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
Perhaps the greatest of these sculptors in marble, whose works, as
winsome as wild flowers, are scattered over the Tuscan hills, was
Desiderio da Settignano, born in 1428. He had worked with Donatello in
the Pazzi Chapel, and his tabernacle in the chapel of the Blessed
Sacrament in S. Lorenzo is one of the most charming things left in that
museum of Tuscan work. Of his beautiful tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S.
Croce I speak elsewhere: it is worthy of its fellows--Bernardo
Rosellino's tomb of Leonardo Bruni in the same church, and the tomb of
the Cardinal of Portugal by Antonio Rossellino at S. Miniato. Desiderio
has not the energy of Rossellino or the passionate ardour of Verrocchio.
He searches for a quiet beauty full of serenity and delight. His work in
the Bargello is of little account. The bust of a girl (No. 198 in the
fifth room on the top floor) is but doubtfully his: Vasari speaks only
of the bust of Marietta Strozzi, now in Berlin. He died in 1464, and his
work, so rare, so refined and delicate in its beauty, comes to its own
in the perfect achievement of Benedetto da Maiano, born in 1442, who
made the pulpit of S. Croce, the ciborium of S. Domenico in Siena. It
was for Pietro Mellini that he carved the pulpit of S. Croce, and here
in the Bargello we may see the bust he made of his patron. In his youth
he had carved in wood and worked at the intarsia work so characteristic
a craft of the fifteenth century; but on bringing some coffers of this
work to the King of Hungary, Vasari relates that he found they had
fallen to pieces on the voyage, and ever after he preferred to work in
marble. Having acquired a competence, of this work too he seems to have
tired, devoting himself to architectural work--porticos, altars, and
such--buying an estate at last outside the gate of Prato that is towards
Florence; dying in 1497.
It is with a prolific master, Mino da Fiesole, the last pupil, according
to Vasari, of Desiderio da Settignano, that the delicate and flower-like
work of the Tuscan sculptors may be said to pass into a still lovely
decadence. His facile work is found all over Italy. The three busts of
the Bargello are among his earliest and best works--the Piero de'
Medici, the Giuliano de' Medici, and the small bust of Rinaldo della
Luna. There, too, are two reliefs from his hand, and some tabernacles
which have no great merit. A relief of the Madonna and Child is a finer
achievement in his earlier manner, and in the Duomo of Fiesole there
remains a bust of the Bishop, Leonardo Salutati, while in the same
chapel, an altar and relief, from his hand, seem to prove that it was
only a fatal facility that prevented him from becoming as fine an artist
as Benedetto da Maiano.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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