Brustolon

Andrea Brustolon (20 July 1662 – 25 October 1732) was an Italian sculptor in wood. He is known for his furnishings in the Baroque style and devotional sculptures.

He was trained in a vigorous local tradition of sculpture in his native Belluno, in the Venetian terraferma, and in the studio of the Genoese sculptor Filippo Parodi, who was carrying out commissions at Padua and at Venice (1677). He spent the years 1678-80 at Rome, where the High Baroque sculpture of Bernini and his contemporaries polished his style. Apart from that, the first phase of Brustolon's working career was spent in Venice, 1680–1685. Brustolon is documented at several Venetian churches where he executed decorative carving in such profusion that he must have quickly assembled a large studio of assistants. As with his contemporary in London, Grinling Gibbons almost all the high quality robust Baroque carving in Venice has been attributed to Brustolon at one time or another. In the Venetian Ghetto, at the Scola Levantina, Brustolon provided the woodwork for the synagogue on the piano nobile, where the carved, canopied bimah is supported on Solomonic columns, which Brustolon had seen in Bernini's baldacchino in the Basilica of St Peter's.

His furniture included armchairs with figural sculptures that take the place of front legs and armrest supports, inspired by his experience of Bernini's Cathedra Petri. The gueridon, a tall stand for a candelabrum, offered Brustolon unhampered possibilities for variations of the idea of a caryatid or atlas: the familiar Baroque painted and ebonized blackamoor gueridons, endlessly reproduced since the eighteenth century, found their models in Brustolon's work.

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