Antonello and Antonino Gagini, figure of a saint (Saint Nymph?), circa 1525, marble Antonello Gagini (Palermo 1478 - 1536) and Antonino Gagini (Messina 1505 - Palermo 1574) FIGURE OF A SAINT (SAINT NYMPH?), C. 1525 marble sculpture, 170x65x38 cm Literature H.W. Kruft, Antonello Gagini und seine Söhne , Munich 1980, p. 377 n. 52 The Italian Soprintendenza considers this lot to be a work of national importance and requires it to remain in Italy; it cannot therfore be exported from Italy. The work in question depicts a life-size female figure in marble, in the round, wearing a tunic and mantle. Although it is devoid of symbolic attributes or other elements that might suggest its identification, both the clothing and the solemn posture and expressive attitude lead one to believe that it is the figure of a saint. In addition, the presence of three holes in the left side of the bust may refer to symbolic attributes that have disappeared today. Hanno-Walter Kruft, in his monograph on Antonello Gagini, has reconstructed the twentieth-century history of this sculpture, associating it with a group of three other similar works with which it forms a coherent series, such as to suggest the same provenance, presumably ecclesiastical and probably Sicilian. The scholar informs us that these statues were purchased en bloc in Palermo by the antiquarian Joseph Brummer in 1936. The most circumstantial study of the Gaginian saint is, as we have said, due to Kruft, who argues that the sculpture certainly came from the workshop of Gagini, but perhaps not quite from Antonello's chisel. Indeed, stylistic analysis seems to place the work at the end of Antonello's career, to whom its conception is probably due, while its realisation would have been entrusted to his son Antonino. After his parent's death, Antonino completed many of the works begun by his father, including some pertaining to the monumental tribune of Palermo Cathedral. When compared to this important achievement by Gagini, the close affinity between the group of four saints, conventionally called Brummer , and the four similar sculptures in Palermo Cathedral is evident.