Il polittico di Andrea Guardi per il Duomo di Carrara. Un’aggiunta e una nuova proposta di ricostruzione
Gerardo de Simone
This essay focuses on the monumental marble polyptych sculpted in the early 1460s by Andrea Guardi, a pupil of Donatello and Michelozzo, for the high altar of Carrara Duomo. A masterpiece from the mature phase of the prolific (and itinerant) sculptor, the altarpiece was dismembered in the second half of the 17th century: today, the incomplete altarpiece is walled up in the left aisle of the ecclesia maior in Carrara. Five elements are instead exhibited in the courtyard of the Palazzo Cybo Malaspina, the seat of the Accademia di Belle Arti, to which they were donated after the Unification of Italy. Unpublished archival evidence, dating back to the 19th century, allows a further element to be associated with the Guardesque polyptych, a fastigium with Vir pietatis and Crucifix, which entered the Bode Museum in Berlin in 1884. This element, originally placed at the crowning of the complex, allows a new, surprising reconstruction and a better evaluation of its possible precedents and influences, both within and beyond the Apuan-Lunigian area.