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Gasparo Cairano, Caprioli Adoration (detail, 1495-1500), whose authorship has been the subject of much debate since the 19th century.

The critical itinerary of Gasparo Cairano, begun during the sculptor's lifetime and still not fully completed today, after more than five hundred years, has seen the contribution of numerous critical voices and the consequent production of a bibliography that is particularly consistent and varied in content, but tends toward an almost total misrecognition of the author and his work.

Along with Gasparo Cairano, the historiographical parable of Brescian Renaissance sculpture and its other protagonists never received the honors of artistic and literary culture, remaining forgotten even by local sources. The main reason for this is to be found in a very long series of errors, omissions and misunderstandings that occurred from the very beginning in the literary field, which led to a real oblivion of the cultural and qualitative level reached by the Brescian School in the thirty years between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as of the names of its protagonists.

The loss of archival documents or of the works themselves, which were often fragmented or even destroyed, has certainly been a factor in this, although much has been preserved. Only since the second half of the 20th century have new studies, supported by the recovery of archives, allowed the critical rediscovery not only of Gasparo Cairano, but of the entire chapter of Brescian sculpture, a panorama still incomplete in many aspects and occasionally filled in by new studies of documents and works.

Gasparo Cairano's critical itinerary through the centuries

The silence of contemporary literature

One of the most striking silences is that of the local artistic literature, which is contemporary with the production of the sculptor. First of all, the date of Marin Sanudo's visit to Brescia, a potential admirer of the blossoming of the local Renaissance, is inconvenient. He passed through in 1483, a few years before the opening of the construction site for the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. On the other hand, Marcantonio Michiel does not devote a single chapter of his Notizia d'opere di disegno, written in 1521, to Brescia: he does, however, mention Gasparo Cairano, saying that he was the brother of "Anzolino Bressano, ovver Milanese," a master of terracotta, providing a valuable reminder of the Brescian sculptor at least four years after his death.

There is no mention of Gasparo Cairano in Elia Capriolo's chronicle of c. 1505, which only vaguely mentions the Brescian Renaissance flowering of those years and its protagonists, "the painters, goldsmiths, and sculptors, emulators of Apelles and Praxiteles", reserving praise only for the later Stefano Lamberti. Even the humanist Vosonius, in a Latin carmen dedicated to Brescia in 1498, sings its praises with classical poetic rhetoric. He even mentions the Palazzo della Loggia, but without naming any sculptors. Likewise, the name of Cairano and, in general, of any other figure of the Brescian sculptural scene of the time, does not appear in the manuscripts of Pandolfo Nassino and Lucillo Ducco.

Nevertheless, Gasparo Cairano must have had a certain fame post mortem, as Michiel's quotation shows. This omission is also puzzling in the light of Gasparo's descendants, for whom documents attest to individuals active in various artistic fields for at least two generations: between 1545 and 1561, Gasparo Cairano "the younger", also a sculptor, son of Simone and thus grandson of Gasparo "the older", from whom he even took his baptismal name, is recorded in various archival sources.

The quote from Pomponius Gauricus

Portrait of Pomponius Gauricus.

Gasparo Cairano is the subject of a single illustrious quotation in the historiography of the period: Pomponius Gauricus' De Sculptura, published in Florence in 1504, in which the humanist pays the Brescian sculptor a complimentary tribute in Latin, not forgetting to mention the Palazzo della Loggia and the Cycle of the Caesars:

Dignus et qui nominetur Brixiani praetorii architectura et Caesaribus Gaspar Mediolanensis

Noteworthy for the architecture of the Praetorian Palace of Brescia and the Caesars, Gasparo Milanese

—Pomponius Gauricus, De sculptura, pp. 254-255.

This note pays tribute to the sculptor and his Caesars, as well as to the entire architecture of the Loggia, who, only twelve years after the start of construction, found a place among the major protagonists of Italian sculpture of all times, in a publication of profound artistic culture and expressly dedicated to figurative matters, the only Lombard sculptor to be named along with Cristoforo Solari. Gauricus does not cite the refined carvings of the Sanctuary of the Miracles, but rather the architecture and the mighty, old-fashioned busts of the Loggia, thus conveying a clear signal of preference for the modernity transposed in these works. However, this promise of glory would remain within the pages of De Sculptura: after the first, successful Florentine edition in 1504, the treatise would not be published again in Italy for at least three hundred years, finding some circulation only beyond the Alps. In fact, no reference to Gauricus is attested in local sources and, in general, in any art-related literature up to the 19th century.

Giorgio Vasari's misunderstanding and Cairano's disappearance from contemporary literature

Self-portrait of Giorgio Vasari.

However, it was Giorgio Vasari who was most responsible for Gasparo Cairano being forgotten, and for a series of misconceptions surrounding his character. In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, in the section devoted to Lombard artists, the scholar states that he has "recently been in Brescia", after which he sings the praises of the great masters of local painting and notes a marked interest in the subject of the picture more than others. Renaissance sculpture is mentioned only in passing in the few words devoted to the Luganese Giovanni Gaspare Pedoni, "who has done many things in Cremona and Brescia [...] that are beautiful and praiseworthy", with a blatant misunderstanding of the artist's identity. This misunderstanding, of considerable importance for art criticism in the centuries to come, is indeed singular, since Pedoni is completely absent from the panorama of the Brescian Renaissance scene, both in terms of documents and works produced.

At the time of his visit to Brescia and the compilation of the pages dedicated to it, Vasari was certainly aware of Pomponius Gauricus' De Sculptura, where the "Gaspar Mediolanensis", author of the Caesars of the Loggia, is named. It is likely, though, that no Brescian could have told him more about this sculptor, at least according to the ignorance revealed by the learned local sources of the time, especially since sculptural styles had changed radically by that time with the Mannerist revolution of Jacopo Sansovino. Not coincidentally, Giacomo Medici, a pupil of Sansovino, is the only Brescian sculptor mentioned by Vasari. Since he also had information about Pedoni's activity in nearby Cremona, Vasari probably ended up conflating the two personalities, identifying the Luganese Gaspare Pedoni, that is, the Milanese, with the "Gaspar Mediolanensis" of Gauricus, and perhaps attributing the sculptor's foreign origin to local ignorance. The publication of the Lives erased Gasparo Cairano's name from Brescian history for at least two centuries.

At the end of the sixteenth century, Brescian art literature, although interested in the works of its own past, especially the Loggia and its rich palimpsest of sculptures, was no longer able to identify the names of the sculptors who had created them. An example of this is Patrizio Spini's Supplimento, written in 1585 as an appendix to the vernacular edition of Elia Capriolo's Chronicle: Spini offers the reader a long digression on the Loggia, in which the exaltation of every artistic detail of the palace clashes decisively with the total silence about the names of the artists responsible for such magnificence. In addition, the participation of names such as Jacopo Sansovino, Andrea Palladio and Galeazzo Alessi in the construction of the palace, which was resumed in the middle of the century, had focused the interest of scholars on mainly architectural matters, relegating sculptural features to the background.

The last mention of Gasparo Cairano in the 16th century is not in Brescia but in Salò: Bongianni Grattarolo, in his Historia della Riviera di Salò written in 1587 and printed in Brescia in 1599, mentions "a master Gasparo Bresciano" as the author of the portal of the cathedral. However, this is only an onomastic memory, completely disconnected from his historical and artistic identity, as well as from the works the sculptor produced in the city.

