Cooperation and Collaboration in Vicenza before Palladio: Jacopo Sansovino and the Pedemuro Masters at the High Altar of the Cathedral of Vicenza

In 1534 the Vicentine masters, Giovanni da Porlezza and Girolamo Pittoni da Lumignano (the so-called Pedemuro masters) signed a contract with Aurelio Dall'Acqua for the construction of the main altar in the cathedral of Vicenza. Documents concerning the altar, later Dall'Acqua's funerary monument, have led scholars to attribute the design to Andrea Palladio, who began his career as a stone carver in the Pedemuro workshop. Designed following the model of a triumphal arch, the altar constitutes an extraordinary novelty in Vicenza, which was still unfamiliar with ancient models in the 1530s and 1540s. Documents show that Aurelio Dall'Acqua had connections to Venetian intellectual close to the doge, Andrea Gritti and the Franciscan theologian Francesco Zorzi, who, in those same years, wrote the program for the church of S. Francesco della Vigna and was in contact with Jacopo Sansovino. The inventory of the library of Dall'Acqua and an examination of his correspondence reveal his religious interests: that he was close to Catholic reform circles and interested in Erasmus; an expression of those interests should be considered part of the realization of the altar. Architectural analysis of the monument allows us to note in it a series of medieval and Renaissance elements from Florentine sources, direct borrowing from antique sources, and elements from Venetian architecture of the same period. Comparison of these elements with the architectural language that Palladio developed in the 1540s, after his first visit to Rome, excludes an attribution to him. In any case, the date of design is too early for him to have undertaken an autonomous project. Many of the architectural elements on the altar are to be found in the work of Jacopo Sansovino, who was invited to Vicenza in 1538 to furnish an opinion on the roofing of the tribune of the cathedral and the movement of the original altar to the end of the apse. The design for the architectural structure of the altar is attributed here to Sansovino, while the disposition of the semiprecious stones which entirely cover the altar is considered to be the work of the Pedemuro masters. Francesco Zorzi seems to have been the connecting figure between patron and architect, as he was in Sansovino's commission for the main altar and funerary monument of Cardinal Francesco Quiñones in the basilica of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome.