Il Sant'Egidio di Orte: aperture per Saturnino Gatti scultore

The focus of this article is on the discovery in Orte of a carved wooden sculpture of a Saint Giles, now attributed to the early period of Saturnino Gatti, a painter and sculptor from the Abruzzo who was trained in the orbit of Verrocchio and who was active during the last quarter of the fifteenth century and first two decades of the sixteenth. Archival research has resolved the misunderstanding that had led the statue to be dated to the eighteenth century, and has cast light on the local artistic scene, providing important new documents that also relate to its original context. The attribution of the Orte statue to Saturnino leads to new hypotheses about his activity in the Abruzzo, Lazio and Umbria, allowing for his authorship to be assigned to other sculptures and paintings in the Nera valley and in areas historically associated with the figurative culture of the Abruzzo, such as Cascia, Arrone and Leonessa; and an example of his probable youthful activity in Rome is discussed. A careful analysis of Gatti’s stylistic peculiarities, as seen in the frescoes at San Panfilo in Tornimparte, offers grounds for attributing a well-known and problematic terracotta statue in the Bode Museum, Berlin to this master.