Between the 17th and 18th centuries

The ark of Saint Apollonius (1508-1510).

By the seventeenth century, Brescian art literature had turned to the local Renaissance scene only to glorify its school of painting and its protagonists - Moretto, Romanino, and Vincenzo Foppa - leaving the thriving field of sculpture clearly unexplored, but not looking for a solution to this gap, almost as if the problem did not exist. At the same time, in Brescia, as in the rest of northern Italy, a certain type of local art literature of an anti-Vasarian nature began to spread, with the aim of redeeming all the personalities neglected in the Lives, but this new trend did not lead to significant results either. In Brescia, the most important text of this genre is Ottavio Rossi's Elogi Historici di Bresciani illustri, published in 1620, in which the author praises all the most famous Brescian painters. However, the Sansovinesque Giacomo Medici, mentioned by Giorgio Vasari as "one of the rarest sculptors in Italy", is the only local sculptor mentioned. The idea that works such as the façade of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and the Caesars of the Loggia predate Medici does not seem to concern the Brescian scholar, although this may be due to a genuine misunderstanding of styles prior to the Mannerism introduced by Sansovino. In this way a new critical trend was inaugurated, that of Giacomo Medici as an illustrious author of Brescian works, with a significant impact on the bibliography that followed Rossi.

It was also in the seventeenth century, however, that the first flashes of interest in the sculptural works of the Brescian Renaissance began to appear, completely misunderstood but nevertheless able to arouse the curiosity of the local literature. First comes Bernardino Faino's guide to the city, the oldest in chronological order among the historical guides to Brescia. The scholar saw the Ark of St. Apollonius and its "small, beautiful stories of the saint", taking care to specify that "the author of this work is not known, being an ancient thing". Similarly, the Caprioli Adoration, which Faino saw correctly installed in the lost tomb of Luigi Caprioli in San Giorgio, is said to be "a carefully made thing, a very ancient thing. Similar praise for the Caprioli relief is found in Francesco Paglia's Giardino della Pittura, written between 1675 and 1713. In the chapter dedicated to the Old Cathedral, after paying homage to the funeral monument of Domenico Bollani by Alessandro Vittoria, Paglia states that "it is best to omit certain other little things. ", referring to none other than the ark of Berardo Maggi and the funeral monument of Domenico de Dominici, to admire an "ark carved with beautiful figures of white marble", namely the Ark of St. Apollonius, which was kept in the Winter Cathedral during those years. In praising the Loggia, Paglia also ventured some attributions involving Bramante and again Giacomo Medici, whose names he took from earlier literature.

Considerations on the same level as the previous ones were also elaborated by Giulio Antonio Averoldi in his guide to Brescia printed in 1700, in which the sculptures of San Pietro in Oliveto are also extensively praised, by Francesco Maccarinelli's guide written in the mid-eighteenth century and, to a lesser extent, by Giovanni Battista Carboni's guide of 1760. It is remarkable, however, that information about local Renaissance sculptors is completely absent from Carboni's Notizie istoriche delli pittori, scultori e architetti bresciani.

Zamboni's research and the revival of the name of Cairano

Detail of the sculptures and architectural elements of the Brescian Loggia (1495-1505).

Gasparo Cairano, Caesar (late 15th century).

From the middle of the eighteenth century, an unprecedented interest in the knowledge of Brescian art and its protagonists, past and present, began to emerge. This interest was undoubtedly encouraged by the cultural maturation of historical studies. Moreover, in the same period the Loggia was affected by a revitalization plan that would lead to the renovation of the square and the erection of the new roof by Luigi Vanvitelli, which remained unfinished, with a reawakening of Brescia's civic pride, which by its very nature was centered around the municipal palace. It was in this new climate that the Memoirs of Baldassarre Zamboni were published in 1778, financed by the city. Zamboni's work, in fact, represents the first historical research in the modern sense of the term, undertaken by the Brescian literary scene, constructed through consultation, questioning and rearrangement of documents, comparison of sources with historiography and material evidence. Approaching the problem from this point of view and with these assumptions, Zamboni transcribed and published a vast amount of information, drawing firstly from the still extant Provvisioni comunali, but above all from the lost and at that time unknown bulletin books of the Municipality of Brescia, drawing for the first time not only the real chronology, but also the names of all the protagonists of a completely forgotten historical phase. And so, finally:

The imperial heads, as far as I can tell from the city bulletins, were almost all made by two hands. Gasparo da Milano made twenty-one, and Antonio della Porta six.

— Baldassarre Zamboni, Memorie intorno alle pubbliche fabbriche più insigni più insigni della città di Brescia, p. 44.

The importance of Baldassarre Zamboni's research lies precisely in the fact that he transcribed these documents, which are now lost: however, the vast amount of data collected allowed him to compile only a very selective synthesis, which nevertheless remains the only surviving evidence of the facts and names reported therein. The scholar's revolutionary discoveries were immediately adopted by Italian and transalpine literature. Zamboni also studied the Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, but limited himself to consulting only the municipal archives, which did not keep the account books, which were kept in the archives of the same church. The recovered documents thus lead him to date the construction of the facade in 1557, superimposed on a "chapel built in a tumultuous and extremely rapid manner" around 1488: thus, a valuable opportunity was missed to transcribe information about this other structure that would be lost a century later.

Resumption of the Vasarian misunderstanding

The new discoveries made in Brescia, however, were far from restoring the works and names of the Brescian Renaissance to the glory of art literature. A new and long chapter of errors and misunderstandings was about to begin. In 1774 the Notizie istoriche de pittori, scultori ed architetti cremonesi by Giovanni Battista Zaist was published, in which the author, dealing with Gaspare Pedoni, went to Brescia to seek confirmation of Vasari's citation. Thus, the façade of the Sanctuary of the Miracles was attributed entirely to Pedoni's chisel, since: "it seems that this work corresponds to the others of his that we have here in Cremona, and was made by him at about the same time, as Giorgio Vasari says". Zaist's attribution had a profound effect on the art literature not only in Cremona but also in Brescia. Among other things, it was necessary to fill the gap left by the question of the work's authorship.

In this way, the eighteenth century came to an end with a cognitive panorama of the sculptural scene of the Brescian Renaissance, more advanced than in the past, but also more clouded by a critical dissociation: in the meantime, Zamboni had returned the authorship of the sculptures of the Loggia to Gasparo Cairano, as their main creator, and to all the other artists who had collaborated on them, while the Vasarian error still burdened the Sanctuary of the Miracles, revived by Zaist's unfounded attribution.

Nineteenth-century guides and studies

Portrait of Leopoldo Cicognara.

The nineteenth-century critical analyses were inaugurated by Leopoldo Cicognara's History of Sculpture, especially the second volume, published in 1816, which contains a chapter on Lombard artists. After a discussion of Gaspare Pedoni's activities in Cremona, Cicognara moves on to Brescia and states:

The other celebrated ornamentalist and sculptor Cristoforo Pedoni, probably the son of the aforementioned one, worked in Brescia in the elegant vestibule of the Madonna dei Miracoli.

— Leopoldo Cicognara, Storia della scultura, p. 186.

