The article presents the figure of the master from Carrara Giovambattista Mazzolo, a prominent personality of sculpture in Messina in the course of the first half of the 16th century. Arriving in the city at the same time as the arrival in Palermo of Antonello Gagini – previous protagonist of the art scene in Messina in the period astride the late 15th and early 16th centuries – Mazzolo answers the demands of Sicilian public and private commissions, realizing a substantial corpus of works of sculpture, which widely reproposed the popular figurative models left in Messina by Antonello Gagini who highly esteemed Benedetto da Maiano. In particular, two series of representations in marble are analysed here: the Madonnas and Child and the Saint Catherines that a private, and not necessarily noble, clientele commissioned from the Carrarese sculptor and that are disseminated throughout the province and significantly, in the territory of the Nebrodi Mountains. By means of a detailed examination of these sculptures, whose dating is concentrated inside a period by the 1530s, a peculiar interpretation of Giovambattista Mazzolo's activity draws his profile as a somewhat tardy “follower” of Gagini's innovative creations, one incapable of fully adhering to the season of the “modern Manner” in Messina.