glazed earthenware, 280x300 x116 cm, Inv. n. 87

Alfonso Lombardi, also known as il Cittadella due to his father's trade as Captain of the Fortress, was born in Ferrara in 1497, or shortly thereafter. He moved to Bologna as soon as he turned twenty and created, as a young man, this group of earthenware pieces with a nineteenth-century inscription that refers to 1524.
Created for the Archconfraternity of the Beheaded John the Baptist (S. Giovanni Decollato), which had its oratory behind the City Hall in a now demolished building that once stood in front of what is now Piazza della Molinella, the works were transferred and housed in the Pinacoteca in 1879 for the first public opening and were exhibited in an eye-catching location at the end of a long hall that was originally the entrance to the Pinacoteca.
Venturi, in the chapter dedicated to sixteenth-century sculpture in his History of Italian Art published in 1935, defined this group as being among the most representative of Alfonso Lombardi, <<who never gives up repeating the commonplace of Roman academicism, cloaking sacred figures in classic embellishments, seeking the showiness of the composition>>.