Master of 1436 (Tuscan)

Master of 1436 is a name made from a date. Nobody recorded who carved the painted relief of Saint Martin that once stood over the portal of a convent at Avesa, a few kilometres from Verona, but the sculptor cut the year 1436 into a scroll on the stone, and scholars borrowed it to label him.

The museum adds a second word, Tuscan, and presents it as a likelihood rather than a fact. In the first half of the 15th century many sculptors from Tuscany found work in Verona and across the Veneto. The Florentine Nanni di Bartolo carved the Brenzoni monument in the church of San Fermo in the 1420s, and Michele da Firenze filled a chapel in Sant'Anastasia with terracotta reliefs in the following decade. Verona had become a subject city of Venice in 1405, yet the museum counts it among the most important centres of International Gothic in Europe, and this unnamed carver worked inside that world.