San Vito's bust

The gilded and painted wooden bust depicts St. Vitus in the iconographic typical of a young man, in agreement with what hagiographies and legends narrate about his death during the childhood age. In the right hand has the evangelario while the left is facing up and probably once held the palm or the cross, both symbols of martyrdom, no longer existing today. The Saint wears a golden tunic and cloak, whose flaps are stopped in the middle by a medallion of gold-plated metal with the function of a brooch containing the relic. The back of the bust has a quadrangular opening. The reliquary has recently undergone a restoration that has made it easier to read the work as a whole. The face, in fact, is characterized by adolescent features, at times dazed, that jar with the rest of the execution, result of the hand of a local artist of a certain dignity, who had well assimilated the models coming from the Neapolitan capital. The eyes, brown, are made of glass paste. The bust rests on a wooden base in green hexagonal shape on the front and bears the inscription of the Saint's name obtained with the technique of sgraffito. From a careful stylistic examination and thanks to comparisons with other specimens of the same period present in the territory, the work can be placed in the middle of the seventeenth century, given the compositional firmness of classicism reminiscence moved only by the regular folds of the drapery that branch off from the waist, held by a belt on the tunic. Because of the impossibility of attributing paternity, the work is ascribed to a discrete southern artisan.