The marble sculpture, now kept in the Diocesan Museum, originally belonged to the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Nicastro, managed by Franciscan Friars for much of the fifteenth century and an apostolic Brief by Innocent VIII dated 1492 confirms the building to the Dominicans who had been occupying it for few years. After the earthquake of 1638,it became the Monastery of Poor Clares and in the nineteenth century the diocesan seminary established there. The depiction in the pedestal front side showing St. Francis receiving the stigmata, and those in the side walls, showing the presence of a monk and a nun praying, confirm that the work belongs to the Franciscan Friars. The inscription, which has no clear interpretation, could suggest that the statue was entrusted, to be preserved, to the Friar Giovanni from Nicastro. The sculpture, initially coloured and golden in some parts, underwent a rough intervention of repainting and in recent times it has been inadequately cleaned to bring the marble to view; a real abrasion which eliminated both the inaccurate repainting and the original draft, of which only small traces of gold in some recesses remain. The fluid shaping of the work, tending to a delicate pictorialism, together with a structural clearness of Brunelleschi's style and a decorative Lombard taste, with echoes of a late Gothic, recalling Ghiberti's experience, lead to attribute the sculpture to Domenico Gagini, who worked between the Genoa, Naples and Sicily area in the second half of the 5th century and was, according to Filarete and Vasari, one of Brunelleschi's pupil influenced by Ghiberti's style. This work of art, of 'Nicastrese' origin, finds formal references to Gagini's other works which are kept in Palma Mallorca, in Naples and Syracuse and, in particular with the Madonna with Child, kept in Marsala. Frangipane attributes the work to Domenico Gagini or to the school to him coeval. Certainly the work cannot belong to his son Antonello, who lived between 1478 and 1536, both for stylistic reasons and because when the work was commissioned, he was still a child.