The historian's attribution contains many oddities: first, it is unclear why he attributes the Brescian façade to Cristoforo Pedoni, Gaspare's son, who may not even have been born at the time. More importantly, this is the only mention of the Brescian Renaissance period. Pomponius Gauricus, Michiel, and even the discoveries made by Baldassarre Zamboni are not mentioned. The situation becomes paradoxical when, one hundred and fifty pages later, he not only shows that he knew Zamboni, but, after praising him for the meticulousness with which he studied the Brescian archives, he goes on to say:

He [Baldassarre Zamboni] enumerates about fifty sculptors for the pilasters [...] and other ornaments of the great hall known as the Public Palace in the Loggia, built after the mid-1500s, and indicates the most detailed circumstances, the agreements made, and the prices of each work, where the names of distinguished artists are preserved, as seen in the lavish compensation received, distinguishing among them Antonio Maria Colla from Padua and Ludovico Ranzi from Ferrara.

— Leopoldo Cicognara, Storia della scultura, pp. 349-350.

Cicognara takes from Zamboni, whom he shows to know in detail, only dates and names concerning the construction of the loggia in the late sixteenth century. Inexplicably, he omits all data concerning the fifteenth-century phase. Moreover, as soon as he mentions the two foreign sculptors, the historian places the well-known Giacomo Medici alongside them, deriving him again from Giorgio Vasari, thus completing a reconstruction that manages to be both based on recent sources and erroneous and misleading.

In 1826, Paolo Brognoli, an art scholar and collector, published the first nineteenth-century guide to Brescia. For the correct attribution and dating of the works discussed, the scholar undertook a series of archival researches that led him, for the first time, to elaborate precise stylistic considerations on what he observed. He appreciated the Martinengo Mausoleum, confessing that "I have not been able to get acquainted with the skilled artists of these works." For the ark of St. Apollonius he conducted a thorough search in the municipal archives, which allowed him to partially reconstruct the circumstances of the commission, but he was unable to find "the contract with the sculptor who worked on this ark [...], being particularly interested in this because I also had in my rooms a sculpture made by the same chisel in 1494," "with the inscription commemorating Luigi Caprioli." Brognoli is talking about none other than the Caprioli Adoration, which he consciously links for the first time to another work by Gasparo Cairano, without recourse to previous literary sources, but on the basis of purely stylistic considerations.

The dome of the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli with Gasparo Cairano's cycle of Apostles and Antonio della Porta's cycle of Angels (1489).

Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, interior (last decade of the 15th century).

Soon after the publication of Brognoli's guide, the Athenaeum of Brescia commissioned Alessandro Sala to write a new guide, which was published in 1834. According to the author himself, the work was intended to be a practical aid for tourists, without any particular claim to depth of information. Sala, who had to give information about the façade of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, consulted, perhaps for the first time, the church archives, taking from them names and facts, but presented with the utmost synthesis. However, the information given by Sala was very important:

We do not know who were the sculptors of the beautiful candlesticks on the façade, nor who, among the many artists mentioned, were the authors of the various marble works inside this sanctuary. The only thing we know is that the four doctors on the cornices of the first dome were made by Antonio della Porta, who also made the two hermits Anthony and Paul in low relief; not that the angels on the cornice of the same dome, above which Gaspare da Cairano placed the twelve apostles he carved in marble, were made by him.

— Alessandro Sala, Pitture ed altri oggetti di belle arti in Brescia, p. 90.

Sala then acknowledges the existence of certain "books about the building" and reports that many artists are named in them, but the works executed are not precisely attributed to them. It is not said explicitly, but it is clear that, on the basis of the same sources, he is also able to write that "the first architect of this temple was a certain Maestro Jacopo", which is a very important and unique information from a literary point of view. The style of the guide, however, leads him not only to omit any dating, but also to formulate no stylistic connection with the documented and homonymous Gasparo da Milano and Antonio della Porta, who worked on the Loggia. Nor does he notice the onomastic coincidence between the Maestro Jacopo mentioned and Jacopo da Verona, who, according to Zamboni, also worked on the Loggia: Thus another opportunity for clarification is lost, which could have been based, among other things, on the "books of the building" of Santa Maria dei Miracoli.

All this led the subsequent bibliography not to pay much attention to what Sala had reported, or rather, not to replace with Sala's insubstantial findings all the previous artistic literature, which remained as a point of reference to be completed with the names proposed by the Brescian scholar. In fact, he initiated the tendency to critically separate the façade of the sanctuary from the sculptures inside. The passage about the Church of the Miracles in Federico Odorici's 1853 guide to Brescia is emblematic in this sense:

Even if Sala's researches to know the author of the beautiful marble chandeliers of this façade were in vain, we found out from a work of Picenardi that it was Gian Gaspare Pedoni. Inside, there are sculptures by Antonio della Porta and Gaspare da Cairano; but it is not easy to identify the authors of each one among the many different styles.

— Federico Odorici, Storie bresciane dai primi tempi fino all'età nostra narrate da Federico Odorici, pp. 99-100.

In this complex attributive confusion, even if partially correct, only Pedoni's name remained truly celebrated. Odorici appreciated the old-fashioned ornamentation of the façade much more than the statues inside, which were only named with their authors. The decorations of the Loggia, the Ark of St. Apollonius, and the Martinengo Mausoleum, praised solely for their formal value, were not subject to any stylistic or attributive assumptions.

Renaissance enthusiasm in post-unification Brescia

Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, facade (late 15th century).

The Unification of Italy, as for other Italian cities, also marked for Brescia the beginning of a new era of institutions in charge of protecting the artistic and monumental heritage, as well as enhancing it through targeted restoration, recovery, or sometimes destruction of what was deemed unworthy of preservation. However, the renewed enthusiasm for the Brescian Renaissance on all fronts was not accompanied by a parallel development of knowledge about its main protagonists. Preceded by a quotation from Cocchetti in 1859, the sculptor Maffeo Olivieri appears for the first time in Brescian art literature in Stefano Fenaroli's Dictionary of Brescian Artists of 1877. Fenaroli, based on the style of the two bronze candlesticks in the St. Mark's Basilica in Venice, also attributes the medallions of the Martinengo Mausoleum to Olivieri.

This early critical openness to the works of the Brescian Renaissance was to have strong repercussions in the early 20th century. Fenaroli's dictionary was a cornerstone of the knowledge of Brescian art history: for the first time, documentary research was carried out in the municipal archives, deepening what had already been found by Zamboni, with discoveries of fundamental importance for artists such as Moretto, Romanino, Floriano Ferramola, Stefano Lamberti and others, reported discursively in the first section of the dictionary. After a section devoted to documents, the volume closes with an appendix that schematically lists "the names of Brescian artists whose works are unknown". In the face of such an extensive literary work, the absence of Gasparo Cairano, Tamagnino, and any personality in the field of sculpture at the time is surprising. Gasparo da Milano is not mentioned anywhere, not even among the unknown artists, although there are known archival documents that mention his name.

