Antonio Corso
Center of Vitruvian Studies; Nordic Library, Athens, Greece
The concern of this paper is a statuette in Parian marble from the quarries of Lakkoi on Paros. The statuette was set up on a water basin in the Basilica of Saint Antony in Padua. It represents the Muse Calliope, holding a tabula cerata in her left hand. The date is Antonine, the craftsmanship looks Rhodian, probably it is a derivative work from the statue of Calliope in the group of Muses of the Hellenistic Rhodian sculptor Philiscus. In 1513, the Friars of the Basilica of Saint Antony in Padua commissioned a statuette of Saint Justine to be set up on a water basin in the Basilica from the sculptor Laskaris, a Greek who at the time lived in Venice. He gave this old statuette to the friars, changing the subject to Saint Justine. Since Saint Justine usually holds in her left hand the Gospel and in her right hand the palm of her martyrdom, the tabula cerata was reinterpreted as a book. The right arm of the statuette was missing but archival evidence reveals that it had been restored in 1571 by the Paduan sculptor Agostino Zoppo: probably this arm was endowed with the palm of martyrdom. In any case the arm fell down and has survived. The statuette was never studied in depth and only recently it has received the attention it deserves. Thus this contribution is an original one.