Giorgio Spavento e la facciata di Santi Filippo e Giacomo a Venezia

Résumé It En

Nel 1491, Giorgio Spavento, proto di San Marco, rimodellò il portale della chiesa dei Santi Filippo e Giacomo aggiungendovi una lunetta in cui collocò le statue di un Magio inginocchiato, una Madonna col Bambino e un San Giuseppe. La facciata della chiesa è stata modificata nell’Ottocento e la lunetta interamente rimossa. Le sculture in pietra d’Aurisina – una pietra calcarea di colore grigio – sono ora conservate presso il Seminario Patriarcale. Le statue erano state scolpite per un ciclo dedicato alla Natività di Cristo progettato a metà del Duecento per il tramezzo della Basilica di San Marco. Non sono note né la data né le circostanze che portarono allo smantellamento del tramezzo. L’attuale transenna scolpita da Jacobello e Pierpaolo dalle Masegne è datata 1394. L’articolo esamina le testimonianze grafiche e documentarie relative alla lunetta dei Santi Filippo e Giacomo e le interpretazioni date alle statue gotiche, risalenti a più di due secoli prima, che Giorgio Spavento fece collocare al suo interno. Il caso, poco noto ma significativo, esemplifica gli equivoci interpretativi che la rifunzionalizzazione e il reimpiego di sculture gotiche potevano causare.

In 1491, Giorgio Spavento, architect (proto) of San Marco, Venice, remodeled the portal of the church of Santi Filippo e Giacomo. He added a lunette to the façade, in which he placed three statues – a Madonna and Child, Saint Joseph and one of the three Wise Men from the East in a kneeling posture. A drawing of the lunette made in 1759 by the draughtsman and painter Jan van Grevenbroeck records the presence of the statues there. In the nineteenth century, the façade of the church was altered and the lunette removed. The article explores the evidence concerning the lunette of Santi Filippo e Giacomo and the interpretations of the Gothic sculptures dating from more than two centuries earlier that were placed inside it. The statues, now considered among the masterpieces of Venetian Gothic sculpture, were originally carved for a large cycle dedicated to the Nativity of Christ, designed in the mid-thirteenth century for the chancel screen of the Basilica of San Marco. The date and the circumstances that led to the cycle being broken up and the chancel screen dismantled are unknown. The rood screen that is currently in place was carved in 1394 by the sculptors Jacobello and Pierpaolo dalle Masegne. This little-known case study offers a rare and intriguing example of a Gothic set repurposed by shifting its iconographic meaning without erasing it entirely. As the lunette of Santi Filippo e Giacomo exemplifies, once statues were taken out of the context they had been carved for originally, their iconographic meaning was open to reinterpretation. Even though it was driven by pragmatic intentions (in this case, to redesign an ancient monastic façade in keeping with a newly fashionable late fifteenth-century style), repurposing statues led to semantic shifts that made them appear enigmatic, if not downright bewildering, to those who looked at them at a later time.