With the work of the individual artists we shall become better
acquainted in subsequent chapters. Here we can merely name their
leaders. In architecture and sculpture respectively, Filippo
Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and Donatello (1386-1466) are the ruling
spirits of the age. Their mutual friendship and brotherly rivalry
almost recall the loves of Dante and Cavalcanti in an earlier day.
Although Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) justly won the competition for
the second gates of the Baptistery, it is now thought that Filippo ran
his successful rival much more closely than the critics of an earlier
day supposed. Mr Perkins remarks that "indirectly Brunelleschi was the
master of all the great painters and sculptors of his time, for he
taught them how to apply science to art, and so far both Ghiberti and
Donatello were his pupils, but the last was almost literally so, since
the great architect was not only his friend, but also his counsellor
and guide." Contemporaneous with these three _spiriti magni_ in their
earlier works, and even to some extent anticipating them, is Nanni di
Banco (died in 1421), a most excellent master, both in large
monumental statues and in bas-reliefs, whose works are to be seen and
loved outside and inside the Duomo, and in the niches round San
Michele in Orto. A pleasant friendship united him with Donatello,
although to regard him as that supreme master's pupil and follower,
as Vasari does, is an anachronism. To this same earlier portion of the
Quattrocento belong Leo Battista Alberti (1405-1472), a rare genius,
but a wandering stone who, as an architect, accomplished comparatively
little; Michelozzo Michelozzi (1396-1472), who worked as a sculptor
with Ghiberti and Donatello, but is best known as the favoured
architect of the Medici, for whom he built the palace so often
mentioned in these pages, and now known as the Palazzo Riccardi, and
the convent of San Marco; and Luca della Robbia (1399-1482), that
beloved master of marble music, whose enamelled terra-cotta Madonnas
are a perpetual fund of the purest delight. To Michelozzo and Luca in
collaboration we owe the bronze gates of the Duomo sacristy, a work
only inferior to Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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