Tiziano Aspetti

Among his large works are bronze statues in the façade of San Francesco della Vigna and of Saint Anthony and many other sculptural decorations for the Basilica of Sant'Antonio of Padua.

When Aspetti began his public career in the 1590s, Alessandro Vittoria had practically stopped sculpting and Girolamo Campagna had a monopoly on the main sculptural commissions.

The Patriarch's family supported Italian Mannerist art and their palazzo near Santa Maria Formosa contained stucco work by Giovanni da Udine, Federico Zuccari and Francesco Salviati.

He and his uncle were among the few Venetian sculptors interested in Florentine techniques for producing bas-reliefs (starting with the Donatellian stiacciato, which had such, in Padua) and his figures ranged from low reliefs to almost fully in-the-round sculpture.

In the two scenes he produced spatial richness through a variety of emotions, poses and textures varying between brick and stone architectural backgrounds, bare flesh, leather and armour.

The elongated, slender and dynamic figures fit the canon of physical beauty and reflect the artist's knowledge of contemporary Mannerism as well as Hellenistic art.

They and the Annunciation (Art Institute of Chicago; early 1580) are the first worthy successors to Jacopo Sansovino's bronze reliefs for St Mark's Basilica in Venice.

This was the third and biggest monumental complex dedicated to St Anthony after Donatello's high altarpiece (completed in 1453) and the bronze statues and marble reliefs decorating the side walls of the Sant'Antonio chapel.

The only surviving sculpture from Aspetti's years in Pisa is The Martyrdom of Saint Laurence, a bronze relief commissioned by Berzighelli's uncle senator Lorenzo Usimbardi (1547–1636).

It is well-attuned to contemporary Counter Reformation poetry, particularly in Laurence's stubborn and immovable depiction in the centre of the work, looking diagonally up to heaven even as he is being placed on the gridiron, the instrument of his martyrdom.

At his own request he was buried in the cloisters of Santa Maria del Carmine in Pisa, with Berzighelli paying for the funeral - a 1606 bust of Aspetti by Palma and an inscription both still survive on the site.