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Sansovino continued his practice of sculpture in Venice, where his arrival coincided with the decline of the Lombardo family school, and he had no serious rivals there until his former pupils Danese Cattaneo and Alessandro Vittoria emerged from his shadow in the 1550s. No single line of stylistic development can be traced in his Venetian sculpture, because Sansovino sought to accommodate his work to local taste and he employed a new medium, bronze, for several major commissions.
The marble St John the Baptist in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari typifies the break with his earlier Michelangelesque phase by its reversion to a late 15th-century style; Sansovino endowed the seated figure with an intensely spiritual quality while exploiting his facility for carving in a manner reminiscent of his Bacchus.
The damaged figure of St John the Baptist is above the holy water stoup, now turned into baptismal font. It was formerly in the chapel where Sansovino wished to buried.
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