BANDINELLI, BACCIO

BANDINELLI, BACCIO. — Sculptor, born in Florence in 1488, died there on 6 or 10 February 1560. An artist of very uneven merit, he was trained in the pictorial refinements of Rustici, came under the influence of Sansovino, Michelangelo, and sixteenth-century classicism, and continually oscillated between opposing tendencies. These sometimes enabled him to produce original achievements, but more often withered every creative impulse of his. A reminder of his training in the pictorial manner is found in the St. Peter for S. Maria del Fiore in Florence (1515); Michelangelo’s influence, evident in the Hercules and Cacus in Piazza della Signoria (1534), produced in his works a massiveness of forms and a theatrical composition that recurs from time to time throughout his production, as, for example, in the Leo X of Palazzo Vecchio or in the Eternal Father of the cloister of S. Croce. The commission to execute the relief of the Nativity of Mary in the Holy House of Loreto (1531), begun by A. Sansovino, brought him close to the latter, from whom he drew his best inspiration for the two tombs of Leo X and Clement VII in S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome (1536). The classicism with which he had come into contact by copying the Laocoön (1525) led him toward certain abstractions of pure formalism, which recur in the sculptures of the choir in S. Maria del Fiore (1540); in some of these, the volumes are subjected to geometric simplification and to an studied arrangement of planes that freezes the memories of his youthful pictorial manner into abstract ideality. The simplification of the iconography of the two Pietà in S. Croce and in the church of the Annunziata in Florence is likewise a product of this formalism; they reveal a rigid composition within a scalene triangle. — Vedi Tav. LI.