Slightly later come Donatello's great pupils, Desiderio da Settignano
(1428-1464), Andrea Verrocchio (1435-1488), and Antonio Pollaiuolo
(1429-1498). The two latter are almost equally famous as painters.
Contemporaneous with them are Mino da Fiesole, Bernardo and Antonio
Rossellino, Giuliano da San Gallo, Giuliano and Benedetto da Maiano,
of whom the last-named was the first architect of the Strozzi Palace.
The last great architect of the Quattrocento is Simone del Pollaiuolo,
known as Cronaca (1457-1508); and its last great sculptor is Andrea
della Robbia, Luca's nephew, who was born in 1435, and lived on until
1525. Andrea's best works--and they are very numerous indeed, in the
same enamelled terra-cotta--hardly yield in charm and fascination to
those of Luca himself; in some of them, devotional art seems to reach
its last perfection in sculpture. Giovanni, Andrea's son, and others
of the family carried on the tradition--with cruder colours and less
delicate feeling.
Masaccio (1401-1428), one of "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown,"
is the first great painter of the Renaissance, and bears much the same
relation to the fifteenth as Giotto to the fourteenth century.
Vasari's statement that Masaccio's master, Masolino, was Ghiberti's
assistant appears to be incorrect; but it illustrates the dependence
of the painting of this epoch upon sculpture. Masaccio's frescoes in
the Carmine, which became the school of all Italian painting, were
entirely executed before the Medicean regime. The Dominican, Fra
Angelico da Fiesole (1387-1455), seems in his San Marco frescoes to
bring the denizens of the Empyrean, of which the mediæval mystics
dreamed, down to earth to dwell among the black and white robed
children of St Dominic. The Carmelite, Fra Lippo Lippi (1406-1469),
the favourite of Cosimo, inferior to the angelical painter in
spiritual insight, had a keener eye for the beauty of the external
world and a surer touch upon reality. His buoyant humour and excellent
colouring make "the glad monk's gift" one of the most acceptable that
the Quattrocento has to offer us. Andrea del Castagno (died in 1457)
and Domenico Veneziano (died in 1461), together with Paolo Uccello
(died in 1475), were all absorbed in scientific researches with an eye
to the extension of the resources of their art; but the two former
found time to paint a few masterpieces in their kind--especially a
Cenacolo by Andrea in Santa Appollonia, which is the grandest
representation of its sublime theme, until the time that Leonardo da
Vinci painted on the walls of the Dominican convent at Milan. Problems
of the anatomical construction of the human frame and the rendering of
movement occupied Antonio Pollaiuolo (1429-1498) and Andrea Verrocchio
(1435-1488); their work was taken up and completed a little later by
two greater men, Luca Signorelli of Cortona and Leonardo da Vinci.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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