Giacomo Serpotta

Giacomo Serpotta (1652 – 1732) was an Italian sculptor, active in a Rococo style and mainly working in stucco.

Serpotta was born and died in Palermo; and may have never left Sicily. His skill and facility with stucco sculpture appears to have arisen without mentorship or direct exposures to the mainstream of Italian Baroque. Rudolf Wittkower describes him as an aberrancy in an otherwise provincial scene, a "meteor in the Sicilian sky".

In 1677, along with Procopio de Ferrari, he decorated the small church of the Madonna dell’Itria in Monreale. His first independent work appears to be in 1682 in connection with an equestrian statue cast of Charles II of Spain and Sicily, which was cast in bronze by Gaspare Romano.…more