The sculptor Giovandomenico Mazzolo had a key role in the animated artistic scene of Messina of the 1540s. Training in the workshop of his father Giovambattista, who had arrived in Sicily from Carrara, Giovandomenico quickly succeeded in breaking free from the composed and rather unemotional style of his father, which was deeply associated with the older models of Antonello Gagini, and launch himself in the direction of a controlled Mannerism, the first of the marble sculptors active in Messina to do so.
A brief description of the works of Mazzolo the younger precedes the
presentation of three statues, attributed here to Giovandomenico on the
basis of stylistic similarities with other works certainly by him or universally attributed to him by art scholars. Among these, the 'Madonna of Loreto' housed in the Mother Church of Pézzolo and the 'Virgin Annunciate' over the high altar of the Mother Church of Frazzanò are important new additions to Mazzolo's œuvre (together with the Eucharistic tabernacle today inside Villa De Pasquale in Messina). The already well-known 'San Sebastiano' of Raccuia, on the other hand, is for the first time compared to the protagonists of the panels of the portal of the Cappella del Crocifisso, which Giovandomenico Mazzolo sculpted in the 1560s for Catania Cathedral. From the numerous “Morellian” comparisons similarities emerge that are enough to attribute the marble not to Rinaldo Bonanno, another Sicilian sculptor active in this period, but to the hand of Giovandomenico Mazzolo, whose work was very close, precisely in the Saint Sebastian, to other contemporary Manneristic expressions in Italy.