Gagini, Family

GAGINI, FAMILY. — Architects and sculptors originating from Bissone on Lake Lugano, active during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in northern Italy, especially in Genoa, Lombardy, the Veneto, and Sicily.

Among the G. of Genoa, BELTRAME is remembered, who died in 1470, the father of PIETRO, ANTONIO, GIOVANNI, and PACE. In 1450 Giovanni was working in the parish of Pigna near Ventimiglia; he subsequently executed the portals of S. Maria in Castello and of the Palazzo Quartana in Genoa, in whose cathedral he erected the tomb of Cardinal Giorgio Fieschi. Pace, on the other hand, after working in Genoa as the sculptor of the reliefs in the lunettes depicting scenes from the life of the Saint in the chapel of S. Giovanni Battista in the Cathedral, was in Pavia alongside Amadeo and his uncle Tamagnino, working on the Certosa. His works are also found in France and Spain.

Other members of the Genoese branch of the family are BERNARDINO, active chiefly in Spain, in Seville and Toledo, during the sixteenth century, and ELIA, son of Giovanni di Beltrame, who executed the loggia of the Palazzo comunale in Udine. He also worked in Spain, but chiefly in Genoa, where he worked with his uncle DOMENICO in the chapel of S. Giovanni Battista in the Cathedral.

Domenico is the founder of the Sicilian branch of the G. Son of Pietro di Beltrame, after working in the chapel of S. Giovanni Battista in Genoa with his nephew ELIA, he went to Sicily in 1463, where he died in Palermo in 1492. In Sicily Domenico worked chiefly in Palermo, sculp-

(phot. Alinari)
GAGINI, FAMIGLIA – Statue of S. Lucia by Antonello G. Saracino, Cathedral.

executing statues and reliefs in a style reminiscent of that of Francesco Laurona. Among his best-known works are the baptismal font of Salemi, the Madonna of Castelverde (1480), the arch of S. Gandolfo at Polizzi Generosa, and several reliefs in S. Francesco in Palermo. More famous but less gifted was the son of D. ANTONELLO, born in Palermo in 1478 and dying there in 1536 after an exceedingly intense career, carried out largely in Messina at the head of a large workshop of sculptors who furnished hundreds of churches in Sicily with their images of the Virgin and the saints, modelled with composure but cloying monotony.

Other sculptors of the Sicilian branch of the family were ANTONIO, GIACOMO and VINCENZO, sons of Antonello, as well as an ANTONIUZZO DI GIOVANNI DOMENICO, and a NIBLIO, the latter a sculptor and goldsmith, who lived between the 16th and 17th centuries and left the area of S. Giovanni in S. Giacomo di Caltagirone.