This absence of names and facts of the Brescian Renaissance sculpture is relentlessly repeated in a series of later texts. Andrea Cassa, in his Appunti su alcuni monumenti bresciani, including Santa Maria dei Miracoli and the Loggia, shows that he had consulted the Sanctuary's archives, but fails to mention either Gasparo Cairano or Tamagnino, instead praising Giovanni Gaspare Pedoni for the work done on the façade. Incidentally, not finding Pedoni's name in the Sanctuary's archives, information that would have supported his thesis, Cassa falsifies his own source, namely Baldassarre Zamboni's text, saying that the latter had found the name of Gaspare Pedoni in the Loggia's archives, whereas the only Pedoni mentioned by the scholar is his son Cristoforo Pedoni, who worked on some parts of the upper cornice in the second half of the 16th century. But even Giuseppe Merzario, in his text I maestri comacini of 1893, does not doubt to identify Gaspare Pedoni as the Gasparo of the Brescian documents, confirming him as the absolute protagonist of the Brescian sculpture of that period.

Luigi Arcioni and the first critical about-face

Gasparo Cairano, Apostle (1489).

It was up to the architect Luigi Arcioni to bring order to this chaotic panorama, to debunk the myths and give due weight to the certainties. Arcioni's contributions, published in part in a series of articles between 1896 and 1897, concern the Loggia and the Sanctuary of the Miracles, the two monuments whose restoration was of interest to the Municipal Commission for the Preservation of Monuments, of which Arcioni was a member. The scholar collected reliable sources and excluded everything that could not be verified or, in some cases, refuted. The first article on the historiography of the Sanctuary of the Miracles, published in 1896, already had important results: it mentioned Gasparo Cairano, Antonio della Porta, Giovanni and Cristoforo dell'Ostello, noting their presence also in the construction site of the Loggia. On the other hand, he excluded Gaspare Pedoni as the author of the façade, not only because his name does not appear in the documents, but also, for the first time, on the basis of stylistic comparisons with his known works in Cremona. However, with a correct interpretation of the archival sources, he refrained from attributing it to Gasparo Cairano or Antonio della Porta, who were mentioned as figure painters and not as decorators. He also recognized them as the same authors of the Caesar cycle on the fronts of the loggia and appreciated their artistic evolution:

Gaspare da Cairano and Antonio della Porta, authors of the apostles, angels and doctors of the first dome, and most probably of the other sculptures among the capitals of the facade, and those of the choir, a few years later are called upon to make the imperial busts of our Loggia palace. And it is an interesting and beautiful fact to observe the progress of these craftsmen toward the new ideal of art.

— Valerio Terraroli, Luigi Arcioni. Progetti e restauri a Brescia tra Ottocento e Novecento, pp. 215-216.

For the first time in art literature, he united Antonio della Porta and the sculptor surnamed Tamagnino into a single artistic personality and linked the hitherto ignored Master Jacopo found by Alessandro Sala with the Jacopo da Verona mentioned in the Loggia documents.

While Luigi Arcioni published his important findings on Brescian Renaissance sculpture, the Milanese lecturer Alfredo Melani published in 1899 in "Arte e Storia" an article on the Martinengo Mausoleum in which attributions were made with some conviction without any documentary or bibliographical support:

Stefano Lamberti for the design and Giacomo Faustinetti for the execution. And since the monument is adorned with bronze medallions and bas-reliefs, their casting is attributed to Andrea Baruzzi, another Brescian artist.

— Alfredo Melani, Il monumento di Marc'Antonio Martinengo della Pallata a Brescia in "Arte e Storia", XVIII, 9-10, p. 59.

Most unlikely is the reference to Giacomo Faustinetti, who was more active in the 1550s. Instead, as the architect of the Church of Miracles, he goes so far as to mention a non-existent "Jacopo del Sala", saying that he was taken from the studies of Luigi Arcioni, while the latter does mention a "Jacopo del Sala" in his writings, but trivially in reference to the Master Jacopo found by Alessandro Sala in 1834.

Meyer: Cairano returns to the critical scene

Gasparo Cairano, Martinengo Mausoleum, Scene of Sacrifice (post-1510).

Gasparo Cairano, Martinengo Mausoleum, Battle Scene (post 1510).

The first significant turning point for the historiography of Brescian Renaissance sculpture is the second volume of Alfred Gotthold Meyer's Oberitalienische Frührenaissance, published in Berlin in 1900: the text devotes an entire chapter to Brescian sculpture and architecture, identifying them for the first time as a specific critical case to be treated separately from the broader Lombard context, with a detailed analysis of works and bibliography, including local ones. However, the scholar made several dating and attribution errors, as well as some omissions, all due to the influence of contemporary art literature. First, Meyer revisits Pomponius Gauricus' and Zamboni's "Gaspar mediolanensis" and separates him from the Gaspare Pedoni cited by Vasari, which he nevertheless takes into account. Drawing his own conclusions from the various documents published locally, from Sala to Arcioni, he then divides the Brescian school into two different operational sectors of decorators and figure painters: he places Gaspare Pedoni and Stefano Lamberti at the head of the first category, and Gasparo Cairano and Antonio della Porta at the head of the second.

Declaring a definite preference for Gasparo Cairano, Meyer proceeds to reconstruct a catalog of works, both known and presumed, each placed in a specific context of precise Lombard artistic references: to the documented Apostles of the Sanctuary of the Miracles and the Caesars of the Loggia he adds the ark of St. Apollonius, the Caprioli Adoration and the altar of St. Jerome in St. Francis, recognizing for the first time their absolute originality in the cylindrical transposition of Mantegna's Brawl of the Sea Gods. Meyer also assumes Gasparo's participation in the Martinengo Mausoleum, but the long-standing misunderstanding about the dating of the monument, then dated between 1526 and 1530, leads the scholar to attribute it almost entirely to Stefano Lamberti, whom he also sees as the author, along with Pedoni, of the ornaments on the facade of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. The text, as already mentioned, omits important works such as the reliefs of San Pietro in Oliveto and, above all, the portal of the Cathedral of Salò, which the German scholar may not have known.

However, the critical oblivion of the historiography of Brescian Renaissance sculpture and of the figure of Gasparo Cairano, an artist who by then had become increasingly important, must also have been caused by Meyer's original reconstruction: the redaction in archaic German severely limited the dissemination of the text, which in fact had little success in Brescia, to the point of being ignored.

In the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Meyer's text and other Brescian sources had quite different effects on the critics who dealt with the subject, according to different interpretations. Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri, in his 1904 monograph on Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, was one of the first to take into account the German scholar's contribution, although he only dealt with the Brescian question in a brief and hasty passage. The volume dedicated to Brescia in the series "Artistic Italy", edited by Antonio Ugoletti in 1909, focused mainly on the Loggia and Santa Maria dei Miracoli, based on selected documents. Perhaps for the first time in several centuries, there is no mention of Gaspare Pedoni, a significant fact since it is a text with a touristic and popular appeal. On the other hand, Giorgio Nicodemi's Guide to Brescia, published in the early 1920s, presents a highly disorganized and fragmentary picture of Brescian Renaissance sculpture, making very general stylistic comparisons and never referring to Gasparo Cairano, Tamagnino, or any other documented sculptor of the period. Especially when compared to the artistic literature of his contemporaries, which approached the Brescian question in a completely different way, the overall result is superficial.

