Girolamo Campagna

Girolamo Campagna

Born in Verona, 1552; died about 1623 or 1625. He was an able, but not strikingly individual sculptor of Northern Italy. He studied under Jacopo Sansovino and Danese Cattaneo, and completed many of the latter's works. To him we owe the figure of Doge Leonardo Loredano on the tomb which Cattaneo made at SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice. After his master's death, Campagna went to Padua where he secured the commission intended for Cattaneo in the church of St. Anthony. This was his masterpiece, a bas-relief of the saint bringing back to life a man who had been murdered. Some years later Campagna made another trip to Padua and wrought the bronze tabernacle for the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament. The greater part of his life was spent in Venice, and there we have the majority of his works: the statues of St. Francis and St. Clare bearing the ostensorium at Santa Maria de'Miracoli; that of St. Giustina over the door of the Arsenal, commemorating the battle of Lepanto, which occurred on her feast-day (7 October, 1571), during Campagna's lifetime; the colossal St. Sebastian at the Zecca; the figures of Our Lady, the Archangel Gabriel and patron saints of Venice, in relief on the Ponte di Rialto; the group in bronze of Christ on a globe, supported by the Four Evangelists at San Giorgio Maggiore. In Verona there is a good Annunciation over the portal of the old Palazzo del Consiglio and a Madonna at the Collegio dei Mercatanti.

Perekins, Italian Sculptors (London and New York); Idem, Historical Handbook of Italian Sculpture (New York, 1883).

M.L. HANDLEY