During the first decade of the sixteenth century, Gasparo was able to win over public and private clients who sought to translate into stone their pride in their supposed historical descent from ancient Rome.

[5] At the time Cairano worked on his Apostles, Tamagnino was the better regarded sculptor, and his superiority is evident in the artistic and technical quality of his Angels, if only for their relative modernity, following the neo-classical mode of Antonio Rizzo.

[5] On August 30, 1493, Cairano was tasked with the decoration of the exterior of the Palazzo della Loggia with the delivery of capita 5 imperatorum romanum,[15] or five busts for the beginning of a cycle of thirty Caesars, which would become among the finest achievements of his career.

[20] Cairano, through the creation of the cycle and subsequent architectural ornamentation of the Loggia palazzo, becomes the fulcrum of commissions, both public and private, from Brescians keen to show off their descent from ancient Rome and to ride the wave of the local Renaissance.

[22] But in an art scene increasingly monopolised by Cairano, who has come a long way from his naive expression of the Apostles, Tamagnino does not garner much attention, and, humiliated by the cold reception, he leaves Brescia, probably never to return.

[35] Certainly the altar was carved after 1506,[note 10] given its high quality and artistic originality, indeed the highest level of art in the Brescian period,[36] and evokes several features of Cairano's earlier work on the Loggia and front-yard of San Pietro's church in Oliveto.

[39] Cairano's hand is evident in the figures of the Father, St. Peter and St. John the Baptist, leaving the Virgin to his collaborator, while the Angel of the Annunciation and two small busts in the spandrels appear to be a joint work.

[41] However, Cairano's attention was not directed to Salò, which he visited rarely, or even to San Pietro in Oliveto, which was mainly run by Sanmicheli, but to two works of greater importance and resonance: the grand staircase of the Loggia and the arch at Sant'Apollonio.

Even the Loggia palazzo, where Cairano had already established scaffolds to mount the figures on the second level, including two angular trophies, was not to see a resumption of work till fifty years later, under the direction of Ludovico Beretta.

[59][note 13] The commission to the jeweller and sculptor Bernardino delle Croci by the brothers Francesco and Antonio Il Martinengo of Padernello dated to 1503,[63] with a term of three years for completion.

[68] A reappraisal of Brescian art of the period, as well as the clear evidence of the style, have led critics to assign to Cairano the execution of the stone parts of the monument, limiting delle Croci's involvement only to the bronze inserts.

Unprecedented in Brescia was the combination of bronze and stone, the former under the supervision of Bernardino delle Croci who certainly had a vast catalogue of references to ancient and contemporary works, all of which are cited in the major and minor rounds on the base.

[78][79] It is difficult to exclude Cairano from the influence of so much classicism, but the sole Scene of sacrifice attests to the sophistication of his chisel and the innovative combination of sculpture and bronzes around 1510, to which date much of the remaining lapidary apparatus can also be placed.

[77][note 17] Stylistic considerations place a number of works, usually small statues, reliefs or fragments removed from their original context and scattered in different locations to the middle of the second decade of the sixteenth century.

[82] Another prominent work, dated to the first decade of the century, is the so-called Pala Kress in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[83] After the contract in 1513 for the entrance of the cathedral of Chiari, Cairano is no longer named in any document known.

[86] A daughter of Gasparo, Giulia, became the wife of an artisan potter,[87] while a third child, Giovanni Antonio, was a qualified goldsmith, as indicated in a deed relating Stefano Lamberti and Bernardino delle Croci.

He can be referred to as a novice artist at the beginning, when the Lombard migrant, like many of his contemporaries, arrived in Brescia during the innovative construction of the Santa Maria dei Miracoli and started a successful career.

That historic moment, with the municipality in search of innovating artists, was also beneficial: he proved able to interpret in stone the boastful self-celebration of the high offices, public and private, of renaissance Brescia.

[95] The first documentary evidence of the company of the Sanmicheli brothers, Bartolomeo and Giovanni, originally from Porlezza on Lake Como, appears in the 1480s in Verona;[96] by the end of the century, they had obtained important commissions in various northern Italian cities.

[note 24] With the Loggia, however, the mature talent of Cairano broke into the Brescian art scene, and his powerful sculptural sequence of the Caesars testifies to the decline of the Sanmicheli, whose ornate style was no longer of interest to the municipality and nobility.

[98] In possibly the last years of the 15th century, the Sanmicheli were involved in the stone decoration of the Caprioli chapel in the Church of San Giorgio, for which Cairano, almost simultaneously, prepared his Adoration, demonstrating for the first time outside of the Loggia a cooperation between the two studios.

[99] Bartolomeo Sanmicheli, at the beginning of the new century, attempted at this point to make a comeback in the local art scene with the Ark of San Tiziano of 1505, characterized by a strong decorative quality.

[6] In addition to the Angels, Tamagnino also delivered four busts for the pendentive of the first dome of the church, titled Dottori della Chiesa,[note 25] and two smaller roundels for the frieze of the nave.

[8] The reasons for the bias are unclear, but it is possible that Cairano enjoyed local favour, especially from the directors of the company commissioning the shrine, which allowed him to prevail over Tamagnino despite the latter's technical superiority.

[113] Sculptural works that had begun at the Loggia in 1492, when Tamagnino had left Brescia, were now the hegemony of Gasparo Cairano, for some years considered as a court sculptor by the Brescian grandees, both public and private.

Tamagnino's qualification, almost unique, was to have performed much of the decoration on the marble facade of the Certosa of Pavia, while Gasparo Cairano leveraged a spectacular leap of artistic quality, which had already produced the first Caesars at the public Palazzo.

[102] Extant documentation makes it possible to follow the competition more clearly than in the case of the shrine dei Miracoli, and the delivered works, their dates and respective payments lend themselves to interesting analyses.

[102] By Tamagnino's arrival in 1499, Cairano already had delivered at least five different Caesars and other stone material, but only a payment for a single bust is documented, because his attention was completely taken up with two gigantic angular trophies that he had recently begun.

[113] But in the following seven months, Cairano records successive advances and balances for trophies in full production mode that does not affect his other works, whereas Tamagnino only realises two Caesars and seventeen leonine busts.

[1] Despite the modernity and the merit of the works produced and the ability of its protagonists, the historiography of Renaissance sculpture in Brescia was never able to win the honors of artistic and literary culture, neither at the time, nor in the following centuries, being forgotten even by the local sources.