LAMBERTI, FAMIGLIA. — NICCOLÒ, Florentine sculptor whose individuality was disentangled only recently (1931) from that of Niccolò di Luca Spinelli da Arezzo, with whom he had been confused as a result of an error by Vasari.
Active as early as 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 for the façade (4 Saints and 4 Fathers of the Church, removed when the old façade was demolished in 1588). In 1401–1402 he took part in the competition for the Baptistery’s second door, and in 1415 he completed the statue of S. Marco which, together with those of the other 3 Evangelists (commissioned respectively from Donatello, Nanni di Banco, and Giuffagni), was to be placed on the façade of the Duomo (the statues are now inside). Bound to the fourteenth-century tradition, Niccolò did not participate in Donatello’s innovatory movement, but persisted somewhat wearily in the decorative play of late Gothic linearism (cf. the S. Luca, formerly in Orsanmichele, now in the Bargello, from 1403–1406, and the S. Marco); he brought this manner to Venice, where from 1416 he worked on the decoration of the façade of S. Marco (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). His son PIERO worked with him in Venice (born in Florence around 1393, died in Venice around 1434). While no secure works are known from the Florentine period (the attribution to him of an Annunciation in Orsanmichele and of the tomb of Onofrio Strozzi in S. Trinità does not seem tenable), in Venice Piero signed, together with Giovanni di Martino da Fiesole, the Mocenigo tomb in SS. Giovanni e Paolo (1423); and, on the model of the tomb of Giovanni XXII, he erected, with the collaboration of Giovanni di Bartolomeo da Firenze, the Fulgosio monument (1431) in the church of the Santo in Padua. Among other works, he is credited with the figures supporting the corbels in S. Marco in Venice, on the side of the Basilica facing S. Basso; Piero and his collaborator Giovanni di Martino are almost unanimously identified with the «duo sotii fiorentini» who signed
the capital of Justice in the Palazzo Ducale, whereas the attribution to him (De Fabriczy, 1902) of the well-known corner group of the Judgment of Solomon remains highly controversial. After a stay in Verona (1430), in 1434 he was working at the Ca' d'Oro.
Maria Vittoria Brugnoli