FG FINE ART LTD
Master of the
Maddalena di Cascio
Tuscany, active in the first quarter of the 16th century
The Penitent Magdalene formerly preserved in the hermitage of Santa Maria Maddalena at Cascio, near Lucca, stands among the most arresting and intellectually provocative survivals of early sixteenth-century Tuscan glazed terracotta. Long suspended between attributions to Giovan Francesco Rustici and the young Baccio Bandinelli, the sculpture ultimately resists full assimilation into either master’s documented oeuvre. What emerges instead is the profile of a distinct artistic personality, whom we may now provisionally designate as the Maestro della Maddalena di Cascio, whose work crystallises a moment of acute experimentation around 1515–1520, when Florentine sculpture hovered between Leonardesque expressivity, archaizing monumentality, and nascent classicising ambition, thus explaining both its proximity to Rustici and its inextricable ties to the artistic milieu of early sixteenth-century Florence.
Penitent Magdalene
Glazed terracotta, 137.3 x 38 x 32 cm
PROVENANCE
Lucca, Bagni di Lucca, Cascio, Hermitage of Santa Maria Maddalena
Florence, Isabella Croce collection, until 1927
Florence, Sandro Morelli
London, Sotheby’s, 7 December 1989, lot 64
New York, Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, 2005-2006
New York, Sotheby’s, 28 January 2022, lot 554
Private collection
BIBLIOGRAPHY
G. F. Turriani, Visite delle Chiese del Vicariato di Garfagnana 1683 et 1684, 1684, Biblioteca
Statale di Lucca, manoscritto 3228, carta 108
G. Gentilini, I Della Robbia: la scultura invetriata nel Rinascimento, Florence, 1992, pp. 470-
471, 481, 489
G. Gentilini, I Della Robbia e l’arte nuova della scultura invetriata, exhibition catalogue, Flor-
ence 1998, pp. 223-224
La Garfagnana dall’avvento degli Estensi alla devoluzione di Ferrara: atti del convegno tenuto a
Castelnuovo Garfagnana, Rocca Ariostesca, 11-12 settembre 1999, Modena 2000, p. 208
C. Cinelli, Il ciclo degli Apostoli nel Duomo di Firenze, Florence 2002, pp. 71, 73, 75, 126-127
Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Sculptures, Salander - O’ Reilly, New York 2005, n. 20
P. Sénéchal, Giovan Francesco Rustici (1475-1554): Un sculpteur de la Renaissance entre Florence
et Paris, Paris 2007, p. 230-231
M. Verdigi, Visite Pastorali nella Garfagnagna del ‘600, Lucca 2010, p. 86
A. Guidugli, La Romita di Cascio. Storia di un’istituzione monastica dal medioevo ad oggi, Lucca 2013, pp. 52-57, 90-91
A. Guidugli, Aspetti dell’eremitismo in Garfagnana, Lucca 2016, pp. 97-102, 165-169
V. Anselmi, in Le corps et l’ame: De Donatello à Michel-Ange. Sculptures italiennes de la Renais-
sance, Paris 2020, p. 340
V. Anselmi, in Maddalena, Il Mistero e l’immagine, exhibition catalogue, Cinisello Balsamo
2022, p. 448
Almost life-size, measuring approximately 137 cm and still preserving its faux-porphyry base, the figure confronts the viewer with an austere frontality that is at once archaic and radically modern. The head tilts upward; the hollowed cheeks and sharply defined jaw tighten the face into an image of ascetic strain; the sinews of the neck stand out beneath taut skin; the lips part to reveal small teeth, a detail of disquieting naturalism. The body beneath the mantle of hair, however, remains structurally firm, the thighs muscular, the knees substantial. The saint is not dissolved by penitence; she endures it. The once vivid polychromy, pallid flesh, subtly livid tonalities at knees and cheeks, dense brown hair rendered in heavy parallel locks, transforms glazed terracotta into a vehicle of psychological immediacy rather than decorative refinement.
The first and most inevitable comparison is with Donatello’s wooden Penitent Magdalene in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence. Donatello’s saint is skeletal, almost desiccated, her body consumed by spiritual fire. By contrast, the Cascio Magdalene retains corporeal integrity aligned with early Cinquecento anatomical inquiry. If Donatello dematerialises, the Maestro della Maddalena di Cascio re-materialises, translating asceticism into muscular tension rather than corporeal annihilation.
A second, crucial point of comparison lies with the wooden Maddalena orante carved in 1519 by Francesco da Sangallo, now in the Museo Diocesano di Firenze. Sangallo’s figure unmistakably reworks the Cascio prototype: the frontal stance, the joined hands, the enveloping cascade of hair. Yet in Sangallo’s version the distortions sharpen toward mannerism, the features grow more angular, and the hair stiffens into linear insistence. The Cascio figure appears the generative matrix: Sangallo amplifies a language already forged.
Earlier Quattrocento precedents clarify the rupture further. The Magdalene types associated with Don Romualdo da Candeli and Neri di Bicci embody devotional sweetness and measured composure. Their saints console; the Cascio Magdalene confronts. Her hair does not adorn but girds and weighs; her face registers existential extremity rather than edifying calm.
