Attributed to Giovanni Battista Caccini, Saint Bonaventura, marble Giovanni Battista Caccini (attr.) (Montopoli 1556 - Rome 1613) SAINT BONAVENTURE marble sculpture, inscription DOCTRINA / ET. VERITAS , h. 108 cm The work illustrates in great detail the image of a full-length holy bishop with his head tilted slightly to the right. The inscription DOCTRINA ET VERITAS on the medallion placed on the cope and the habit underneath, together with the book and the bishop's robes, allow us to recognise the figure as St. Bonaventure, Franciscan theologian and mystic, born in 1221 and died in 1274, minister general of his order and later cardinal and bishop of Albano, the first official biographer of St. Francis of Assisi. According to Sandro Bellesi, author of a critical card, the statue shows lexical characteristics typical of the Florentine figurative culture of the late Mannerist age, finding, essentially, pertinent parameters of comparison in the stylistic language of Giovan Battista Caccini, a leading master in the workmanship of marble statuary between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the following century. "The work," writes Bellesi, "can be catalogued in the mature phase of Giovan Battista Caccini's activity, with a probable dating to the first decade of the 17th century, and is evident in the treatment of the marble, conducted with dry folds falling harmoniously downwards, and in the motif of the face, dominated by regular features and, above all, by the large expressive eyes, emanating affable humanity, striking syntactical similarities with works of various periods fired by the artist and destined mainly for places of worship in Florence and its countryside, also sensitive to the lessons of Giovanni Bandini and Pietro Bernini'.