FILARETE. - Antonio Averlino or Averulino, called il F., Italian sculptor and architect, b. in Florence around 1400, d. after 1465. The son of a master carver, he was perhaps in his youth an assistant of Ghiberti on the first door of the Baptistery; summoned by Eugene IV, he went to Rome in 1433, where he worked for twelve years on the bronze door of St. Peter's, carrying on other works at the same time, among which is attributed to him the tomb of Cardinal Antonio Chiaves in St. John Lateran, which he had to leave unfinished, however, because he was forced to flee following the accusation brought against him of wanting to steal the head of the Baptist. Having returned to Florence, he soon departed from it to wander in Lombardy and the Veneto, until in 1449 he settled in Venice, from where he set out again, however, to go to Milan, recommended to Francesco Sforza by Piero de' Medici.
Here he carried out especially architectural works, among them the facade of the Castle, but because of disagreements that arose with the other engineers, he asked the duke for leave; nevertheless in 1456 he was still in Milan and received the commission for his greatest Milanese work, the Ospedale Maggiore, for which he prepared the design and on whose construction he worked until 1465. After that date all trace of him is lost. Among his other activities it is recalled that in 1452 he was appointed engineer of the Fabbrica del Duomo, and that he was in various cities of the duchy as the duke's consultant. And to the duke, as a sign of gratitude, he dedicated his Treatise on Architecture, written from 1460 to 1464, in which, in 25 books, imagining that he had received the order to build an ideal city, he gives precisely the plans and advice for the construction of this city, which he calls Sforanda.
His sculptural work on the door of St. Peter's was already criticized by Vasari and in reality one cannot fail to observe in it a certain hybridism between Gothic archaism and the new spatial researches of the Renaissance, besides a weakness of modeling and a superficiality of expression that gives him a very modest place among the sculptors his contemporaries. He indulges in Gothic ornamental fantasy also in his work as an architect: he did not know how to resist the suggestion of the traditional elements of Lombard art, even if on paper he was elaborating, according to genuinely humanistic principles, that city of his which was supposed to revive the excellent "ancient manner." - See rav. LXXXV.
Bibliography2 works
FILARETE - Exterior of the Ospedale Maggiore - Milan.
history of architecture. Florence 1938, p. 185 ff.
Gilberto Ronci