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 refined techniques of painting under Rustici, was influenced by Sansovino, Michelangelo, and 16th-century classicism, and constantly wavered between opposing tendencies, which at times allowed him original achievements but more often stifled every creative impulse. A reminder of his training in the pictorial manner is seen in the *St. Peter* for Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence (1515); the influence of Michelangelo, evident in the *Hecules and Cacus* in Piazza della Signoria (1534), imparts to his works a massive form and a theatrical composition that recur from time to time in his production, as, for example, in the *Leo X* in Palazzo Vecchio or in the *Eternal Father* in the cloister of Santa Croce. The commission to complete the relief of the *Nativity of Mary* in the Santa Casa at 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 Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome (1536). The classicism he encountered while copying the *Laocoön* (1525) led him to certain abstractions of pure stylism, which are found in the sculptures of the choir in Santa Maria del Fiore (1540); in some of these, the volumes are subjected to a geometric simplification and a contrived arrangement of planes that freeze the recollections of his early pictorial manner into abstract idealism. The result of the same stylism is the iconographic simplification of the two *Pietàs* in Santa Croce and in the church of the Annunziata in Florence, which reveal a rigid composition within a scalene triangle.
— V. Tav. L.