MEO di FRANCESCO del CAPRINO. - Architect, born at Settignano in 1430, died at Roma in 1501. By 1467 he was already in Roma, working as a stonecutter in the garden of the palace of S. Marco, the present Palazzo Venezia, and then, in 1470, on the travertine work of the ancient Loggia della Benedizione near S. Pietro. In 1471 he received payments for similar work in the Vatican. Then, in 1490–91, he was in Firenze, a judge in the competition for the façade of S. Maria del Fiore, and a year later he went to Torino for the construction of the cathedral.
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 builders, such as Giovannino de' Dolci, Jacopo da Pietrasanta, and Baccio Pontelli himself, who, intensely active in Roma during the last forty years of the fifteenth century, sometimes rose from craftsmanship to genuine architectural works because of the confidence placed in them by their patrons. For M. d. C., the building that can most certainly be attributed to him on the strength of documents and stylistic characteristics is the cathedral of Torino, where, in the general layout of the structure and in the features of its construction, traits characteristic of the contemporary Roman milieu recur. - See plate XLIII.