DESIDERIO da SETTIGNANO. - Florentine sculptor, born at Settignano ca. 1428–31, died 16 Jan. 1464. Perhaps trained in the workshop of Bernardo Rossellino, he looked especially to Donatello, endeavouring to translate violent luminism into a pictorial quality highly sensitive to the character of the material and singularly effective, thus foreshadowing, on the level of a lighter poetry, Verrocchio and Leonardo.
Besides a few works of a monumental character (the tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce [ca. 1455], the tabernacle of the Sacrament in S. Lorenzo), he produced a long series of stiacciato bas-reliefs depicting Madonnas (Berlin, Turin, Bargello, etc.) or saints (S. Giovannino at the Bargello, S. Cecilia at Toledo [U.S.A.]), busts of children (Vienna, Washington, Bargello, etc.) and of gentlewomen (Bargello, Louvre, Washington, Berlin, etc.), more often in marble, sometimes in polychrome stucco, initiating a pro-
duction which after him would assume an almost industrial character. - See pl. XCII.