03 — ARTWORK
St Thomas
- MEDIUM
- Marble, over life-size
- TYPE
- Religious
PALETTE
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- FILE
- 676 × 1400 px · JPEG
COMMENTARY
UNDERLINED TERMS ARE DEFINED IN THE GLOSSARY.
All hope that Michelangelo would execute 12 more than life-size statues of Apostles for the Duomo was abandoned in 1508, when he began to work on the Sistine ceiling. For three years the scheme was in abeyance, and then, in the first half of 1511, it was decided to allot to statues separately to such sculptors as were available. In June the first commission, for the St James, was awarded to Jacopo Sansovino. In the second half of 1513, after a vain attempt to induce Andrea Sansovino to undertake two statues, a figure of St John the Evangelist was commissioned from Benedetto da Rovezzano, who completed it in twelve months, and about the same time a St Andrew was commissioned from Andrea Ferrucci.
In 1514 Ferrucci was unsuccessfully invited to carve a second statue, a St Peter, and when he refused, this was entrusted, early in 1515, to a young and unproved protégé of Giuliano de'Medici, Baccio Bandinelli.
The coloured marbleloosely applied to any hard limestone that can be sawn into thin slabs and will take a good polish so that it is suitable for decorative work; more strictly, it refers to metamorphosed limestones whose structure has been recrystallized by heat or pressure. Marbles are widely disseminated and occur in a great variety of colours and patterns, but certain types have been particularly prized by sculptors. The most famous of Greek white marbles in the ancient world was the close-grained Pentelic, which was quarried at Mount Pentelicon in Attica. The Elgin Marbles are carved in Pentelic. Widely used also were the somewhat coarser-grained translucent white marbles from the Aegean islands of Paros and Naxos. Parian marble was used for the celebrated Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The pure white Carrara marble, quarried at Massa, Carrara, and Pietra Santa in Tuscany from the 3rd century BC, is the most famous of all sculptors' stones. It was used for the Apollo Belvedere, and was much favoured in the Renaissance, particularly by Michelangelo, who often visited the quarries to select material for his work. Neoclassical sculptors also favoured Carrara marble because of its ability to take a smooth, sleek surface, but it can look rather 'dead' compared with some of the finest Greek marbles. tabernacles in which the statues are shown were designed in 1563-65 by Ammanati. Thereafter four further figures were commissioned, two (St Philip, 1577, St James the Less, 1576) from Giovanni Bandini, and two (St Matthew, 1580, St Thomas, c. 1580) by Vincenzo de' Rossi.
CITE THIS RECORD — BIBTEX
@online{wga-r94f5d313af66ec,
author = {Krén, Emil and Marx, Daniel},
title = {St Thomas by ROSSI, Vincenzo de'},
organization = {{Web Gallery of Art}},
date = {2026-09-13},
url = {https://beta.wga.hu/artists/rossi-vincenzo-de-r33e17a6064f2c6/st-thomas-r94f5d313af66ec},
urldate = {2026-09-13},
langid = {english}
}ACCESSED 2026-09-13. REPLACE THE AUTHOR FIELD WITH THE COMMENTARY AUTHOR WHERE ONE IS NAMED.
