The series of Byzantine doors made in Constantinople (wood covered with inlaid bronze panels, frames, and handles) continued after the first one was donated to the Cathedral of Amalfi in 1060 by the merchant Mauro di Pantaleone of Amalfi:

In 1066, Abbot Desiderius of Montecassino requested a similar door for the church of Montecassino, whose consecration in 1071 was attended by the famous Hildebrand of Soana, abbot of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, Alfano, bishop of Salerno, and Giraldo, archbishop of Siponto and St. Michael the Archangel on the Gargano Peninsula.

Giraldo’s presence at the Montecassino ceremony led to the request for a similar door for the sanctuary of San Michele al Monte Sant’Angelo, a door that was “ordered” in Constantinople in 1076 by Mauro di Pantaleone, as reported by the inscription on the door itself: HOC OPUS COMPLETUM EST IN REGIAM URBEM COSTANTINOPOLI ADIUBANTE DOMINO PANTALEONE QUI EAS FIERI IUSSIT ANNO AB INCARNATIONE DOMINI MILLESIMO SEPTUAGESIMO SEXTO. [Photos 1 to 10, bronze door of the Sanctuary of San Michele al Monte Sant’Angelo and details of the same]

Around 1070, at the request of Ildebrando di Soana and commissioned by Mauro di Pantaleone of Amalfi, the Door of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome was built in Constantinople by Theodoros and Staurachios. [Photos 11–16, bronze door of the Papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome, and details of the doors]

On the Atrani door, only the four central panels feature Byzantine damascening; the others feature a sort of identical, low-relief chalice from which a cross emerges, probably cast with sand and held in place by four large studs. One of the damascened panels bears the name of the donor Pantaleone, while the other features Greek inscriptions indicating it was made in Constantinople in 1087. [Photos 17 to 21, bronze door of the Church of San Salvatore de’ Birecto in Atrani and details thereof]

The door in Salerno Cathedral has eight inlaid panels, while the remaining panels feature the same type of chalices with crosses applied as the one in Atrani Cathedral. One of the inlaid panels bears the names of the donor and his wife: Landolfo and Guisana Butrumile; the door was made in Constantinople around 1085-1090. [Photos 22-26, bronze door of Salerno Cathedral and details of the door itself]

The two doors of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, the central one in the atrium and the door of San Clemente, were made in Constantinople but are later than the previous ones, dating to the first half of the 12th century. Both are covered with bronze panels with typically Byzantine damascening.

The central door was commissioned and donated by the merchant Leo da Molino, procurator of the Basilica from 1112 until his death in 1146.

Both were conceived as the “Gates of Paradise,” featuring the supplication (Deesis) represented by Christ with the Virgin on his right and St. John the Baptist on his left, and the Litany of the Saints, for the remission of sins that would allow Leo da Molino and the faithful to enter Paradise. [PHOTO series VENICE, first the Maggiore and then San Clemente]

This door is part of the group of bronze doors made in Constantinople and sent to Italy, recognizable by the particular style of the damascening designs on the panels, of Byzantine type but slightly Westernized.

Just a few years after 1054, the year of the schism between the Eastern and Western churches, in 1070 the door for the Church of Saint Paul Outside the Walls was cast in Constantinople and immediately shipped to Rome.
It was donated by Pantaleone of Amalfi, “Consul Malfigenus,” as the dedicatory inscription on the door read. Pantaleone, a very wealthy merchant from the flourishing colony of Amalfi in Constantinople,
donated it to the Basilica of Saint Paul in Rome, just as he had donated it to the church of Amalfi, the Basilica of Montecassino, and the sanctuary of Monte Sant’Angelo.

The door we see, although original, is the result of the 1966 restoration, and highlights how in Byzantine bronze doors everything revolved around the design of the intaglios and not the volume of the sculptural parts. No three-dimensional sculpture was required, because the doors had to be
large panels of shiny golden yellow metal “painted” with intaglios, and never patinated; in fact, they were periodically washed to maintain their brilliance (Photos 1, 2, 3).

