive.

In terms of its composition, details, and the Virgin Mary’s facial type, the Budapest statue exhibits an affinity with works by Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530), a childhood friend of Sansovino, including the figure of Caritas in the Chiostro dello Scalzo in Florence and the figure of the Virgin from the Annunciation group in the Monastery of San Gallo (now held at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence). However, there may be a more prosaic reason for the stylistic affinity, namely the fact that the two sculptors ran a joint workshop between 1510 and 1517.

Although the chair of the adjudicative body, the famous Florentine painter Lorenzo di Credi, judged the statue model by Sansovino to be the best of the models submitted by the various contestants, in the end the commission was won by Sansovino’s rival, Baccio Bandinelli, who apparently had better political connections.



Manga Pattantyús

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