Around 1525 Lombardian artist Giovanni Angelo Del Maino completed a stunning wooden relief depicting the Marriage of the Virgin. Del Maino was a highly regarded sculptor who produced a series of major altarpieces for churches north of Milan. The work has been ascribed to an altarpiece commissioned for the Sanctuary of the Madonna, in Tirano, Lombardy, that commemorated an apparition of the Virgin. Yet a re-examination of the documents surrounding the commission and contemporary descriptions of the work casts doubt on this conclusion. Similarly, the relief treats the Marriage of the Virgin on a largely unprecedented scale in a highly luxurious fashion, neither of which have been satisfactorily accounted for. This paper examines Del Maino’s sculpture, its iconography and its supposed commission to explain its unusual treatment of the subject.
Please RSVP tould@unimelb.edu.au if you plan to join us for dinner in Lygon st afterwards.