LAURANA, FRANCESCO. - Sculptor, born in Dalmatia, perhaps at Zara, in the early decades of the fifteenth century, and active in Naples, the Marches, Sicily and France, died probably in 1502. His early training remains a matter of debate, but he may have been among the sculptors working at Rimini, under the direction of Agostino di Duccio and Matteo di Pasti in the Malatesta temple: some even sought to see the hand of L. in the sculptures that adorn the apartment of Jole in the Ducal Palace of Urbino, which are instead — by now the concordant opinion of criticism — the work of Michele di Giovanni of Fiesole.
In any case, in his youth he was certainly in Naples, where he worked on sculptures for the Aragonese arch and generally for Castelnuovo: then, on the death of Alfonso, he went to France, where he struck medals for the most notable personalities of the time, portraying them with the rarest mastery. But by '68 he is again in Italy, and precisely in Sicily. To that year probably belongs one of his masterpieces, the portrait of Eleonora d'Aragona, depicted in half-length. At Sciacca he directed the work on a side door of the church of S. Maria, where his hand is recognizable in the lunette. Also in 1468 he executed the Mastrantonio chapel in the church of S. Francesco at Palermo, though with the help of other artists. The many commissions must have obliged him to entrust the execution of certain works to others, as, for example, the Madonna existing in the chapel of the cathedral of Palermo, the very one that was commissioned from the sculptor for Monte S. Giuliano and that was then kept in the city; and likewise the other, which was executed subsequently in place of that one, and which is found in the chapel of the Assunta in the cathedral of Montesangiuliano. A work instead entirely by the artist and signed by him is yet another Madonna, which is found in the church of the Crocifissione at Noto, and finally likewise the one existing in S. Agostino at Messina. In 1472 the sculptor is again in Naples, where among other things he executed the bust of Beatrice d'Aragona, daughter of Ferdinand I; this bust passed to the Museum of Berlin. Subsequently he went to Urbino, perhaps between '74 and '77, the year in which he returned to France for good. In the Urbino period he executed the portrait of the duchess Battista Sforza, in the National Museum of Florence, and her marble profile, now in the Civic Museum of Pesaro. At Marseilles the sculptor worked from '77 to '83 in the old Cathedral, where he executed, not without collaborators, the altar of S. Lazzaro; he was then at Avignon and in other places in France, devoting himself above all to executing funerary monuments.
Examining his most certain and most deservedly famous works, one must recognize that he was one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, inclined to a lyrical exaltation of the subject represented. He aspired to the simplification of forms through a geometric synthesis of volumes, so that he recalls the art of Piero della Francesca, with whom evidently L. must have been in contact, and an ideal kinship with the greatest Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina. But an art of this kind, so coherent and personal, does not always accord with the many works attributed to the sculptor, a sign that his personality has not yet been fully separated from that of his numerous collaborators.
Bibliography3 works
Piero Zampetti