Evidently the schism of 1054 had not interrupted artistic and commercial exchanges between East and West, and had not affected the Roman taste for Byzantine objects; so much so that Hildebrand, the influential figure in the papal circle, requested from Pantaleone Amalfitano, consul in Constantinople, the door in clear Byzantine style.

The door (5 meters high and 3.42 meters wide) was composed, like other Byzantine doors, of 54 individual and separate inlaid brass panels, about half a centimeter thick (Photo 4); the panels were fixed to the large wooden door with brass frames nailed to the wood. It was therefore a cladding of metal panels and frames on the wood (Photos 5, 6). These panels were cast using the “stirrup” technique, which is more suitable (and easier and quicker) for obtaining thin, flat sheets than lost-wax casting.

In July 1823, the Basilica of St. Paul suffered a disastrous fire that destroyed much of the building; as many fragments of the bronze door as possible were recovered and stored in a room adjacent to the sacristy. Some of the panels lost the silver originally inserted in the grooves of the damascening (Photos 7, 8, 9, 10).

The door featured two inscriptions: one in Greek and Syriac on the frame beneath the Crucifixion of St. Peter, commemorating the founder Staurakios (“It was made by my hand, Staurakios the founder. You who read, pray also for me”), and was lost in the fire at the Basilica (but a faithful copy exists in the 19th-century corpus of drawings by Seroux d’Agincourt); the second appeared during the 1966 restoration and commemorates the artist Theodoros (“O Saints Peter and Paul, help your servant Theodoros who designed these doors”).

An ancient third inscription comes to us from the “Historia delle Stationi di Roma” of 1588 by Pompeo Ugonio (Photo 11), who had seen written on the door itself:
“Anno 1070. Ab incarnatione Domini, temporibus / Domini Alexandri sanctissimi Papae Quarti, et / Domini Ildebrandi venerabilis Monachi et / Archidiaconi, constructae sunt portae istae / in Regia Urbe Costantinopoli adiu / vante Domino Pantaleone Con / sule, qui illa fieri iussit.” which confirmed the construction of the gate in Constantinople in 1070, but this inscription too was lost in the fire of 1823.

Desiderio, descendant of a princely family from Benevento, became abbot in 1058 [Photo 1]. The Cassino monk Leone Marsicano in the “Chronica monasterii Casinensis” wrote that around 1065 the abbot Desiderio, while he was architecturally renovating the monastic complex of Montecassino (the reconstruction took 5 years) was struck by the beauty of the bronze door of the Amalfi cathedral [Photo 2,3]:

“Since his eyes were enchanted, he immediately sent the measurements of the door of the old church to Constantinople, along with the order to build the door as it is today. He had not yet decided to rebuild the church: this is why the door was so low, as it remains today.”

It is the second gate in chronological order, created in Constantinople and shipped to Montecassino. Like the one in Amalfi, it was built by nailing panels and frames to a heavy, thick wooden frame.

The door has two dedicatory inscriptions at the bottom (flanked by flat crosses similar to those of Amalfi), the left one bears the name of the donor Mauro di Amalfi and the date 1066, the year of their execution [Photos 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].

Above these, the doors are occupied by 18 panels each inscribed with the list of the monastery’s possessions [Photos 9, 10, 11, 12]. However, it should be noted that the typology of the decorations on the doors of Amalfi and Montecassino is very different: in Amalfi the four central panels are inlaid with Christ, the Virgin, St. Andrew and St. Peter, all the other panels feature flat crosses; in Montecassino the door is practically a long inscription with only four of the crosses at the bottom. It is very unlikely that Desiderio requested 36 panels all inscribed with the 180 possessions of Montecassino. The study of this list has highlighted that 26 of the 180 possessions inscribed on the door were purchased by Montecassino after 1066, most of which after the death of Desiderio (1087). But the current form of the gate and its dating are highly controversial:
the “Chronica monasterii Casinensis” reports that in 1123: “around this time Abbot Oderisio ordered the beautiful bronze door at the entrance of our church to be made.” It is very likely that the origin of the gate bearing the list of Montecassino’s possessions is due to Abbot Oderisio II, who ruled the Abbey from 1123 to 1126.

