BANDINELLI, BACCIO. - Sculptor, b. in Florence in 1488, d. 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, of Michelangelo and of sixteenth-century classicism, and continually oscillated between opposing tendencies, which sometimes allowed him original achievements but more often dried up every creative impulse of his. A reminiscence of his training in the pictorial manner is found in the St. Peter for S. Maria del Fiore in Florence (1515); the influence of Michelangelo, evident in the Hercules and Cacus of the Piazza della Signoria (1534), produces in his works a massiveness of forms and a theatrical composition that recur again and again in his output, as, for example, in the Leo X of the Palazzo Vecchio or in the Eternal Father of the cloister of S. Croce. The commission to complete 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 the best ideas for the two tombs of Leo X and of Clement VII in S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome (1536). The classicism with which he had come into contact by copying the Laocoön (1525) produces in him certain abstractions of pure stylism, which are found again in the sculptures of the choir in S. Maria del Fiore (1540); in some of these the volumes are subjected to a geometric simplification and to a studied arrangement of planes that freeze into abstract ideality the reminiscences of his youthful pictorial manner. The fruit of the same stylism is the iconographic simplification of the two Pietàs in S. Croce and in the church of the Annunziata in Florence, which reveal a rigid composition within a scalene triangle. - See Pl. LI.
Bibliography2 works
Guglielmo Matthise