The Remarkable Tomb of Abbot Meli

Sometime in late 1478 or early 1479, Antonio Meli, abbot of the Cremonese church of San Lorenzo, contracted with Giovanni Antonio Piatti for a memorial dedicated to the four martyred saints whose bones had been housed at San Lorenzo since the 11th or 12th century, and which remains the abbot intended to enshrine along with his own in an imposing double sepulcher. Meli's remarkable tomb stood in the family chapel the abbot constructed to house it until the 1798 suppression of San Lorenzo and the subsequent dispersal of the tomb. This paper proposes a reconstruction of the monument and a stylistic scrutiny of the sculptures from the tomb now in Milan, Philadelphia, and Sarasota, Florida. There appears to exist no precedent for the abbot's appropriation of sainted remains for his own truly remarkable tomb.