St Daniel Dragged by a Horse

The story of the Venetian High Renaissance relief is brought to a close by two makers of bronze statuettes, Tiziano Aspetti and Niccolò Roccatagliata. Aspetti produced three reliefs, two in the Cathedral at Padua and one in Santa Trinita, Florence. Unlike the tribune reliefs of Sansovino, the reliefs in Padua do not employ a consistent relief style, but are conceived as groups of statuettes attached to a flat ground. The treatment of the intermediate planes is lifeless, and even the figures in the round are stamped with a fatal flaccidity.

Roccatagliata, a more varied and ambitious artist, modelled one major relief, the bronze antependium of the altar in the sacristy of San Mois� in Venice.

Aspetti’s two reliefs in the Cathedral at Padua show St Daniel being dragged by a horse and then nailed between a table of wood and one of stone. The picture shows one of the two, St Daniel Dragged by a Horse.

There are two sets of casts of the reliefs: one still in Padua, and one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.