Statue of San Luca

A work that reveals the changing wishes of the client

The statue is one of the five sculptures commissioned to Antonello Gagini by Ettore Pignatelli, Duke of Monteleone (Vibo Valentia) and viceroy of Sicily, for his chapel-mausoleum in the choir of Santa Maria la Nova, which at the time was called Santa Maria del Gesù. 

The request to portray San Luca came to the artist in 1534. The request was to replace the figure of Saint Michael the Archangel, which the duke had requested in the contract ten years earlier, but which had not been executed. 

The statue was probably completed by the workshop after Gagini's death in 1536 and placed with the others in the family chapel, but was excluded from the late sixteenth-century re-arrangement, ordered by Ettore III Pignatelli, which instead regarded only the marble images created by master from Palermo himself. 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the sculpture was brought to the Cathedral, with the others included in the polychrome altar, and relocated in the right transept, within the large chapel of San Basilio, together with another work from the Gaginesca workshop, depicting the Virgin and Child. Since 1988 it has been part of the collection exhibited in the Valentianum.