When Montecassino was bombed in 1944, the door panels had come loose, and it was discovered that eight of them had inlaid figures of saints and prophets on the back [Photos 13, 14, 15, 16, 17]: the Desiderius door, which came from Constantinople, with Byzantine inlaid panels and built just a few years after the Amalfi one, must have been dismantled and reassembled with the panels turned, on which the inscriptions with the properties of the Montecassino monastery had been engraved; the reassembly with the turned panels and the inscriptions is probably what is attributed to Oderisius II in the “Chronica monasterii Casinensis” in 1123.
The two large panels at the base of the doors, with the crosses, were added by Desiderius to make the door, which had been ordered too small, appropriate for the size of the entrance.

Of the ten bronze doors made in Constantinople and sent to Italy, only eight remain in their original locations: in the Amalfi Cathedral, in the Abbey of Montecassino, in San Paolo fuori delle Mura in Rome, in San Michele Arcangelo on Monte Sant’Angelo, in San Salvatore de Birecto in Atrani (moved to the collegiate church of Santa Maria Maddalena), in the Cathedral of Salerno, in the central door of San Marco in Venice, and in the door of San Clemente. The one from 1099, sent as a gift by Godfrey of Bouillon and placed at the entrance to the façade of Pisa Cathedral, was destroyed in the fire of 1595, and the one from the Basilica of San Martino in Montecassino (mentioned in the Abbey’s “Chronica”) was also lost.
Constantinople was the Mediterranean center of luxury goods production and trade, and was particularly renowned for its metalwork. Yet incredibly, no similar gate has survived, either in the metropolitan area or anywhere else in the empire; only the seven gates that reached Italy are known.

While Carolingian and Ottonian (or even Romanesque) gates are solidly cast, Byzantine gates are made of thin panels (about 3 millimeters thick) separated and nailed to a wooden frame. The individual panels were enclosed by modular frames (flat, as in the Amalfi Cathedral, or semi-circular or cordoned) [Photo 1] whose pieces were also nailed to the wood. Ultimately, they were wooden doors covered with thin panels and brass frames.

The Byzantine doors do not have any raised parts, with the exception of the lion heads supporting the door knocker. The aim was to create a shiny, pictorial and not plastic surface, unlike that of the medieval doors created in the West.

The first of the group was that of Amalfi Cathedral, commissioned around 1060 by the very wealthy Amalfi nobleman Pantaleone de Comite Maurone, who had settled in the Constantinopolitan merchant colony founded by the Amalfi people in the 9th century. The most influential figure in the colony, he had been awarded the titles of “hypatos” and “dishypatos” (consul and consul again) by the Byzantine imperial court.

Pantaleone donated it to the cathedral of his hometown, dedicating the gate to Saint Andrew for the forgiveness of his sins and the redemption of his soul, as appears from the inscription engraved on the cross in the panel below that of Saint Andrew, along with his family lineage [Photos 2, 3]. We know that the cross in the panel below that of Saint Peter (now lost and replaced with a plain cross) bore the inscription in Latin and Greek with the name of the founder, Simeon.

It consists of twenty-four brass panels (not actually bronze, but brass, as the alloy contains a high percentage of zinc): Byzantine doors were normally cast in brass, which, thanks to its yellow color, shone with golden reflections and were therefore not patinated but rather continuously washed to keep them shiny. Of these, twenty panels have applied flat, smooth, thin crosses, probably sand-cast, each secured with four hemispherical-headed pins [Photo 4].

The four central panels [Photos 5,6] instead have inlaid copper and silver figures of Christ [Photo 7] and the Virgin at the top [Photo 8], of Saint Andrew [Photo 9] and Saint Peter [Photo 10] at the bottom, under arches supported by two columns. The inlaid engraving was done cold on the smooth sheets of the panels which had also already been sand-cast.

