Marblee altar with statues by Antonello Gagini

An admirable trace of the artistic connection between Vibo and Palermo in the sixteenth century

Currently located in the Chapel of the Souls of Purgatory within the left transept of the Cathedral, the altar is a sumptuous late sixteenth-century re-arrangement ordered by Duke Ettore III Pignatelli of three of the five statues commissioned in 1524 from Antonello Gagini. His ancestor Ettore Pignatelli, viceroy of Sicily, had commissioned the statues for its noble chapel in his Calabrian dominions, which was located in Vibo in the presbytery of Santa Maria la Nova, previously called Santa Maria del Gesù. These white marble sculptures were originally to be arranged separately in five aedicules of the same material. The three statues placed in the niches of the later tabernacle in polychrome marble correspond to those actually delivered by the artist in the 1530s and depict the Virgin and Child, Magdalene and Saint John the Evangelist. In place of the remaining sculptures commissioned by the duke, a Saint Michael and a Saint Joseph, in 1534 a second contract was drawn up for the delivery of two new statues, a Saint Luke and a second Virgin and Child, destined at that point for chapel in the castle-palace of the city. Today these two works, probably executed by Gagini's workshop, are in the Valentianum. The sumptuous marble structure built in 1598 to house the three statues was only moved to the mother church of Vibo at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A fragment of the inscription placed on the altar is today walled up in the cloister of the nearby Convitto Nazionale, near the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli.