Attributed to Jacopo di Andrea del Mazza, Saint Sebastian, marble Jacopo di Andrea del Mazza (attr.) (Florence 1450/1455 - 1501) SAINT SEBASTIAN marble relief, inscription on side S / MOVERI GAVDEAT IN TERRIS NOME / ET , 64x76.5x15.5 cm Comparative literature P. Parmiggiani, Sulla gioventù di Andrea di Pietro Ferrucci: Jacopo d'Andrea del Mazza e il monumento di Marco Albertoni in Santa Maria del Popolo a Roma , in "Prospettiva", 2011 (2012), 141-142, pp. 73-85 The slab features a half-length image of Saint Sebastian as he awaits his martyrdom with proud acceptance. offering his chest to the arrows. The saint appears to stand in front of the robust moulded frame on which, with an effective perspective virtuosity, the halo is superimposed and the loincloth falls. According to Giancarlo Gentilini, author of a critical file on this work, "the inclination of the head, the foreshortened posture of the chest and the offset posture of the arms of the figure offering the observer his left side, as well as the workmanship with grips on the back of the marble, suggest that the tile must have been the left side slab of a casket-like structure, perhaps an altar table, probably bearing the image of Christ on the front, or the sarcophagus of a funerary monument, as the inscription is also suitable for a sepulchral epigraph'. Concerning an attribution, Gentilini writes: "In the robust and squared face, characterised by a haughty frown, with an attractiveness that is well suited to the military vocation of Sebastiano, tribune of the praetorian guards, we can perceive a physiognomic intensity of close Leonardo ancestry, but declined in a clearer and smoother manner, a plastic clarity that, in accordance with the dilated layout of the figure, gives the image an abstraction out of time and space... But if these findings confirm the genesis of the work in the Verrocchio entourage of the 1580s, the calm plastic and expressive conception appears alien to the production of Andrea and his workshop, characterised by a greater formal exuberance and physiognomic emphasis. This alterity is particularly evident in the geometric course of the drapery, stylised and flattened in sharp triangular folds, zigzagging fan-shaped crests that instead recall solutions peculiar to the sculpture of Mino da Fiesole Such a conjuncture, foreign to the Tuscan artistic scene, therefore directs us to search for the author of the relief in the composite scenario of Florentine sculptors active in Urbe, in the shadow of the great building sites of the Rome of Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII, largely managed by Mino and the Lombard Andrea Bregno. In this context, the comparison with the Sepulchre of Marco Albertoni in Santa Maria del Popolo, commissioned in 1487 to the Florentine Jacopo d'Andrea del Mazza, a work that combines a Bregno architectural layout with formal solutions of a Verrocchio matrix, appears particularly compelling and significant".