Six lion heads were applied to support the door knocker, the only elements in plastic relief in the entire work [Photo 11, 12].

The Door of the Temple of Romulus in the Roman Forum closed the pre-existing round monument that the emperor Maxentius in 309 AD transformed into the temple of his son Valerius Romulus, and is contemporary (Photo 1,2). It consists of two doors completely cast in bronze, 4.92 meters high and 3.16 meters wide, and was decorated with bronze studs, now lost. (Photo 3,4)

The uprights of the frame are made of two whole bronze plates (external and internal) joined with dovetail joints; the central panels are single solid plates 5 mm thick.

The door came from the Cura Iulia, the ancient seat of the Roman Senate, built by Octavian in 29 BC, which Pope Honorius transformed into a church in 630 with the name of Sant’ Adriano al Foro; it was transported by Pope Alexander VII Chigi and adapted by Borromini to place it at the entrance to the Basilica of St. John Lateran (Photo 5).

There are various drawings of the door when it was still in the church of Sant’ Adriano al Foro: by Giuiano da Sangallo from the end of the 15th century, by Antonio Labacco from 1528, by Etienne Duperac from 1575, by Aloisio Giovannoli from 1615 (Photos 6,7,8,9,10).

From the Diary of Pope Alexander VII we know that “on May 27, 1656, the doors for the new building were removed” and, the pope continues, “the door that was St. Adrian’s should be given to Father and Virgilio Spada [intermediary between the pope and Borromini] who should have it repaired by Cav. and Borromino with more bronze or at least copper”. The door therefore underwent various adjustments in size and decoration by Borromini compared to the Roman original, and for the reassembly with different sizes, a wooden core was created to which the sheets were attached (Photos 11,12,13).

Another bronze door of ancient Roman origin reused in the Basilica of St. John Lateran is the one, of which little is known, of the oratory of the Chapel called Sancta Sanctorum (Photo 14): Onofrio Panvino in “De praecipuis urbis Romae sanctioribusque basiicis, quas Septem ecclesias vulgo vocant” of 1570, tells us that the Oratory dedicated to St. Lawrence had bronze valves of admirable workmanship, and he tells us this a few years before the renovation carried out between 1586 and 1589 on the Lateran complex by Pope Sixtus V; this renovation did not alter the appearance of the oratory and therefore we can say that the door has remained as it was in ancient times.

It consists of two doors made of solid bronze plates with 3.4 cm thick uprights and 7 mm thick panels; it is 2.42 metres high and 1.15 metres wide at the bottom while it is 1.10 metres wide at the top. The bolts indicate a reuse in the medieval period probably during the works of Innocent III (1198-1216) (Photo 15,16).

Another late antique Roman door is that of the oratory of St. John the Baptist in the Lateran Baptistery, built in the early 300s AD by Constantine I (Photo 17). After the sacking by the Visigoths of Alaric in 410 and then by the Vandals of Genseric in 455, Pope Hilary donated many furnishings to the oratory between 461 and 468; this is the only remaining door and therefore dates back to those dates and is still inserted in the marble frame from the time of Pope Hilary; the two solid bronze doors measure 255 x 84 centimeters each and are divided into rectangular panels with molded profiles, without the cold-applied decorations originally present on the frames such as the studs, of which clear traces remain.

The two upper panels have a scaled panel (used in Rome since the 1st century) with raised arches, inside which there is a small silver cross in inlaid work. A dedicatory inscription in inlaid work to Pope Hilary is present on the smooth mirror of both doors. (Photos 18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25)

If the marble entrance frame to the oratory of St. John the Evangelist of the Lateran Baptistery from the time of Pope Hilary, identical to that of the oratory of St. John the Baptist, has remained original, the bronze door from 461-468 that housed it has been lost. In its place there is the medieval bronze door dated 1195 commissioned by Pope Celestine III and made by Cardinal Cencio Savelli, the future Pope Honorius III. Its authors left their signature inside the arches engraved at the bottom left of the left door: Pietro and Uberto da Piacenza, also creators of the similar door, made in 1196, today located in the cloister of the Lateran Basilica at the passage to the sacristy. On the upper mirror of the left door of this last door appears the inscription with the date and the name of Pope Celestine III. (Photos 26,27,28,29,30,31,32)

Chiseling hammers are different from common hammers, they have a different shape (Photo 1), a different weight (generally around 100 grams, handle included) with a flat and wide head (Photo 2) which is worn out by continuously hitting the iron (Photo 3), and a special balance so as to tire the hand of the chiseler as little as possible who must continuously hit the chiseling iron for entire days of work (Photo 4).

