A Previously Unknown Ecce Homo by Nikola Lazanić in Italy

Abstract

Nikola Lazanić, born on the island of Brač, is the most important late Renaissance sculptor in Croatia. His sculptural opus includes only three signed works. The earliest is a relief stone altarpiece from 1578 with a Madonna with the Child and St Peter and Paul in the church of St Peter in Nerežišće on the island of Brač. From 1581 to 1584, the master was active in Rome, and in 1589 in Dubrovnik, where he produced his two anthological statues, St Blaise and St Jerome, for the old church of the city’s patron saint. Nikola was also a painter, so in 1591 he took an apprentice whom he pledged to teach sculpture and painting for ten years. The last mention of the master is a signed altarpiece painted in 1593 for the Chiesa dei Carmini in Bitonto. This paper focuses on a previously unknown stone bust of Christ with a crown of thorns – Ecce Homo. It is located outside of its original context, in the garden of the parish house in Noventa Padovana, in the eastern suburbs of Padua. The bust bears the master’s signature: NICvs . LASANEVS . F. It is hypothetically dated to the ninth decade of the 16th century, when the master supposedly stayed in Venice and Veneto. Also, the author suggests a possible pictorial model for Lazanić’s work, an engraving based on Titian’s Ecce Homo, printed in Venice in the third quarter of the 16th century.