Giorgio Nicodemi's lack of interest in Brescian Renaissance sculpture in this work is even more evident in his 1925 monograph on Bambaia, where he mentions the two statuettes of Virtue and attributes them to this sculptor without noticing that they are almost identical to the figures on the Ark of St. Apollonius. On the other hand, Adolfo Venturi, in his History of Italian Art of 1924, treats the Loggia and the Sanctuary of the Miracles exclusively as a matter of late fifteenth-century architecture, without a word about the sculptures, while Silvio Vigezzi, in his The Lombard Sculpture of the Sixteenth Century of 1929, reports that the façade of the Sanctuary of the Miracles was chiselled by Gaspare Pedoni, to whom he also attributes, without any documentary source or significant stylistic comparison, the Ark of St. Apollonius, the tomb of Niccolò Orsini and the Martinengo Mausoleum.

The archival research of Paolo Guerrini

Gasparo Cairano, Tomb of Gaspare Brunelli (1500).

In 1930, Paolo Guerrini, the most important Brescian scholar of the first half of the 20th century, published in the first volume of the Historical Memoirs of the Diocese of Brescia the contents of a series of documents of fundamental importance for the historiography of Brescian Renaissance sculpture. First of all, he reports some invoices for some sculptural works done in Santa Maria dei Miracoli in 1493, which the scholar found in the Brunelli family archives, where they were located thanks to Gaspare Brunelli's role as functionary for the construction of the church. After analyzing these bills, Guerrini published the contents of the Martinengo Mausoleum, which he found in the archives of Santa Maria dei Miracoli: the document, now lost and published exclusively in Guerrini's text, which is why it is so important, is a copy of various accounting data concerning the construction of the Sanctuary, including payments to Cairano and Antonio della Porta for the two cycles of statues inside. Paolo Guerrini's contribution thus provides reliable contemporary documents on which to base the dates and attributions of the Sanctuary's sculptures, and is the only one of its kind, apart from the information provided by Sala a century earlier.

In addition, the Brunelli family archives had already allowed Paolo Guerrini in 1926 to discover a document mentioning "M. Gaspare da Milano", whom the scholar believed to be Pedoni, as the author of the Gaspare Brunelli's funeral monument in San Francesco, adding yet another missing piece to Gasparo's historiography. Almost in parallel with Guerrini's archival investigations, other discoveries increased the sculptor's catalog. In 1920, Luigi Rivetti published for the first time the contract between "Gasparem de Cayrano de Mediolano lapicida architectum et ingeniarum optimum" and representatives of the municipality of Chiari, in the Brescia area, for the construction of the portal of the city's cathedral, while in 1932 Anton Maria Mucchi published the archival documents relating to the commission and execution of the portal of the Cathedral of Salò, in which the name of "Gasparo da Milano" reappears: by this time, his name was well known to the critics, and his catalog, as well as his artistic abilities, were gradually gaining depth.

The big misunderstanding of the twentieth century: Maffeo Olivieri

Martinengo Mausoleum (1503-1518).

Detail of the Martinengo Mausoleum (first decade of the 16th century).

Absent from any literary source of the time, either edited or in manuscript, Maffeo Olivieri's name first appeared in art literature in 1847, when his signature was noted by Pietro Selvatico on the two bronze candlesticks in the St. Mark's Basilica in Venice. The scholar rightly lamented the impossibility of finding information about this sculptor. Thirty years later, as already mentioned, Stefano Fenaroli revealed how Maffeo Olivieri was actually mentioned in the Brescian register of 1534 and hypothesized his authorship on the bronzes of the Martinengo Mausoleum, a proposal that remained without follow-up. Bode and Planiscig, in their extensive studies of early 20th-century bronzes, attributed a number of statuettes to him, while Hill, in 1930, identified him as the "Master of 1523," author of a series of medals. Remaining initially unknown to international critics, on the other hand, Giuseppe Papaleoni's discovery, published in Trent in 1890, that Maffeo Olivieri was also the author of the elaborate wooden altarpiece of the Assumption in Condino, as evidenced by the contract dated 1538.

Knowledge of Olivieri at the beginning of the 20th century, before he became the absolute protagonist of Brescian Renaissance sculpture, was limited. Antonio Morassi, in an article published in 1936, was the first to mention the talents of this artist, who was obviously very versatile but who was completely absent from the sources of the time. The scholar, convinced that he was in the presence of an extremely important and undiscovered author, went to Brescia in search of important works that such a personality must have left behind. Therefore:

I was thus going around the churches of the Brescian area and Brescia, where he had kept his workshop and whence he perhaps never for a long time moved, always in search of my author; and I was already despairing, proving fruitless even some archival investigation, of tracing his footsteps, when it occurred to me to visit the Christian Museum, in the deconsecrated church of Santa Giulia. [...] I stopped my attention on that distinguished masterpiece of Brescian sculpture that is the mausoleum of General Marc'Antonio Martinengo. I observed [...] the strange flavor of that style in which Gothic substrata, mixed with Baroque features, emerge, which is proper to the decorative art of Brescia in the sixteenth century. And I was thinking about the architectural relations of the monument with the portal of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, catching in it some leading threads that well clarify its northern origins, when, as I approached to examine the bronze medallions embedded in the plinths, I had the sensation that I was facing creations of the master I was researching. The resemblance, indeed, the partial identity, of these figures with those seated in the niches of the Venetian candlesticks, which had well remained in my eyes, gave me the confidence that I had come, at last, to a good port. [...] Probably the bronze square panels of the sarcophagus, as well as the triumphal frieze in which the stylistic affinity to Condino's figures was evident, must also have belonged to him. Instead, I was left with some uncertainty about the possible attribution to Maffeo of the marble part.

— Antonio Morassi, Per la ricostruzione di Maffeo Olivieri in "Bollettino d'Arte", year XXX, 6, December 1936, pp. 243-245.

At this point in the article, Morassi was already convinced of Olivieri's authorship of the bronzes in the Martinengo Mausoleum, while he still had doubts about the marble part, doubts that would be resolved later in the same article by purely deductive means. Morassi was also affected by the misunderstanding about the dating of the monument, which is generally linked to the funeral of General Marcantonio Martinengo, who died in 1526, which helps the scholar to compare it with the Venetian candlesticks dated 1527. Morassi also misunderstood Stefano Fenaroli's proposal to attribute the bronzes of the Mausoleum to Olivieri, claiming that the Brescian scholar must have deduced their names from the documents of the time, when this was clearly not possible, since in that case Fenaroli would not have hesitated to include them in the documentary appendix of his dictionary. After comparing the arks of St. Apollonius and St. Titian, Morassi proceeded to reconstruct the cultural context in which Olivieri must have been trained:

Who were his masters in the plastic arts? It is difficult to say. The relationship between his art and the pictorial atmosphere is obvious. We will come back to that. On the other hand, there are no names of Brescian sculptors who could shed some light on our artist. It is not known that Brescia had important sculptors around 1500, when Maffeo's training could have taken place. Nor is it likely that they existed there, since for the most important work of the period, the plastic decoration of the Church of the Miracles, woodcarvers from Como, with somewhat confused stylistic tendencies, came to Brescia [...]. The facade of the Miracles, with its fine work of bas-reliefs [...], therefore constituted, and certainly constituted for Olivieri, a model of the first order. [...] But if Olivieri's architectural and decorative sense (also in the Venetian candlesticks, as well as in the Martinengo Mausoleum) is clearly Lombard, the same cannot be said of the figural parts. The broad, soft, animated treatment of his figures, often modeled with synthesis and abbreviation, presupposes the abandonment of that naturalistic trend that belongs to Amadeo and Briosco [...]. Olivieri's art developed in a most interesting phase of Brescian figurative art; and only painting can give us the key to understand it.

