Ecce Homo's bust

The bust depicting the Ecce Homo is a surviving specimen that is part of the small mysteries of the Passion, whose models were used as liturgical furnishings for altars inside private chapels or for domestic devotion and not for public exposure, as it happens for the larger format works that in many Iberian centres and of the Southern Italy, like Altamura, are often the protagonists of charismatic and heart-felt processions during the rites of Holy Week. The Christ, depicted half-length while leaning forward his arms crossed with his wrists superimposed on his executioners, is depicted with the face declined on the right side and with the distraught and mystical gaze poured down accepting his destiny of Salvator mundi. The stylistic analysis makes it possible to attribute the work to the Altamuran sculptor Filippo Angelo Altieri (1646-1682) in whose workshop have taken life numerous wooden statues depicting the mysteries of the Passion, still existing in the Altamuran church of San Sepolcro and in that of Carmine in Ruvo di Puglia. It is with this last sculptural cycle that the bust is to be related, especially to the Christ carrying the cross, whose execution was completed by the Alessieri in 1674. The fine and accurate carving in the beard and curly hair, the arched and nervous hands, the intense realism and pathos of the face, show strong analogies in the implant and in the stylistic features with the work of Ruvo, for which the Altamuran bust represented a model. The sculpture is part of the production of figures related to the sacred representations of Holy Week and shows a strong dependence on Neapolitan figurative examples, corroborating the hypothesis according to which the Altieri had carried out his apprenticeship in the workshop of Aniello Perrone, one of the major carver master of the third quarter of the seventeenth century.