The iron is held between the thumb, index finger and middle finger, while the ring finger rests firmly on the surface to be chiseled (Photo 5,6).
For chiseling, large sculptures are fixed on wooden supports; medium-small sculptures are instead stopped by the jaws of special “chiseling vices” (the vices in the images date back to the 1930s (Photo 7,8)) which have the characteristic of discharging to the ground the continuous blows created by the beating of the iron in the chiseling; the vices have lead jaws that allow the bronze sculpture to be tightened and blocked without causing scratches or nicks.

These clamps are applied to sturdy work worms (Photos 9,10,11) that have remained the same since the early 1900s to the present day.

One of the problems that chiseling bronze involves is the noise: a continuous “den den” at high volume that lasts for many hours, with few intervals of peace (as it’s possible to hear in the two videos below where the volume of the noise has been deliberately reduced), and which forces the chiselers to use noise-cancelling headphones.
In the Ferdinando Marinelli Foundry in Rifredi, opened in 1919 between the houses, 3 to 5 chiselers have continued to chisel simultaneously every day. And it was precisely this noise that was one of the reasons that pushed us to create a new foundry in the countryside of Barberino Val d’Elsa where we moved in 2000.

Nella formella della Porta del Paradiso in fase di cesello (Foto 12) le figure in alto sono state cesellate, quelle al centro sono a metà cesellatura, quelle in basso sono appena iniziate. Il cesello si esegue anche su fusioni di grandi dimensioni, come sulla testa di uno dei personaggi del ratto delle Sabine del Giambologna (Foto 13) e anche su quella del David di Michelangelo (Foto 14).

Il bordo inferiore del gonnellino del David del Verrocchio presenta un nastro con scrittura pseudo-cufica (molto di moda nel Rinascimento) eseguito a cesello (280-282). Le sottili masse dei capelli nella testa della Diana Cacciatrice del Museo Vaticano dimostrano il cesello eseguito con uno “spianatoio” (284-286).

Metal doors, or rather “lined” metal doors, have been known since ancient times; Homer in the Odyssey describes those of the palace of Alcinous:

“The palace of Alcinous gave off a great light as if it were a sun or a moon. From the threshold, along all the walls, the wall was lined with bronze with, at the top, enameled friezes of a blue color. The doors were of gold and the threshold had silver jambs, the architrave was of silver and the handles of gold”.

In the tomb of Rekmire in Thebes (ca. 1400 BC) a workshop of bronze workers casting molten bronze to make the door of the temple of Amun is depicted, and the doors of Babylon, the door of the temple of Zeus in Olympia, and the bronze door of the Arsenal of Piraeus were also made of bronze.
The Assyrians in about 850 BC had decorated the wooden door of the palace of King Salmanassar III in Imgur-Enlil by covering it with sculpted bronze bands fixed with nails to the wood (Photos 1,2,3)

The doors of public buildings in the Roman era were mainly made of bronze (Vitruvius defines the typology (De architectura, lib. IV, chap. IV). Among those that have remained in Rome, the most famous are the door of the Pantheon from the 2nd century AD, that of the Temple of Romulus in the Roman Forum, the door of the Curia Iulia from the age of Domitian that Borromini used for St. John Lateran and which was enlarged and decorated with new studs and shoots.

In the late ancient era, there are, all reused, the door of Pope Ilarus (460 AD) in the oratory of St. John the Baptist in the Lateran Baptistery, that of St. John the Evangelist in the same Baptistery, that in the cloister of St. John Lateran and that in the chapel of the Scala Santa.

The door of the Pantheon, from about 120 AD, is the largest, 7.53 meters high and about 4.45 wide; it is a door of wood covered with 4 cm thick bronze sheets, probably cast in an open horizontal shape that allowed the casting of large and thick sheets (Photos 4,5,6,7,8,9).

In 1520, Pope Leo X promoted the restoration of the Pantheon and its door, in 1555 Pope Pius IV “had the metal door cleaned for rusty old age” and 182 bronze studs replaced; Pompeo Ugonio, Canon of the Vatican Basilica, at the beginning of the 17th century tells us that these doors were “gilded with similar gates above”; fortunately, in the stripping carried out by Pope Urban VIII in 1625 of the gilded bronze coverings of the pronaos beams to melt down 80 cannons for Castel Sant’Angelo and the twisted columns for the altar of St. Peter, the door was not recast (Photos 10,11,12)

The door of the Pantheon has been depicted in paintings since the mid-1400s, as in the chest of Apollonio di Giovanni with the stories of Dido and Aeneas in the Art Gallery of Yale University dated around 1450, where the two doors are depicted, with three mirrors and in yellow, probably gilded, but which fill the entire space of the opening without the upper grille. Around 1500 Simone del Pollaiolo designed it with a single door, but with the upper grille; finally Raphael designed it in 1508 as it is still today, except for the studs and decorations. (Photos 13,14,15,16,17)

In lost-wax bronze casting, chiseling is an important phase in the processing of the surface of sculptures; it is performed with special tools called “chisel irons”.
Chisel irons are small steel chisels (called simply “chisels” or “iron”) with a square or round section, with the head (the part in contact with the metal) of different shapes, while the opposite end is intended to receive the hammer blows. (Photo 1,2,3)

This is because the chisel tools are normally used to define and finish with extreme meticulousness the details of bronze castings. They can highlight parts that in casting were less evident than intended (Photo 4,5),

or even create new details on the bronze that had not been modelled on the wax before casting (Photo 6,7); in some cases to flatten and re-beat (with the iron called “flattener”) smooth areas of the bronze that have slight imperfections or small holes that will thus be plugged and disappear.

These cold-work touches enhance the overall sculptural quality, highlighting the play of light and shadow, creating greater depth in some cavities and at the same time sharpening the edges.
The main tools are the profiler (Photo 8,9), the nail (Photo 10) and the smoother (Photo 11).

They can be of different sizes and measures: the nail is used to trace curved lines, the profiler for straight lines, the flatteners to flatten the surface around the drawing as well as flatten porous areas of the bronze. There are also irons that have various designs on the head to be able to imprint them on the surface of the sculpture (Photo 12), others with dots or stars (Photo 13) like those imprinted on the upper part of the warrior from behind (Photo 14).

All the irons are always shiny and frayed on the head due to the continuous hammering on them, which crushes them creating curls of metal (Photo 15).

In 1925, a national competition was announced for the construction of a “Monument to Victory” in Forlì, to be inaugurated on October 30, 1932, the tenth anniversary of the “fascist revolution”.

The competition was won by a figure favored by the regime, the architect and engineer Cesare Bazzani, who wanted to create a monument that, compared to the others, had the particularity of being able to have two main sides on which to host ceremonies, one facing the public garden and the other facing the station; this characteristic was also underlined by Mussolini in the inauguration speech he gave from the balcony of the Government Palace in Piazza Saffi, saying of the monument “…on one side pity for the fallen, on the other the proud exaltation of victory…”, for which the entire work was also called Monument to the Fallen.

Bazzani designed an important composite architectural structure completely covered in Trani marble, 32 meters high in total: a raised base with rounded shorter sides, on which three elements stand: in the center a 22-meter high Doric column whose base contains a small chapel which is entered through an iron door: from the ceiling of the chapel you can access the spiral staircase contained inside the column, which reaches the top of this; the staircase is lit by two small openings on the column itself. On the sides two parallelepipeds decorated with two bas-reliefs each, made by Bernardino Boifava, which depict the fundamental moments in the life of the heroes, that is, the attack, the defense, the sacrifice and the triumph, and on the sides that look towards the square, a fountain with a modern representing the sacrifice of Victory.

