Scenes from the Life of St Dominic

Venetian foundries had been producing work of the highest quality since the Middle Ages, and it was appropriate that the great Dominican convent should celebrate its founding saint, Dominic, with a series of six, large-scale reliefs for his newly created chapel in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo. (Only six were executed, the sixth, in wood, was placed there later, in 1770). The commission of Giuseppe Mazza was made possible by the donation of a wealthy friar; Mazza was involved with the project for almost twenty years, from 1716. His reliefs were designed to fit into the lateral walls and were very much subordinated to their architectural setting. Their low-key style displays the grace and polish for which Mazza was famous, but his inspiration seems to have been the one great classicising relief cycle of the sixteenth century, that conceived by Tullio and Antonio Lombardo for the chapel of St Anthony in the basilica of Il Santo in Padua; there we find a similar range of medium- to low-relief figures and the same paring down of the narrative to a minimal number of characters, all translated from the medium of marble to bronze.

The picture shows the left part of the six reliefs in the Cappella di San Domenico of the Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.