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Riccio's major project, the joint tomb of Girolamo and Marcantonio della Torre (d 1506 and 1511 respectively), in San Fermo Maggiore, Verona, is of uncertain date. The tomb was of a novel, specifically humanist form, with no overtly Christian iconography: a rectangular pedestal with a laudatory commemorative inscription beneath a table-like structure with four baluster legs and a top with an ornamented frieze. On it are seated four bronze sphinxes - similar to those on the Paschal candlestick - that support upon their backs a plain marble sarcophagus decorated only with eight rectangular narrative reliefs, and it is crowned with a curious double-sided bronze finial presenting death-masks of the two individuals countersunk into ornamentally framed oval recesses.
The reliefs are copies; the originals (now in Musée du Louvre, Paris) were removed by the French in 1796. They relate in a thoroughly classical narrative sequence the end of the career, the death, after-life and posthumous fame of a medical professor: a theme that could apply equally to either the older or younger of the deceased. The compositions are in some instances lifted from ancient Roman sarcophagi, and the dramatis personae are universally idealized, tall, slim and elegant, whether nude or draped, and accompanied with a number of playful putti. Elsewhere, winged infants represent the soul of the deceased being ferried across the River Styx and being led into the Elysian Fields. The architectural backgrounds are austerely Classical; the tomb itself features in one scene, which shows that the finial was originally flanked by six bronze seated putti (untraced). The final panel shows a gorgeous winged figure of Fame balancing on a globe, trumpeting in triumph over Death, shown as a skeleton, with Pegasus striking the ground with his hoof and creating the spring Hippocrene, fount of the Muses.
The reliefs Riccio executed for the Della Torre monument are the sculptural equivalents in Northern Italy of Raphael's tapestry cartoons, and they are among the most explicit expressions of High Renaissance Classicism in all Italy.
The eight reliefs are the following.
- Della Torre Teaching
- Illness of Della Torre
- Sacrifice to Aesculapius
- Death of Della Torre
- Funeral of Della Torre
- Descent of Della Torre's Soul into the Underworld
- The Soul's arrival in the Elysian Fields
- The Triumph of Humanist Virtue
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