RAMO DI PAGANELLO

Italian sculptor. No signed or documented work by him survives. A series of late 13th- and early 14th-century documents suggest a talented but personally difficult artist who visited, or perhaps worked in, northern Europe. On the basis of this information some scholars have conjectured that Ramo was responsible for works of the highest quality in Siena, Orvieto, and Assisi.

Documents of 1281 and 1288 connecting him with Siena Cathedral have inspired the attribution of four splendid busts, two male and two female, modelled in high relief, on the interior of the lateral façade portals. Orvieto Cathedral documents (1293 and 1310) have led to attributions of relief sculpture on the façade and on interior capitals of the building, as well as the design for the bronze Christ with Apostles in the architrave of the south portal and a wood statuette of the Virgin and Child (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Orvieto).

The monument of Giovanni di Brienne in the lower church of San Francesco, Assisi, commissioned between 1326 and 1328, has also been attributed to Ramo because of its sophisticated Tuscan style with north European overtones. These attributions may seem individually plausible, but collectively they cancel one another out, and at present reconstruction of Ramo’s oeuvre is highly speculative.