MEO di FRANCESCO del CAPRINO. — Architect, b. at Settignano in 1430, d. at Rome in 1501. In 1467 he was already in Rome working as a stonemason in the garden of the palace of S. Marco, now the Palazzo Venezia, and then in 1470 on the travertine of the ancient Loggia della Benedizione near S. Peter’s. In 1471 he received payments for similar work in the Vatican. Later, in 1490–91, he was in Florence as judge of the competition for the façade of S. Maria del Fiore, and a year afterward he went to Turin for the construction of the Duomo.
Although the Roman documents that mention him are relatively numerous, very few works can be attributed to M. Indeed, those documents chiefly indicate that he was one of those stonecutters or master masons—such as Giovanni de’ Dolci, Jacopo da Pietrasanta, and even Baccio Pontelli—who, active in Rome during the last forty years of the 15th century, sometimes rose from craftsmanship to actual architectural works thanks to the trust placed in them by their patrons. For M. d. C., the building that can be attributed to him with the greatest certainty, both on documentary grounds and by stylistic features, is the Turin Duomo, where the general design of the structure and its constructional traits reflect modes characteristic of the contemporary Roman milieu. — See pl. XLIII.