Silvester of Sulmona (of L'Aquila)

SILVESTER OF SULMONA (of L'Aquila). - Sculptor, son of Giacomo, also called S. dell'Aquila from his place of birth, has very often been confused with his great-nephew, S. d'Arischia (born there in 1550).

He is the major personality of Abruzzese sculpture of the last decades of the 1400s: the documents also recall him as a painter. First noted in 1471; in 1476-80 he carved the monument to Card. Agnifili in S. Massimo at Aquila, signed "Opus Silvestri Aquilani"; to the monument also belonged the lunette now walled into the side door of S. Marciano and which recalls the school of Antonio Rossellino; the knowledge of Florentine models is clear also in the scheme of the tomb. The characteristics of his art suggest other contacts with the figurative culture of his time. In the monument to Maria Camponeschi in S. Bernardino (which he was still working on in 1496) the Tuscan scheme of the funerary monument grows heavy with statues within niches in the pilasters and with rich ornaments according to the taste of the Roman school of the late 1400s; in the St. Sebastian (1478), now in the Museum of Aquila, to the reminiscences of Rossellino are joined motifs of Verrocchio. In 1500 S. was working on the mausoleum of St. Bernardino, in the church of the same name, rich in statues and ornaments, completed in 1505 for the most part by assistants.

Typical are certain groups in painted terracotta of the Madonna with the Child (in S. Bernardino at Aquila, in S. Maria di Collemaggio) which remained as models for the Abruzzese sculpture of the 1500s. - See pl. XL.

Maria Vittoria Brugnoli