Author of statues in the major churches of Padua and Venice, Giammaria Mosca was among the leading sculptors in northern Italy during the second and third decades of the sixteenth century. In 1529 Mosca was summoned by the King of Poland to erect his tomb in Cracow. From 1533 until the artist's death in 1574, documents at regular intervals record important commissions to Mosca throughout Poland from the Polish royal family, as well as from prominent members of the nobility and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Many of Mosca's inscribed and documented monuments survive in their original site and state and testify to the sculptor's key role in the diffusion in Eastern Europe of Italian Renaissance ideals.
In both native and adoptive homes, thus, there exists a substantial body of extant and documented works by Mosca; indeed, Mosca is virtually unique among émigré Renaissance sculptors for the completeness with which both halves of his career are documented and therefore offers the perfect test case for assessing the effect of emigration from the center to the periphery. Yet no one has ever asked whether Mosca's move to Poland changed his art. For the first time, Anne Markham Schulz not only explores the effect on Mosca's art of new patrons and materials, of different artistic conventions, functions, and traditions, but also sets Mosca's emigration within the context of those cultural exchanges between Italy and Poland that contributed fundamentally to the formation of the Polish Renaissance.
This book represents the first comprehensive study of Giammaria Mosca in any language. It includes more than 260 detail photographs of all of Mosca's sculptures; almost every one has been made anew, many from specially constructed scaffolds. In addition, another 109 photographs illustrate comparative works. All documents concerning the artist, most never published before and many quite unknown, are reproduced in their entirety. There is an exhaustive catalogue of all works attributed to Mosca or his shop and a comprehensive bibliography of scholarship in ten languages.
