Corpus Christi

myminifactory

This evocative Corpus has convincingly been attributed to Antonio Bonvicino, the foremost Venetian carver of wood crucifixes in the early decades of the 15th century. Bonvicino's masterpiece is the monumental Crucified Christ in the church of Santi Apollinare e Cristoforo in Casteldimezzo (Markham Schulz, op. cit., figs. 1-7), which is signed by the sculptor. The present work, by contrast, is small scale and was almost certainly made for a private devotional context.Within Bonvicino's oeuvre, the present sculpture finds close stylistic parallels in a Cristo Passo in the church of San Carlo Borromeo in Mestre (Castri, op. cit., pl. 43) and a Crucified Christ in the Museo del Canton Ticino, Lugano (ibid., pl. 44). As with the present Corpus, the example in Lugano displays a slender torso and rich, cascading drapery on the hips, and features comparable to wood sculpture from of the International Gothic style which Markham Schulz  associates with Bonvicino's later oeuvre (op. cit.).  RELATED LITERATUREA. Markham Schulz, 'Antonio Bonvicino and Venetian Crucifixes of the Early Quattrocento', in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, vol. 48, no. 3, 2004, pp. 293-332