LAMBERTI, FAMILY. - NICCOLÒ, a Florentine sculptor whose personality was only recently (1931) distinguished from that of Niccolò di Luca Spinelli of Arezzo, with whom he had been confused owing to an error by Vasari.
Active from 1388 in the Opera del Duomo of Florence, he worked on the Porta della Mandorla (1393–94, 1407), the Porta dei Canonici (1402–1403), and the statues of the façade (four Saints and four Fathers of the Church), which were removed when the old façade was demolished in 1588. In 1401–1402 he took part in the competition for the second door of the Baptistery, and in 1415 he completed the statue of St. Mark, which, together with those of the other three Evangelists (commissioned respectively to Donatello, Nanni di Banco, and Ciuffagni), was to be placed on the façade of the Duomo (the statues are now in the sacristy). Linked to the fourteenth-century tradition, Niccolò did not participate in Donatello’s innovative movement but persisted wearily in the decorative play of late-Gothic linearism (cf. the St. Luke, formerly in Orsanmichele, now in the Bargello, of 1403–1406, and the St. Mark); he brought this manner to Venice, where he worked from 1416 on the decoration of the façade of St. Mark’s (frieze and crowning of the central arch); he then went to Bologna, where he is still recorded in 1429 (restoration of the Palazzo degli Anziani). In Venice he worked with his son PIERO (b. in Florence c. 1393, d. in Venice c. 1434). While no certain works survive from his Florentine period (the attribution to him of an Annunciation in Orsanmichele and of the tomb of Onofrio Strozzi in S. Trinita do not seem sustainable), Piero, together with Giovanni di Martino of Fiesole, signed the Mocenigo tomb in SS. Giovanni e Paolo (1423); and following the model of the tomb of John XXII, he erected, with the collaboration of Giovanni di Bartolomeo of Florence, the Fulgosio monument (1431) in the church of the Santo in Padua. Among other works attributed to him in St. Mark’s in Venice are the crouching figures on the side of the Basilica toward S. Basso; with Piero, and with his collaborator Giovanni di Martino, are almost unanimously identified the “two subtle Florentines” who signed the capital of Justice in the Ducal Palace, while the attribution to him (De Fabriczy, 1902) of the well-known corner group of the Judgment of Solomon is highly controversial. After a stay in Verona (1430), in 1434 he was working at the Cura d’Oro.