— Antonio Morassi, Per la ricostruzione di Maffeo Olivieri in "Bollettino d'Arte", year XXX, 6, December 1936, pp. 246-247.

The statements made by Morassi are questionable, especially in the light of the knowledge of Brescian Renaissance sculpture that was established at that time. Disregarding the documented sculptors active in Brescia at the turn of the 1500s, whose existence is even questioned, he places painting as Olivieri's only reference: there is no Pomponius Gauricus, no Baldassarre Zamboni, no Alessandro Sala, no Luigi Arcioni, no Meyer, and no Guerrini. Moreover, as already mentioned, at the end of the article, the Martinengo Mausoleum was completed under the sole name of Maffeo Olivieri, to whom Morassi literally “gave the chisel”.

Sanmicheli workshop, ark of Saint Titian (1505).

In 1939, in the volume dedicated to Brescia in the Catalogue of Art and Antiquity in Italy, Antonio Morassi no longer had any doubts in attributing to Olivieri the title of sculptor, and therefore proceeded to define his catalog of Brescian works in marble, of much greater quantitative and qualitative proportions than the medals and the wooden altarpiece assigned up to that time. The Martinengo Mausoleum became "a most important work, certainly by Maffeo Olivieri." The ark of St. Apollonius was classified as "perhaps an early work of Maffeo Olivieri, as would be judged from the style, comparing the ark with Martinengo's funerary monument." Due to similarities with the mausoleum, the Altar of St. Jerome in San Francesco was also "probably the work of Maffeo Olivieri". On the contrary, anything that could not be attributed to Maffeo Olivieri's style would not interest Morassi, who completely omitted any archival sources on individual works. He questioned the involvement of Gaspare Pedoni on the façade of the Sanctuary of the Miracles, but deliberately avoided mention of Gasparo Cairano and Tamagnino, documented by Guerrini nine years earlier as the authors of more than twenty statues inside the sanctuary. Again ignoring Paolo Guerrini and the "M. Gaspare da Milano" he found, he classified the Brunelli funerary monument as a "fine work by a Brescian sculptor in the style of Lamberti," while the Caprioli Adoration was relegated to an anonymous "Brescian author of the early 1500s, a pupil of Amadeo." Finally, he panned the Ark of Saint Titian, judging it "not very good".

Antonio Morassi's reconstruction minimizes and superficializes the complex panorama of trends and artists of Brescian Renaissance sculpture, focusing on a bronze and wood sculptor turned marble master, with a catalogue of works based solely on the deductive attribution of the Martinengo Mausoleum and nothing else. The consequences of Morassi's erroneous reinterpretation were very serious and had a series of repercussions in the critical field. The first to fall victim to this misunderstanding was Gaetano Panazza, who, in the 1958 catalogue of the Civic Museums of Brescia, considered Olivieri's attribution of the Martinengo Mausoleum "satisfactory". Even in the History of Brescia, published by Treccani in 1963, the opportunity to finally bring order to the historiography of the period was partially lost when Adriano Peroni, on the basis of Morassi's "well-founded critical reconstruction", left unchanged Maffeo Olivieri's catalogue and artistic role, which, moreover, was seen as a natural response to the gap concerning the artist's youth. Peroni's contribution, however, remains of the greatest cultural depth, above all because he inaugurated a critical interpretation of the sculptural works, capable of going beyond questions of attribution, to include broader themes such as the reconstruction of the humanistic context in which the great building sites of Renaissance Brescia took place. In addition to Maffeo Olivieri, Peroni was able to identify Gasparo Cairano and Tamagnino and attribute the documented works to them, although the relevance of what has been attributed to Olivieri clearly places the latter member of the trio in the foreground.

This preeminent position of Maffeo Olivieri finally fell out of favor in 1977, when Camillo Boselli, in the Regesto artistico dei notai roganti in Brescia dall'anno 1500 all'anno 1560, the result of research in the Notarial Fund of the Brescia State Archives, in addition to a partial reconstruction of the Cairano family tree, published a series of documents fundamental to the reconstruction of the commission of the Martinengo Mausoleum, starting with the 1503 contract between Bernardino delle Croci and the brothers Francesco and Antonio II Martinengo of Padernello, with other subsequent documents up to 1516. The construction of the monument was thus backdated by almost twenty years, and the attribution of the monument to Maffeo Olivieri and all the other works attributed to him by Morassi, which were based on the authorship of the mausoleum, fell. On the contrary, in the second half of the twentieth century, numerous documents from civil and ecclesiastical archives testify to Maffeo Olivieri's activity as a woodcarver, along with some works that are certainly attributed to him. The question of Maffeo Olivieri as a marble artist was finally closed in 2010 by Vito Zani who, after a long discussion, concludes:

No one seems to have ever asked why, of this supposed Brescian protagonist of marble, not a single document or work has ever been found that could give the slightest plausible indication of his activity as a stonemason.

— Vito Zani, Gasparo Cairano, p. 85.

1980-90s: critical recognition

Palazzo della Loggia in Brescia.

The repercussions in critical circles of the discoveries published by Camillo Boselli in 1977, together with what was already known from literature, first appeared in a series of volumes on various subjects published in the 1980s, in particular the monograph on the Sanctuary of the Miracles, edited by Antonio Fappani and Luciano Anelli in 1980, and that on San Pietro in Oliveto by Father Stipi in 1985, while more specific in this sense is Valerio Terraroli's monograph on the two cathedrals of Brescia, of 1987, which became the occasion for a new critical reinterpretation of the Ark of St. Apollonius.

Based on the proceedings of the conference on the Piazza della Loggia held by Ida Gianfranceschi in 1986, the large three-volume monograph on the Loggia and its square was published between 1993 and 1995, and includes an essay by Giovanni Agosti specifically on the Caesars cycle, which traces an innovative artistic profile of Gasparo Cairano, starting from the reconsidered citation of Pomponius Gauricus and the humanist milieu with which the sculptor was associated. Michiel's account of his brother Anzolino, who worked as a terracotta sculptor in Milan, was also recovered. The scholar then draws up a hypothetical catalogue of his works and, in collaboration with Alessandro Bagnoli and Roberto Bartalini, proposes a distinction of authorship of the Caesars between Cairano and Tamagnino, critically acclaimed to this day, and reconstructs for the first time the historiography of the Caprioli Adoration, attributed, however, to a more prudent "anonymous Lombard artist of the late fifteenth century." The opening of the Santa Giulia Museum in 1998 was the occasion for the publication of a series of illustrated texts on the material included in the exhibition, including the Martinengo Mausoleum, for which a number of important historical images were published.

Studies and debates of the 21st century

Gasparo Cairano, Altar of Saint Jerome, Brawl of the Sea Gods (c. 1506-1510).

