In the Olympic Discourse, Dio Chrysostom, writing in the early second century CE, positions Pheidias as the proponent of sculpture against poetry, concluding that “all men have a strong yearning to honor and worship the deity from close at hand, approaching and laying hold of him … being eager in every possible way to be with [the gods] and to hold converse with them.”1 The tangible and immediate quality of sculpture thus aligned with the needs of the faithful for a recognizable and fully present sacred focal figure. Even in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when painting regularly triumphed over sculpture in learned disputations designed to celebrate the genius and skill of the artist, the reasons for sculpture’s alleged inferiority support its suitability as devotional object. Leonardo da Vinci elevated painting over sculpture in part because of the greater degree of artifice required to make a flat painted surface simulate believable space, whereas the very essence of sculpted material inherently results in a comprehensible and relatable object.2 Leonardo also recognized a sculpted figure’s ability to maintain eye contact with the viewer at multiple angles, thus increasing the devotee’s easy connection with three-dimensional representations.3 Whatever the outcome of the debate between media, the traditional structure of the paragone connotes a dialectic between modalities of representation that belies the frequent practice of concurrently employing various materials to manifest sacred power in late medieval and early modern Italy.