BACCIO (BACCIO SINIBALDI) DA MONTELUPO

BACCIO (BACCIO SINIBALDI) da MONTELUPO. — Sculptor and architect, born in Montelupo in 1469, died in Lucca in 1535. Among his works are four terracotta statues for a Pietà in S. Domenico, Bologna (1495), inspired by a vivid pictorial sensibility deriving from Verrocchio and Leonardo; the lightness of the drapery, the soft flexion of the gesture, and the subtle transition of the planes, through which the pictorial intention is expressed, are balanced by the measured counterpoising of light and shadow.

He executed many crucifixes (Florence, S. Marco; Arezzo, SS. Flora e Lucilla, etc.), but among them the one in S. Lorenzo in Florence has a particular softness of modelling. More solid is the pensive bronze S. Giovanni Evangelista of 1515 (Florence, Orsanmichele), in which the balance of light and shade and that of the pose are rendered with greater deliberation. In the late period of his activity, which unfolded in Lucca, the Madonna in the church of S. Martino (remnant of the Gigli monument) reveals, in the enlargement of the forms and the continual breaking of the drapery, a shattering of the initial balance, whereby the work is emptied of its lyrical content.

Toward the end of his life he devoted himself to architecture, and his most important work is the church of S. Paolino in Lucca, with a disharmonious three-tiered façade, excessively developed in height, and a single-nave interior with transept, in which the architectural order is

(Alinari photograph)
BACCIO D'AGNOLO - Bell tower of the church of S. Spirito. Florence.

surmounted by an attic that gives the whole a disproportionate verticality. - Vedi Tav. XL.

Guglielmo Matthise