Master of 1179
Holy Roman Empire · Romanesque
The story
Master of 1179 is a name made out of a date. The sculptor who carved the stone sarcophagus of Saints Sergius and Bacchus did not sign it, but an inscription runs along the edge of its lid, and it records the year 1179 and the man who paid for the work, Bonifacio, abbot of the Benedictine monastery of San Silvestro at Nogara, in the plain south of Verona. Scholars took that year and made it his name.
No document says who he was, and everything written about him starts from that inscription. He worked about a generation after Nicholaus, the sculptor who signed the great portals of San Zeno and of Verona Cathedral in the 1130s. The Castelvecchio museum, where the sarcophagus stands today, calls him an unknown Romanesque sculptor of great narrative force.