At the top, the column capital hosts a decorated round base on which is placed an important bronze sculptural group of three winged female figures representing the sky, the earth and the sea. The model was made by the sculptor Bernardo Morescalchi who entrusted the casting to the Fonderia Artistica Ferdinando Marinelli of Florence. Marescalchi had previously worked with the Fonderia Artistica Marinelli for the casting of large-scale works, such as the Horses of Forlì.

In October 1932 Mussolini officially inaugurated the monument with a grand ceremony and a speech from the balcony of the Government Palace.
Later, in June 1938, King Vittorio Emanuele III, visiting Forlì, stopped at the foot of the monument and laid a wreath.

Searching in the archives of the Fonderia Artistica Ferdinando Marinelli, a letter appeared, dated April 28, 1923, following the inauguration of the Monument that the Foundry wrote to the Podestà of Forlì, in which payment was requested for “the letters for the monument la Vittoria”, for which it was still a creditor. These are the letters of the inscription applied at the top under the capital of the base of the bronzes.

In the year 2024, the Municipality of Forlì has planned an inspection to monitor its “health”, followed by the Studio Tecnico Nerodichina of Forlì with the architect Giancarlo Gatta. The Winged Victories presented cracks and breaks; but the most peculiar thing was a series of holes that at first left scholars in doubt and only after a conversation between the architect Gatta and Ferdinando Marinelli Jr. manager of the Ferdinando Marinelli Artistic Foundry was it understood that they were due to bullets from the last war.

La seconda scultura che Michelangelo eseguì per l’Arca di San Domenico a Bologna è il SAN PROCOLO, alto poco meno di 60 centimetri.
Lo rappresentò per quello che era, cioè un forte soldato romano cristiano martirizzato a Bologna dai Romani al tempo di Diocleziano: la tunica corta dei soldati chiusa in vita dalla cintura, il mantello, alti calzari e molto probabilmente una lancia nella mano destra che è andata persa.

Anche in quest’opera è chiaro lo stile michelangiolesco, figura solida, volto accigliato, atteggiamento teso e sicuro evidenziato dal modo di tenere il mantello sulla spalla sinistra, non più delicata e femminea come le figure del Rinascimento.

Nel 1572 fra Ludovico da Prelormo custode dell’ Arca scrive:

“La vigilia del padre San Domenico il povero sventurato fra’ Pelegrino converso roppe la statua di San Procolo, la gettò a terra in più di cinquanta pezzi. Io né ho mai avuto in ottanta anni il più intenso dolore al cuore di questo. Mi credeva certo di morire; vennero i Padri tutti a confortarmi, e molti maestri periti ne l’arte, e così la portarono via e fu aconzia [aggiustata] alla foggia al presente si vede.”

E infatti la figura presenta una serie di rotture più o meno restaurate; chiara quella della testa riattaccata grossolanamente.

La terza delle sculture che Michelangelo eseguì per l’Arca di San Domenico è quella di SAN PETRONIO, vescovo e patrono di Bologna, posto al centro dell’Arca tra gli altri due santi precedentemente eseguiti da Niccolò dell’Arca

Il Santo guarda davanti a se, porta la tiara e un lungo mantello dalla caotiche ma studiatissime pieghe chiuso da un fermaglio davanti al petto, più complesse dei mantelli degli altri due Santi.
Il volto è riconoscibilissimo come opera di Michelangelo.

La caratteristica particolare è la città di Bologna che tiene in alto tra le mani, sostenendone il peso a fatica sbilanciando l’anca e tendendo i tendini dei polsi; Michelangelo si è ispirato alla statua dello stesso Santo eseguita da Jacopo della Quercia e posta sulla porta centrale della basilica di San Petronio di Bologna, ma in controparte.