Un altare a Portovenere e altre novità per il secondo soggiorno genovese di Silvio Cosini, tra Padova e Milano

This article presents three unpublished works in marble, two in high relief of Saint Peter and Saint Law-rence, surmounted by the Archangel Gabriel and the Annunciate Virgin, respectively, and a low relief figure of God the Father Blessing, set within a seventeenth-century altar in the church of San Lorenzo in Portovenere. The sculptures are attributed to Silvio Cosini, an eccentric, itinerant and mysterious Pisan sculptor who was active during the first half of the 1500s in Tuscany, Liguria, the Veneto and Lombardy, and famous for his technical virtuosity. These reliefs, which look back to Cosini's activity in Padua during the project for the Arca del Santo (the Tomb of Saint Anthony; 1533-1537), and in the shadow of his friend Jacopo Sansovino, are related to the work he did during his second Genoese period (c.1540-1542), when he was in productive collaboration with Giovan Angelo Montorsoli in the decoration of the church of San Matteo. The author also follows the vicissitudes of the Portovenere altar, as seen through some marble pieces from an unknown dismantled altare now in Palazzo Picedi Benettini (now Gropallo) in Sarzana; and provides a summary, supported in part by new documents and a revision of early sources, of Cosini's career in his late years in Padua, north-western Tuscany, Genoa and Milan, where the sculptor died in December 1545.