DESIDERIO DA SETTIGNANO. - Florentine sculptor, b. at Settignano ca. 1428-31, d. January 16, 1464. Trained perhaps in the workshop of Bernardo Rossellino, he looked especially to Donatello, undertaking to translate violent luminism into a painterly quality highly sensitive to the quality of the material and singularly effective, so as to prelude, on the plane of a lighter poetry, to Verrocchio and Leonardo.

Besides a few works of a monumental character (tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce [ca. 1455], tabernacle of the Sacrament in S. Lorenzo), he produced a long series of low reliefs in stiacciato depicting Madonnas (Berlin, Turin, Bargello, etc.) or saints (St. John the Baptist as a boy in the Bargello, St. Cecilia in Toledo [U.S.A.]), of busts of boys (Vienna, Washington, Bargello, etc.) and of gentlewomen (Bargello, Louvre, Washington, Berlin, etc.) more often in marble, sometimes in polychrome stucco, giving rise to a production that after him would take on an almost industrial character. - See pl. XCII.

Plate XCII BUST OF AN UNKNOWN YOUNG GIRL. Work by Desiderio da Settignano - Florence, Museo Nazionale.(fol. Alinari)

Bibliography3 works

BIBL.: F. Schottmüller, s. v. in Thieme-Becker, IX, pp. 132-133; L. Planisic, D. da S., Vienna 1942; G. Galassi, La scultura fiorentina del Quattrocento, Milan 1949, pp. 160-72.

Roberto Salvini

@incollection{ec4_desiderio_da_settignano, author = {Salvini, Roberto}, title = {Desiderio da Settignano}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {IV}, pages = {1474--1475}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1950}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/desiderio-da-settignano} }

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