In two works published in 2001 and 2003, scholar Vito Zani carried out a reinterpretation of the sculptural landscape of Renaissance Brescia, placing Maffeo Olivieri in his proper artistic context, mediated by the documents referred to him, and proposing Gasparo Cairano as the definitive protagonist of the Brescian artistic period, considered equal to a "Brescian Amadeo". He was an enterprising contractor, active in public and private commissions, with a rapidly rising artistic career. In the two texts, Zani attributed to Gasparo Cairano the works already generally accepted by critics, adding the Caprioli Adoration, as Meyer had suggested a century earlier, the stone parts of the Martinengo Mausoleum, and a group of sculptures scattered in museums and collections in Italy and abroad. Zani's proposal was quickly taken up by the art critics of the 21st century, first by Valerio Terraroli, who published it in Renaissance Lombardy. Art and Architecture in 2003, a volume that was widely distributed even outside Italy, a real launching text for the "emblematic figure of Gaspare Coirano da Milano".

In 2010, the first monograph dedicated entirely to Gasparo Cairano was finally published by Vito Zani. The text attempts, for the first time, to fully reconstruct the critical vicissitudes of Brescian Renaissance sculpture through the centuries, devoting an entire chapter to it, preceded by a reconstruction of the Brescian artistic scene from the second half of the 15th century onward and followed by a third and final chapter in which the Brescian biographies of the sculptors recognized in the numerous sources consulted are traced, from Gasparo Cairano to Antonio della Porta, Antonio Mangiacavalli and the Sanmicheli. Zani's contribution turned out to be fundamental, especially for the publication of numerous unpublished documents, in particular the survey of 1517, which confirmed the sculptor's death before that date, and the survey of his son Simone, dated 1534, which made it possible to reconstruct much of the genealogy after Gasparo. The greatest contribution, however, remains the reconstruction of the artist's catalog of works, with all the major works carved in stone in early 16th century Brescia, with the exception of the Ark of St. Titian, and with the addition of erratic works scattered in museums and collections around the world, revealing a clear connection with the chisel of Gasparo Cairano. The monograph dedicated to Lombard sculpture between the 15th and 20th centuries, edited by Valerio Terraroli in 2011, in which Vito Zani is the author of the chapter on Brescian Renaissance sculpture, also includes a summary of the historiographical line proposed by Vito Zani.

Shortly thereafter, also in 2010, Giuseppe Sava published in “Arte Veneta” an article reconstructing the figure of Antonio Medaglia, the architect of the church of San Pietro in Oliveto, proposing a catalog of his works including some figures of the altar of San Girolamo, which, therefore, would have been made in collaboration between Medaglia and Cairano. The scholar, in some passages of the article, also finds an opportunity to comment on what Vito Zani highlighted, repeatedly hinting that he does not fully agree with the proposed reconstruction. In 2012, however, Vito Zani had the opportunity to reply to the considerations expressed by Sava in the context of an article in the online journal Antiqua, accepting only partially what he had reconstructed about Antonio Medaglia and generally defending his theses on Gasparo Cairano.

At a Florentine auction in 2011, a sculptural group of three crown-holding angels was presented, with an illustrative commentary in the auction catalog by Marco Tanzi. On the basis of the dating and stylistic context of the work, the scholar made a number of significant criticisms of the reconstruction proposed in 2010 by Vito Zani of Gasparo Cairano's Catalogue and the Sculptural Landscape of Renaissance Brescia, without, however, following up on the issue in other publications. The following year, in 2012, Vito Zani responded to Tanzi with an article published in three parts by the online art magazine Antiqua: in the first part, he revised and even overturned Tanzi's attribution to the Three Angels, while in the second part he rebutted the objections raised by the scholar in the auction catalog. In the third and last part, Vito Zani returned to the subject of the catalog of the Brescian sculptor, repeating what he had already said in 2010 and, above all, using a rich collection of photographs to formulate the right comparisons between the works he grouped under the sole authorship of Gasparo Cairano.

See also

• Gasparo Cairano
• Renaissance art in Bergamo and Brescia

Bibliography

Ancient sources (up to the 19th century)

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On other topics

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• Sava, Giuseppe (2010). "Antonio Medaglia "lapicida et architecto" tra Vicenza e la Lombardia: il cantiere di San Pietro in Oliveto a Brescia" [Antonio Medaglia “lapicida et architecto” between Vicenza and Lombardy: the site of San Pietro in Oliveto in Brescia]. Arte Veneta (in Italian) (67).
• Terraroli, Valerio (1987). "Itinerario della scultura rinascimentale nelle Cattedrali" [Itinerary of Renaissance Sculpture in Cathedrals]. Le cattedrali di Brescia [The cathedrals of Brescia] (in Italian). brescia: Grafo.
• Zani, Vito (2007). "Sulle tracce dei Sanmicheli a Brescia e Mantova, tra Quattro e Cinquecento" [On the trail of the Sanmicheli in Brescia and Mantua, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries]. Tullio Lombardo. Scultore e architetto nella cultura artistica veneziana del Rinascimento, atti del convegno [Tullio Lombardo. Sculptor and architect in the Venetian artistic culture of the Renaissance, conference proceedings] (in Italian). Venezia.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

On other topics in Renaissance sculpture and culture

• Adorno, Pietro (1991). Il Verrocchio. Nuove proposte nella civiltà artistica del tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico [Verrocchio. New proposals in the artistic culture of the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent.] (in Italian). Firenze: Edam.
• Bode, Wilhelm (1906). Die italienische Bronzestatuetten der Renaissance [Italian bronze statuettes of the Renaissance] (in German). Berlino.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Brentano, Carrol (1989). "Della Porta, Antonio, detto Tamagnino" [Della Porta, Antonio, known as Tamagnino]. Dizionario biografico degli italiani [Biographical Dictionary of Italians] (in Italian). Vol. 37 (voce). Roma: Treccani.
• Burnett, Andrew M.; Schofield, Richard V. (1997). "The Medallions of the Basamento of the Certosa di Pavia. Sources and Influence". Arte Lombarda (120).
• Caglioti, Francesco (2008). "Fifteenth-century reliefs of ancient emperors and empresses in Florence: production and collecting". Collecting sculpture in early modern Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Cicognara, Leopoldo (1823). Storia della scultura [History of sculpture].
• Ferrari, M.; Zanata, I. (1991). "La cappella del "Sangue de Christo" nella cattedrale di Mantova" [The chapel of the "Blood of Christ" in the cathedral of Mantua]. Storia e arte religiosa a Mantova. Visite di Pontefici e la reliquia del Preziosissimo Sangue [History and religious art in Mantua. Visits of Pontiffs and the Relic of the Precious Blood.] (in Italian). Mantova: Casa del Mantegna.
• Fittschen, Klaus (1985). "Sul ruolo del ritratto antico nell'arte italiana" [On the role of the ancient portrait in Italian art]. Memoria dell'antico nell'arte italiana [Memory of the ancient in Italian art] (in Italian). Torino: Einaudi.
• Hill, George Francis (1923). A corpus of italian medals of the Renaissance before Cellini. Oxford.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Malaguzzi Valeri, Francesco (1904). Gio. Antonio Amadeo. Scultore e architetto lombardo /1447-1522) [Gio. Antonio Amadeo. Lombard sculptor and architect /1447-1522)] (in Italian). Bergamo.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Melani, Alfredo (1899b). Dell'ornamento nell'architettura [About ornament in architecture] (in Italian). Milano.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Meyer, Alfred Gotthold (1900). Oberitalienische Frührenaissance. Bauten und Bildwerke der Lombardei [Early Renaissance in Northern Italy. Buildings and sculptures in Lombardy] (in German). Berlino.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Merzario, Giuseppe (1893). I maestri comacini [The masters from Como] (in Italian). Milano.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Nicodemi, Giorgio (1925). Il Bambaia [Bambaia] (in Italian). Gallarate.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Planiscig, Leo (1921). Venezianische Bildhauer der Renaissance [Venetian sculptors of the Renaissance] (in German). Wien.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Schofield, Richard V.; Shell, James; Sironi, Grazioso, eds. (1989). Giovanni Antonio Amadeo. Documents. Como: New press Edizioni.
• Schofield, Richard V. (2002). "The Colleoni chapel and the creation of a local all'antica architectural style". Bramante milanese e l'architettura del Rinascimento lombardo [Milanese Bramante and the architecture of the Lombard Renaissance]. Venezia: Marsilio.
• Tanzi, Marco (2011). "Scultore lombardo (Bresciano?) tra Tamagnino e Coirano, 1500 circa. Tre angeli reggicorona. Scultura in marmo, cm 83x62x29." [Lombard sculptor (Brescian?) between Tamagnino and Coirano, c. 1500. Three crown-holding angels. Marble sculpture, 83x62x29 cm.]. Arredi, Mobili e Dipinti Antichi provenienti dalla famiglia Antinori-Buturlin e altre proprietà private [Antique furnishings, furniture and paintings from the Antinori-Buturlin family and other private properties] (in Italian). Firenze: catalogo della casa d'aste Pandolfini.
• Venturi, Adolto (1924). Storia dell'arte italiana [Italian art history].
• Vigezzi, Silvio (1929). La scultura lombarda del Cinquecento [Lombard sculpture of the sixteenth century] (in Italian). Milano.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

