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Tullio Lombardo was involved in the major project of the redecoration of the Cappella dell'Arca di Sant'Antonio in Il Santo, Padua. The chapel, in which the relics of St Anthony are entombed, was elaborately refurbished with a series of nine monumental marble reliefs illustrating the Miracles of St Anthony carved from c. 1500 to 1577. Tullio was commissioned to sculpt five of these reliefs, although he completed only two of them, the Miracle of the Reattached Leg, begun in 1500, largely finished in 1501 and delivered in 1504, and the Miracle of the Miser's Heart (installed in 1525), the commission for which was transferred from Antonio Lombardo to Tullio in 1520.
It seems likely that Tullio was also largely responsible for the design of the chapel's architecture and sculpture, which has previously been attributed to either Andrea Riccio or Giovanni d'Antonio Minelli Bardi (c. 1460-1527), a minor Paduan sculptor. Tullio and Antonio were the first artists selected to carve reliefs for the chapel; Tullio was the leading artist associated with the chapel's redecoration from c. 1500 until his death in 1532, and he was chosen to carve more reliefs than any other artist. It can be argued that the whole complex must have been planned in detail from the outset, given the chapel's carefully coordinated perspectival illusionism, in which the fictive vaulted architecture of the rear wall reliefs is seen through the real arches of its front wall, and the similar compositional arrangement of all the reliefs.
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