Brescian Renaissance sculpture

The protagonist of this brief period, cut short in 1512 with the invasion of the French and the subsequent sack of Brescia, was Gasparo Cairano, acknowledged author of works of the highest artistic level such as the ark of St. Apollonius, the Caprioli Adoration, the Martinengo Mausoleum, and, first and foremost, the cycle of the Caesars for the elevations of the Palazzo della Loggia, praised in print as early as 1504 by Pomponius Gauricus' De sculptura.

Contemporaries of Cairano were other more or less Brescian authors, often present in Brescia only for short chapters of their careers, such as Tamagnino and the Sanmicheli workshop, together with other minor artists who could be placed in the master's circle, such as Antonio Mangiacavalli and Ambrogio Mazzola, while the many sculptors of Venetian influence who worked in the city throughout the second half of the 15th century remain largely anonymous.

[13][15] The earliest documentary information on the workshop of the brothers Bartolomeo and Giovanni Sanmicheli, originally from Porlezza on Lake Como, dates back to the early 1580s in Verona,[16] and by the end of the century a number of important commissions obtained in various cities in northern Italy are documented.

[18][note 7] The Sanmicheli's Brescian career thus continued in the second, great building site of Renaissance Brescia, that of the Loggia, where, however, the local style, initially focused on ornate and very fine surface decoration, migrated toward horizons of power and structural classicism, less particular, in fact foreign to the family's specialization.

[24] As soon as he had earned the right to continue work inside the sanctuary of the Miracles, Cairano's art and career began a rapid ascent: as early as November 16, 1491,[25] he was paid for the two keystones for the new presbytery of the old cathedral, which was being built under Bernardino da Martinengo's design and the only figural sculptures present in the new construction.

It was precisely with the Loggia that the now-formed Gasparo Cairano burst onto the Brescian art scene, whose influence of the Caesars sanctioned the beginning of the decline of the Sanmichelian experimentation at the Sanctuary of Miracles, which had effectively ridden the local trend of Renaissance ornamentation, in which, however, municipality and nobility no longer mirrored each other.

[30] Still around 1505, the reconstruction of the church of San Pietro in Oliveto was begun, probably seized by the Sanmicheli but with Gasparo Cairano's chisel in the tondi with the Apostles: it is worth noting that these reliefs are the only figurative works on the site besides the fine carvings on pilasters and cornices of the chapels, the product of a Sanmichelian specialization by then late and no longer responding to the preferences of the time, changed in the aftermath of the classicist candor experienced with the Loggia.

Within a few years there was the Sack of Brescia in 1512 by the French led by Gaston of Foix, which not only threw the city into ruin but also dissolved the myth of the Brixia magnipotens,[note 8] putting an end to a lively season of accomplishments and humanistic dreams, a phenomenon that would also affect the rest of the peninsula in the following decades.