Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second EditionHutton, Edward
History
Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition
Hutton, Edward
Art -- Italy -- Florence; Genoa (Italy) -- History; Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
Softly beside him, untouched by the passion of his style, grew all the
lovely but less passionate works of the sculptors in marble, the sweet
and almost winsome monuments of the dead. Bernardo Rossellino, born in
1409, his elder by more than twenty years, died more than twenty years
before him, in 1464, carving, among other delightful things, the lovely
Annunciation at Empoli, the delicate monument of Beata Villana in S.
Maria Novella, and creating once for all, in the tomb of Leonardo Bruni
in S. Croce, the perfect pattern of such things, which served as an
example to all the Tuscan sculptors who followed, till Michelangelo
hewed the great monuments in the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo. His brother
Antonio, born in 1427, worked with him at Pistoja certainly in the tomb
of Filippo Lazzari in S. Domenico, surpassing him as a sculptor, under
the influence of Desiderio da Settignano. His finest work is the
beautiful tomb in S. Miniato of the young Cardinal of Portugal, who died
on a journey to Florence. In that strange and lovely place there is
nothing more beautiful than that monument under the skyey work of Luca
della Robbia, before the faintly coloured frescoes of Alessio
Baldovinetti. Under a vision of Madonna borne by angels from heaven,
where two angels stoop, half kneeling, on guard, the young Cardinal
sleeps, supported by two heavenly children, his hands--those delicate
hands--folded in death. Below, on a frieze at the base of the tomb,
Antonio has carved all sorts of strange and beautiful things--a skull
among the flowers over a garland harnessed to two unicorns; angels too,
youthful and strong, lifting the funeral vases. At Naples, again, he
carved the altar of the Cappella Piccolomini in S. Maria at Montoliveto.
Here in the Bargello some fragments of beautiful things have been
gathered--a tabernacle with two adoring angels, a little St. John made
in 1477 for the Opera, a relief of the Adoration of the Shepherds,
another of Madonna in an almond-shaped glory of cherubim, and, last of
all, the splendid busts of Matteo Palmieri and Francesco Sassetti; but
his masterpiece in pure sculpture is the S. Sebastian in the Collegiata
at Empoli, a fair and youthful figure without the affectation and
languor that were so soon to fall upon him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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