This intensely expressive and small-scale marble bust of a scantily clad young woman was probably intended for the studiolo of a Renaissance humanist or erudite collects or. The sculpture was carved at a moment in Italy’s artistic development when the revival of classically-inspired sculpture in Venice was at its height, heralded by the renown Lombardo brothers, Tullio and Antonio, in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The genre’s popularity grew with the work of Simone Bianco with whom Antonio Minello was employed by the wealthy Venetian merchant and renown collects or Andrea Odoni (1488-1545).

Fully carved in the round, the present work is sensitively worked with a combination of bold, waves of spiraling locks and wisps of hair delicately carved with the lightest touch of the chisel, bound with a thin ribbon adorning and supporting her intricate hairstyle. She wears a dress made of diaphanous fabric that reveals her sensuous flesh and exposes one breast. In the absence of identifiable features, the bust appears to depict an ‘ideal beauty’, rather than a portrait, a genre echoed in the work of Venetian painters, including Titian and Palma Vecchio.

Antonio Minello's work is indebted to that of Tullio Lombardo, in this sculpture’s revealing dress, elaborate hairstyle, and incised pupils and irises. Her moving expression is that of astonishment, with parted lips, her head slightly turned and inclined, her eyes gazing upward. As Luchs explains in her entry for the present bust in her exhibition at the National Gallery in 2009¹, the sculpture’s melancholic expression may signal that she represents Dido, the Queen of Carthage and grief-stricken lover of the Trojan hero Aeneas who abandoned her. The heroine’s forehead is adorned with a medallion, based on a famous ancient gem representing Diomedes from Greek legend, but in the Roman version of the story, Aeneas is the central character; thus the reference to Dido.²

Her facial expression was likely inspired by the great classical sculpture of Laocoön and his sons, unearthed in Rome in 1506, which became widely known through engravings and drawings. Schulz notes that this physiognomy is a trope that Minello repeats in many of his sculptures including his signed figure of Mercury of 1527, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and made for the noted 16th century scholar and art collects or Marcantonio Michiel.³ According to Schulz, the dating of the present bust should approximate that of the Mercury (fig. 1). ⁴

Antonio Minello’s name first appears in April 1483 in documents of the Arca of the Basilica di S. Antonio at Padua when he was working under his father, Giovanni Minelloi, in the extensive decoration of the basilica’s choir screen and later the Cappello del Santo.

Antonio was entrusted with three funerary monuments in SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice in honor of military heroes from the Siege of Padua, circa 1512-15, and the relief of the Investiture of St. Anthony in the Cappello, 1513-19 (fig. 2). Among the smaller, refined sculptures in his oeuvre are Pan and Luna, circa 1525, now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich and his bust of a woman in the Museo Bardini, Florence (fig. 3) based on Minello’s statue of S. Giustina, circa 1512, on the facade of the Cappello del Santo.⁵ On 4 January 1524, after the death of Lorenzo Bregno, Minello acquired the older sculptor’s workshop in Venice and moved his business there.

Together with the leading proponents of the classically-inspired “ideal” portrait, Minello championed this sculptural aesthetic with a combination of finesse and a vitality of carving that distinguished him from the work of sculptors from antiquity.

¹ A. Luchs 2009, p. 82
² A. Luchs 2009, pp. 82 and 85, n. 2
³ A. M. Schulz 2014, p. 58
⁴A. M. Schulz 1995, p. 806
⁵ A. M. Schulz, 'Four new works by Antonio Minello' in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XXXI, no. 2/3, 1987, pp. 291-326