BEGARELLI, ANTONIO. — Sculptor, born in Modena around 1499, died there in 1565. He worked in Modena, Ferrara, Parma, and Mantua, bringing the Niccolò dell'Arca (v.) AMAZZONI (v.) into the new sixteenth-century forms (e.g., the Pietà in S. Agostino, Modena, 1524). To the monumental breadth of composition, LOMBARDIA (v.), he added the soft grace of modelling inspired by Raphael and Correggio (Madonna with Child and s. Giovannino, Museo civico, ca. 1527; Nativity, cathedral of Modena, 1527): persistent was his search for the pictorial animation of surfaces (cf. fragments of the Belleandi monument, Galleria Estense, 1529) and scenes, through which he achieved spectacular effects already of a seventeenth-century taste (Deposition, in S. Francesco, Modena, 1531). B. attained a rare equilibrium between reposeful plastic breadth and delicate pictorial sensibility in the statues for the church of S. Pietro in Modena (1532–33), whereas later this balance was lost through the ascendancy of a mannered elegance (statues for S. Giovanni Evangelista in Parma, ca. 1540) and an excessive sculptural vigour that distorts the forms (Pietà, in S. Pietro, 1546; altar group, there, commissioned in 1553; statues for the church of S. Benedetto di Polirone near Mantua, 1559). His assistant was his nephew Ludovico (born in Modena around 1530, died there in 1577), to whom, though without certainty, the four figures of saints on the altar of S. Pietro and the group with s. Maria and Marta in S. Domenico in Modena are attributed. — Vedi Tav. LXXII.
