Vito Zani

The incomplete cycle of eight medallions with busts of Apostles in the presbytery of the church of San Maurizio in Ponte in Valtellina represents an episode that is difficult to interpret in the context of late 15th century sculpture in Lombardy...

The funeral portrait of Gaston de Foix in the early 19th Century: preservation, study and collecting VITO ZANI A number of documents from Milan’s State Archive and Biblioteca Ambrosiana reveal two previously unknown historical events connected with the funeral portrait of Gaston de Foix, sculpted by Agostino Busti, a.k.a. Bambaia, between 1517 and 1521 for the unfinished monument of the renown French military commander, projected for the church of Santa Marta in Milan. If the dispersion of various parts of the monument – which was never assembled – had already started by the end of the 16th Century, the church still kept the portrait at the beginning of the 19th Century, before if was transferred to the Brera Academy in 1806 and consequently moved to its present location, the Museo d’Arte Antica at Castello Sforzesco. Thanks to the retrieved documents, we now come to know that a relocation of the artwork to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana was attempted in 1801, and that very few years later Count Alberico di Belgioioso d’Este tried to acquire it for his prominent collection. The article also presents an extremely important late-17th-early-18th- Century drawing retrieved by Francesco Repishti at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, portraying the arrangement of the funeral monument in the cloisters of the convent annexed to Santa Marta, commissioned by the nuns in 1674. Finally, some critical insight is given about two Renaissance sculptures formerly included in the Belgioioso collection.