Bologna, a tondo with an equestrian portrait attributed to Jacopo della Quercia

A new attribution for Jacopo della Quercia (Siena, c. 1374 - 1438), the great Tuscan proto-Renaissance sculptor: art historian Paolo Cova has in fact assigned to him a stone tondo depicting the equestrian portrait of Niccolò di Ligo Ludovisi, an early 15th-century Bolognese condottiere. Jacopo della Quercia is said to have sculpted it during the years of his stay in Bologna, when from 1425 to 1434 he waited for the decoration of the Porta Magna of the basilica of San Petronio. The work is located in the Rocchetta Mattei, purchased in 2005 by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Bologna, which underwent a decade-long restoration.The tondo is located in the central courtyard of the Rocchetta, above the entrance to the Scala nobile.

In ancient times the work, which still retains part of its original polychromy, was in the Cloister of the Dead of the Convent of San Domenico in Bologna, and was placed above the tomb that the effigy’s son, Giovanni Ludovisi, had made for himself and his father. The work thus shares a common provenance with the already known corbels of Giovanni da Legnano’s ark, made between 1383 and 1386 by Jacobello and Pier Paolo dalle Masegne and reused in the Rocchetta Mattei as a support for the balcony of the Pope’s Room. Cova therefore speculates that the relief was acquired in the 19th century by Count Cesare Mattei, who had his Rocchetta built in 1850 in the eclectic style that was raging at the time. “The presence of the corbels and the tondo in the Rocchetta courtyard itself,” the scholar explains, “imply a ’stock’ acquisition, around the middle of the nineteenth century, by the count of these relevant works of art from the Dominican complex, artifacts that today, finally visible to the public, are the focus of important scientific studies and further ennoble the already substantial patrimony of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna.”

Cova came to attribute the equestrian portrait to Jacopo della Quercia on the basis of a lengthy stylistic, iconographic and technical investigation: the results will be presented tomorrow, at 10:30 a.m., at the Casa Saraceni in Via Farini 15 in Bologna (speakers will include Paolo Cova, scientific referent of the Fondazione Carisbo, Franco Cardini, professor emeritus of Medieval History, Massimo Medica, head of the Musei Civici d’Arte Antica di Bologna, and will bring institutional greetings Carlo Monti, president of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, Fabio Roversi-Monaco, president of Genus Bononiae, Virginio Merola, mayor of Bologna, Graziella Leoni, mayor of Grizzana Morandi, and Cristina Ambrosini, superintendent of Bologna).

Pictured is the relief attributed to Jacopo della Quercia.

Bologna, a tondo with an equestrian portrait attributed to Jacopo della Quercia

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