SILVESTER of SULMONA (of L’AQUILA). — Sculptor, son of Giacomo, also called S. dell’Aquila after his birthplace, has often been confused with his great-nephew, S. d’Arischia (born there in 1550).
He is the leading figure in Abruzzese sculpture during the last decades of the 15th century; documents also record him as a painter. First noted in 1471, in 1476–80 he carved the monument to Cardinal Agnifili in S. Massimo, Aquila, signed “Opus Silvestri Aquilani”; the lunette from this monument is now set in the side door of S. Marciano and recalls the school of Antonio Rossellino, while Florentine models are evident in the tomb’s design. His style shows other links with the visual culture of his time. In the monument to Maria Camponeschi in S. Bernardino (still being worked on in 1496), the Tuscan scheme of the funerary monument is weighed down by statues in niches on the piers and lavish ornament in the taste of the late 15th-century Roman school; in the S. Sebastian (1478), now in the Museo dell’Aquila, memories of Rossellino are joined by motifs from Verrocchio. In 1500 S. was at work on the mausoleum of S. Bernardino in the church of that name, rich in statues and ornament, completed in 1505 largely by assistants.
Characteristic are several groups in painted terracotta of the Madonna and Child (in S. Bernardino, Aquila, and in S. Maria di Collemaggio) that served as models for Abruzzese sculpture of the 16th century. — See pl. XL.