Marco Antonio Prestinari
Hercole che squarcia il leone

Born in Claino, a village in the Valsolda close to Porlezza, in an unspecified year in the 1570s, Prestinari died in Milan some time between 21 February and 10 March 1621. His first recorded work for the garden and nymphaeum of Pirro Visconti’s villa at Lainate, near Milan, are the marble statues of a Nymph in the centre of the “large grotto” in the nymphaeum, and the Adonis originally in the same nymphaeum but now in the Louvre, can in all likelihood be dated to the mid 1590s. The terracotta depicting Hercules and the Nemean Lion is a preparatory model for a monumental sculpture in ceppo stone of the “Teatro d’Ercole” of the garden of Villa Arconati at Castellazzo di Bollate (near Milan) and can be dated at the first years of the 17th century.