ABSTRACT
Giovanni de Fondulis has been rediscovered only recently, because, due to a false document, his identity has been mistaken for over one century for that of another artist. Yet he was a very important sculptor, especially for the art of terracotta, proving superior in quality and technique to his more fortunate competitor Bartolomeo Bellano. De Fondulis is a worthy Lombard-Venetian counterpart to what Niccolò dell'Arca and Guido Mazzoni represented for Emilia. Giovanni, was born in Crema around 1435, after a long training in Lombardy, he moved to Padua where he enriched his style with the novelties of Donatello, Mantegna, and Pietro Lombardo, establishing himself as the most important modeller in Veneto at least until the end of the fifteenth-century eighties. In addition to reconstructing the biographical story and the corpus of this fascinating artist's works, it is now possible, through the documents, to investigate his client relations with some religious orders: the Benedictines, the Dominicans, but above all the Augustinians, to whom the artist had been very attached since his youth. This chapter analyses the significance of terracotta sculptures for the Augustinian order, using as its starting point investigation of two works by De Fondulis.
