FILARETE. — Antonio Averlino or Averulino, known as F., Italian sculptor and architect, b. in Florence around 1400, d. after 1465. The son of a woodcarving master, he may have assisted Ghiberti in his youth on the first door of the Baptistery; summoned by Eugenius IV, he went to Rome in 1433, where he worked for twelve years on the bronze door of St. Peter’s, while simultaneously undertaking other works, among which he is credited with the tomb of Cardinal Antonio Chiaves in S. Giovanni in Laterano. He was forced, however, to leave it unfinished because he had to flee following the accusation that he wished to steal the head of the Baptist. Returning to Florence, he soon left it again to travel through Lombardy and the Veneto, until in 1449 he settled in Venice, from which he departed once more, however, to go to Milan, recommended to Francesco Sforza by Piero de' Medici.
Here he undertook chiefly architectural works, including the façade of the Castello, but because of disputes that arose with the other engineers, he asked the duke for permission to 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 whose construction he supervised until 1465. After that date, all trace of him is likewise lost. Among his other activities, it should be recalled that in 1452 he was appointed engineer of the Fabbrica del Duomo, and that he served in various cities of the duchy as the duke’s consultant. And
to the duke, as a sign of gratitude, he dedicated his Trattato di architettura, written from 1460 to 1464, in which, imagining that he had received the order to build an ideal city, he gives the plans and advice for the construction of this city, which he calls Sforanda, in twenty-five books.
His sculptural work on the door of St. Peter’s was already criticized by Vasari, and in fact one cannot fail to observe in it a certain hybridism between Gothic archaism and the new spatial investigations of the Renaissance, as well as a weakness of modeling and a superficiality of expression
that assign him a very modest place among his contemporaneous sculptors. He also indulged in Gothic ornamental fantasy in his architectural work: he was unable to free himself from the influence of the traditional elements of Lombard art, even though on paper he was elaborating, according to genuinely humanistic principles, that city of his which was intended to revive the excellent « maniera antica ». — Vedi rav. LXXXV.
history of architecture. Florence 1938, p. 185 ff. Gilberto Ronci