SANSOVINO, Andrea
(b. ca. 1467, Monte Sansovino, d. 1529, Monte Sansovino)

Madonna and Child with St Anne

1512
Marble
Sant'Agostino, Rome

Sansovino's Roman commission, the marble group of the Virgin and Child with St Anne, was instigated by one of the leading humanists in Rome, the curial prelate Johann Goritz. Goritz, who entertained literary and artistic friends on the feast of St Anne, commissioned the work as part of an altar that was intended to unite the arts of sculpture, painting and poetry. Sansovino collaborated with Raphael, whose fresco of the Prophet Isaiah is on the pier above the altar ensemble. An annual poetry contest was held to celebrate the saint, the statue and the patron.

The statue, possibly the first life-size, multi-figure group carved out of a single block of marble since antiquity, might have been executed in response to the discovery in Rome in 1506 of the Laocoön (Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican), an antique sculptural group reputedly carved from one block. To give equal emphasis to the three figures, Sansovino created three principal views for the group; that featuring St Anne approximates most closely the compositional solutions that Leonardo adopted in his series of the same subject.