Allegory of the Redemption

Niccolò Roccatagliata, of Genoese origin, was already active in Venice in the last decades of the sixteenth century. This altar dossal, however, documents the sculptor's very last activity; he signed it together with his son Sebastiano in 1633. Regardless of its specific aesthetic significance, the work documents the particular cadence that the new culture, the Baroque, was taking on in Venice, in perfect consistency with the entirely distinctive tradition of the artistic civilisation of the lagoon, where problems of light and colour had always been placed before drawing and line. These specific and unmistakable characteristics of Venetian figurative culture would take on an entirely particular significance in relation to other historical and cultural situations, such as, for example, those of Rome at the beginning of the seventeenth century.