ANTONIO MINELLI (1465-1529), ATTRIBUTED TO ITALY,... Lot 265

ANTONIO MINELLI (1465-1529), ATTRIBUTED TO ITALY, PROBABLY XVIE SIECLE, Bust of a Roman Emperor Bronze with brown patina Height of the bust : 30,5 cm , Height with the pedestal : 45 cm Provenance : former Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé collection, then Pierre Bergé Son of a sculptor and stonecutter, Antonio Minelli or Minello was born in Padua around 1465. Trained in his father's workshop, he assisted him in the work on the Basilica of S. Antonio in Padua, probably from 1483-84. But his most significant intervention was in the construction of the chapel of the Arch of S. Antonio, certified first in June 1500, and then the following year, when, together with his father, he made the relief of the Miracle of the Mule or Miracle of St. Anthony of Padua, one of the nine Antonian stories intended to adorn the walls of the chapel. In the contract, signed on 26 March 1502, the subject was finally transformed into the Vestizione di s. In 1502, Antonio Minelli sculpted the funerary monument of the Franciscan general Francesco Nani, known as Sansone, and a year later that of the rhetorician Giovanni Calfurnio, which can be seen today in the cloister of the Novitiate (Padua, Basilica of S. Antonio). In 1510 he undertook, together with Antonio da Ostiglia, the sculpting of fifteen marble reliefs showing figures of prophets for the central portal of the Basilica of S. Petronio in Bologna, a work that was completed in 1511. The statue of S. Giustina (Padua, Basilica of S. Antonio), made in marble in 1512, is one of the most representative of his classical style. The model of the saint's face was taken almost literally for a polychrome terracotta bust of a woman kept in the Bardini Museum in Florence. In 1522, Antonio Minelli signed a contract with the goldsmith Bartolomeo di Jacopo Stampa. Antonio Minelli also produced fine sculptures after the antique, which he made on a small scale, such as our bronze bust, the marble relief with the god Pan preserved in Munich in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, or the bust of a young man belonging to a private collection in New York, a production destined for the erudite amateurs of the sixteenth century, including the collector Andrea Odoni. The statuette of Mercury in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, made in 1527 for the Venetian patrician Marcantonio Michiel, also belongs to this corpus. After Lorenzo Bregno's death in Venice, Antonio Minelli took over his workshop on 4 January 1524, undertaking in the contract to complete some of his unfinished works, namely the sculptures for the Treviso altar in the church of S. Maria Mater Domini and the Madonna and Child in the portal of the cathedral of Montagnana. From that date onwards, Antonio Minelli continued his activity in the Senestia, a city in which he had already worked in the past, executing, between 1512 and 1515, the funerary monuments of the condottieri Nicolò Orsini, Dionigi Naldi da Brisighella and fra Leonardo da Prato (Venice, Ss. Giovanni and Paul), which are now attributed to him on a stylistic basis. He died in Venice in 1529.