On other Brescian topics

• Brognoli, Paolo (1826). Nuova guida per la città di Brescia [New guidebook for the city of Brescia] (in Italian). Brescia.
• Cassa, Andrea (1882). S. Francesco. S. Maria dei Miracoli. La Loggia. Il Cimitero. Appunti [S. Francis. S. Maria dei Miracoli. The Loggia. The Cemetery. Notes] (in Italian). Brescia.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Cocchetti, Carlo (1859). "Brescia e la sua Provincia" [Brescia and its Province]. Grande illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto diretta da Cesare Cantù. Volume III. Storia e descrizione di Brescia, Cremona, Como e loro contorni [Great illustration of Lombardy-Veneto directed by Cesare Cantù. Volume III. History and description of Brescia, Cremona, Como and their surroundings.] (in Italian). Milano.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Corna Pellegrini, Alessandra (2011). Floriano Ferramola in Santa Maria del Carmine [Floriano Ferramola in Santa Maria del Carmine] (in Italian). Brescia: Tipografia Camuna.
• Fenaroli, Stefano (1877). Dizionario degli artisti bresciani [Dictionary of Brescian Artists] (in Italian). Brescia.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Fisogni, Fiorenzo (2011). "Scultori e lapicidi a Brescia dal tardo classicismo cinquecentesco al rococò" [Sculptors and stone carvers in Brescia from late sixteenth-century classicism to rococo]. Scultura in Lombardia. Arti plastiche a Brescia e nel Bresciano dal XV al XX secolo [Sculpture in Lombardy. Plastic arts in Brescia and the Brescia area from the 15th to the 20th century.] (in Italian). Milano: Skira.
• Franchi, Monica, ed. (2002). Le pergamene dell'Archivio Capitolare. Catalogazione e regesti [The Parchments of the Chapter Archives. Cataloguing and Registries] (in Italian). Travagliato.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Gianfranceschi, Ida, ed. (1986). Piazza della Loggia. Una secolare vicenda al centro della storia urbana e civile di Brescia, atti del seminario didattico (Brescia, 1981-1982) [Piazza della Loggia. A centuries-old affair at the center of Brescia's urban and civil history, proceedings of the teaching seminar (Brescia, 1981-1982)] (in Italian). Brescia.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Guerrini, Paolo (1926). "Iscrizioni delle chiese di Brescia. Chiesa e chiostri di San Francesco" [Inscriptions of the churches of Brescia. Church and cloisters of San Francesco]. Commentari dell'Ateneo di Brescia per l'anno 1925 (in Italian).
• Mucchi, Anton Maria (1932). Il duomo di Salò [The cathedral of Salò] (in Italian). Bologna.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Nicodemi, Giorgio (1920). Brescia (in Italian). Bergamo.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Odorici, Federico (1853). Storie bresciane dai primi tempi fino all'età nostra narrate da Federico Odorici [Brescian stories from the earliest times to our age narrated by Federico Odorici] (in Italian). Brescia.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Panazza, Gaetano (1958). I Civici Musei e la Pinacoteca di Brescia [The Civic Museums and Art Gallery of Brescia] (in Italian). Bergamo.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Rivetti, Luigi (1920). La chiesa parrocchiale di Chiari. Note di storia ed arte [The parish church of Chiari. Notes on history and art] (in Italian). Chiari.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Sala, Alessandro (1834). Pitture ed altri oggetti di belle arti in Brescia [Paintings and other objects of fine arts in Brescia] (in Italian). Brescia.
• Stipi, Lorenzo Dionisio (1985). Invito a San Pietro in Oliveto. Storia, tradizione, arte, leggenda, folclore [Invitation to San Pietro in Oliveto. History, tradition, art, legend, folklore.] (in Italian). Brescia: Moretto.
• Terraroli, Valerio (1999). Luigi Arcioni. Progetti e restauri a Brescia tra Ottocento e Novecento [Luigi Arcioni. Projects and restorations in Brescia between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.] (in Italian). Brescia: Musei civici di arte e storia di Brescia.
• Treccani, Gian Paolo (1988). Questioni di "patrii monumenti". Tutela e restauro a Brescia [Issues of "heritage monuments". Protection and restoration in Brescia] (in Italian). Brescia.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Ugoletti, Antonio (1909). Brescia (in Italian). Bergamo.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

On other topics

• Morassi, Antonio (1939). Catalogo delle cose d'arte e d'antichità d'Italia. Brescia [Catalog of the things of art and antiquities of Italy. Brescia] (in Italian). Roma.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Papaleoni, Giuseppe (1890). Le chiese di Condino prima del 1550 [The churches of Condino before 1550] (in Italian). Trento.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Passamani, Bruno, ed. (1978). Restauri ed acquisizioni 1973-1978 [Restorations and acquisitions 1973-1978] (in Italian). catalogo della mostra, Trento.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Picenardi, Giuseppe (1820). Nuova guida di Cremona per gli amatori dell'arti del disegno [New Cremona guide for lovers of the drawing arts] (in Italian). Cremona.
• Selvatico, Pietro (1847). Sulla scultura e sulla architettura in Venezia dal Medio Evo sino ai giorni nostri [On sculpture and architecture in Venice from the Middle Ages to the present day] (in Italian). Venezia.
• Schlosser, Julius von (1924). La letteratura artistica. Manuale delle fonti della storia dell'arte moderna [Art literature. Handbook of the sources of modern art history] (in Italian).

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• Italian sculpture
• Italian Renaissance
• Sculpture