The tomb for Mario Nari

The sculptor and architect Bartolommeo Ammannati (1511-1592) was one of the most important artists of the Florentine High Renaissance. After an apprenticeship in the workshop of the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, he went to Venice in 1527 and there became active as an assistant to Jacopo Sansovino. After his return to his hometown in the mid-1530s and a short period at the court of the Duke of Urbino, he received his first major commission between 1540 and 1542: the funerary monument for Mario Nari, a Roman nobleman and courtier in the entourage of Alessandro de‘ Medici. For his tomb in the Florentine church of Santi Annunziata the sculptor created, alongside the recumbent Nari and two flanking figures of angels (now lost), also a standing allegorical figure of Victoria, trampling underfoot the bearded figure crouching at her feet as a sign of her triumph. Presumably she was placed in a niche above the figure of the deceased lying on top of a sarcophagus. Yet already during work on the tomb, voices began to be raised about the impropriety of Nari’s funerary monument being erected in a Marian sanctuary, since he had been killed in a duel. Ammannati’s works were then removed from the church between 1565 and 1568. While the recumbent figure of Mario Nari was reported at Poggio Imperiale in 1818 and thence transferred to the Bargello in 1872, the figure of Victoria remained in the Florentine church, where it first found a new site in the cloister of SS. Annunziata. Later it was removed to the adjacent Giardino dei Semplici. Not till 1945 could the two sculptures be reunited in the Bargello.