The Robbian comparison is equally instructive. Andrea della Robbia’s glazed Magdalene at Borgo a Mozzano offers enamelled luminosity and Savonarolan restraint. By contrast, the Cascio figure — though almost certainly glazed in proximity to Giovanni della Robbia’s workshop — deploys polychromy with corporeal immediacy. The glaze is not decorative veneer but expressive instrument, pushing invetriated terracotta toward a realism more commonly associated with polychromed wood.
The most provocative dialogue unfolds with the young Bandinelli. In his marble Saint Peter for Florence Cathedral, the taut articulation of the neck, the extended jaw, the square skull, the hollowed cheeks and the parted lips revealing teeth form a physiognomic constellation strikingly close to the Cascio Magdalene. Comparable tension animates Bandinelli’s Saint Jerome at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where ascetic intensity is conveyed through exposed tendons and angular modelling. Even a drawing associated with Bandinelli’s early production representing Mary of Egypt reveals a similar fascination with gaunt physiognomy and tensile anatomy. Yet divergences are decisive. Bandinelli’s figures favour torsion and monumental projection; the Cascio Magdalene remains hieratically frontal. None of Bandinelli’s surviving works ventures into glazed polychromy with comparable audacity. The overlap lies in anatomical ambition; the divergence lies in medium and compositional ethos.
If stylistic comparison situates the sculpture within early Cinquecento Florence, documentary evidence anchors it firmly in Cascio. Pastoral visitations beginning in 1570 record a standing image of the Magdalene placed within the altar niche of the sandstone oratory dependent on the monastery of Santa Maria Forisportam in Lucca. Subsequent visitations in 1580, 1629, 1679, 1680 and 1683 repeatedly confirm the presence of the figure, at times describing it as “marble,” elsewhere specifying terracotta with varnish, a fluctuation revealing both its perceived preciousness and the ambiguity of glazed surfaces. A 1531 concession of usufruct to the Rampalli and Simonelli families, who assumed responsibility for funding masses and maintaining the altar, provides a plausible context for its commission. Veiled with transparent cloth and framed within carved and painted wood, the sculpture functioned for centuries as the devotional focus of the hermitage. Removed in the late 1920s by the Croce family, an act that inadvertently spared it wartime destruction, it later entered the art market, appearing at Sotheby’s London in 1989, at the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery in New York in 2005–06, and again at Sotheby’s New York in 2022 before entering a private collection.
The modern critical history of the work unfolds with unusual clarity. Giancarlo Gentilini first brought the sculpture into sustained scholarly discourse in I Della Robbia. La scultura invetriata nel Rinascimento, cautiously aligning it with Rustici while noting technical irregularities in the glaze that suggested experimental handling. He reaffirmed this proximity 1998, cataloguing it as the work of a sculptor “vicino a Giovan Francesco Rustici”.
A decisive and more rigorously articulated reorientation came with Carlo Cinelli in Il ciclo degli Apostoli nel Duomo di Firenze. Cinelli did not merely observe generic affinities with the young Bandinelli; he constructed a detailed morphological argument centred on the marble Saint Peter. He emphasised the strained musculature of the neck, the squared configuration of the cranium and jaw, the breadth of the face articulated through deeply incised cheeks and prominent zygomatic arches, and above all the device of parted lips revealing teeth, an accent recurring in the Cascio Magdalene, in the London Saint Jerome, and in the colossi of Hercules and Cacus. Such traits, he argued, are not iconographically prescribed but belong to a specific investigative language forged in the crucible of early Cinquecento anatomical research. Cinelli further proposed that the expressive force of the Saint Peter presupposes experimentation in ductile media, terracotta among them, where modelling could be pursued with greater immediacy. In this light, the Cascio Magdalene would represent a crucial document of Bandinelli’s formative plastic investigations between approximately 1515 and 1520.
A decisive and more rigorously articulated reorientation came with Carlo Cinelli in Il ciclo degli Apostoli nel Duomo di Firenze. Cinelli did not merely observe generic affinities with the young Bandinelli; he constructed a detailed morphological argument centred on the marble Saint Peter. He emphasised the strained musculature of the neck, the squared configuration of the cranium and jaw, the breadth of the face articulated through deeply incised cheeks and prominent zygomatic arches, and above all the device of parted lips revealing teeth — an accent recurring in the Cascio Magdalene, in the London Saint Jerome, and in the colossi of Hercules and Cacus. Such traits, he argued, are not iconographically prescribed but belong to a specific investigative language forged in the crucible of early Cinquecento anatomical research. Cinelli further proposed that the expressive force of the Saint Peter presupposes experimentation in ductile media, terracotta among them, where modelling could be pursued with greater immediacy. In this light, the Cascio Magdalene would represent a crucial document of Bandinelli’s formative plastic investigations between approximately 1515 and 1520.
Measured against Donatello’s skeletal transcendence, against the devotional calm of Candeli and Neri di Bicci, against Andrea della Robbia’s enamelled clarity, against Sangallo’s reinterpretation, and against Bandinelli’s marble and graphic explorations, the Cascio Magdalene asserts a singular position. It is anatomically modern yet compositionally archaic, polychrome yet severe, devotional yet confrontational.
In that charged space between Rustici’s Leonardesque inheritance and Bandinelli’s emergent classicism, the Maestro della Maddalena di Cascio claims his place, not as an echo, but as an innovator working in combustible proximity to the most ambitious sculptural experiments of early Cinquecento Florence.
A full fact sheet is available on request.
