Tiziano Aspetti (15591606) was an Italian sculptor of the Renaissance. He was born in Padua and active mainly there and in Venice. He completed both large and small sculpture in bronze. Among his large works are bronze statues in the façade of San Francesco della Vigna and of Saint Anthony and many other sculptural decorations for the Basilica of Sant'Antonio of Padua.
When Aspetti began his public career in the 1590s, Alessandro Vittoria had practically stopped sculpting and Girolamo Campagna had a monopoly on the main sculptural commissions. Although Aspetti beat Campagna to the commission for the Sant'Antonio altar, he was not so successful in Venice, producing nothing quite as powerful as Campagna's high altar for San Giorgio Maggiore (1590-1593) and the altar at San Salvatore ().
However, he had no rivals in Florence for producing reliefs, other than perhaps Giovanni Battista Caccini and his contemporary Giambologna, which may have been Aspetti's reason for moving there in 1604, completing a bronze relief of the Death of St. Lawrence now in the Florentine church of Santa Trinita in Florence. He flourished in Tuscany and died in Pisa, though it is impossible to fully analyse him as an artist until more is discovered about the now-lost works he produced there, especially eight mythological works.
Life and works
Early life
His mother's family had produced many other artists - nicknamed 'Lizzaro', her father Guido Minio had specialised in bronze casting and her brother Tiziano Minio was a noted sculptor and stucco-artist. Aspetti was probably trained in the family studio and may have been a studio assistant to Girolamo Campagna, the other major sculptor active in Venice in the late 16th century. His family contacts definitely allowed Aspetti to join the household of Giovanni Grimani in Venice in 1577, ultimately spending sixteen years in it.
Patriarch of Aquileia from a family which had produced three doges, Grimani was also a major patron of contemporary artists and his palazzo hosted one of Italy's large and valuable collection of antiquities outside of Rome, a major draw for visitors to Venice. Aspetti's long service was unlike the repeated commission-hunting of other artists in Venice at the time, making him almost a court artist and . The Patriarch's family supported Italian Mannerist art and their palazzo near Santa Maria Formosa contained stucco work by Giovanni da Udine, Federico Zuccari and Francesco Salviati. Spending his youth in the rich and elegant surroundings of the collection, including time restoring some of the antiquities, made its mark and can be seen in his mature works.
His first known works are two mediocre bas-reliefs of Saint Mark and Saint Theodore in 'pietra viva' for the 'new' Rialto Bridge and the clumsy Giant in marble sited in what is now the entrance to the Libreria Marciana, neither of them relating to the elegance of his later works. The Atlantes supporting a bas-relief () over the fireplace in the Sala dell'Anticollegio of the Palazzo Ducale by Campagna were for a time misattributed to Aspetti, who actually produced the bas-relief itself of Vulcan's forge. His first surviving bronzes are the life-size allegorical figures of Temperance and Justicec in the Grimani chapel in San Francesco della Vigna. They were undertaken before 28 November 1592, the date at which the Patriarch used a codicil in his will to order the artist to complete them. He also ordered Aspetti to execute the figures of Moses and Saint Paul for the same church, as will be discussed later. Aspetti was painted by Leandro Bassano around 1592, a work now held in the Royal Collection of the United Kingdom.
Padua
Thanks to the Grimani's patronage, Aspetti's fame quickly spread to Padua and early in the 1590s he produced bronze bas-reliefs of Saint Daniel Dragged Along By A Horse and The Martyrdom of Saint Daniel for its cathedral, probably for an altar to that saint in the crypt. What is probably the original casting is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, later replaced by another casting, the latter still being in Padua's Diocesan Museum of Religious Art and probably produced in the 19th century.