Meo di Francesco del Caprino

MEO DI FRANCESCO DEL CAPRINO. - Architect, b. at Settignano in 1430, d. at Rome in 1501. By 1467 he was already in Rome working as a stonecutter in the garden of the palace of S. Marco, the present Palazzo Venezia, and then, in 1470, on the travertine of the ancient Loggia of the Blessing near St. Peter's. In 1471 he received payments for similar work in the Vatican. Then in 1490-91 he is in Florence, a judge of the competition for the facade of S. Maria del Fiore, and a year later he goes to Turin for the construction of the cathedral.

Although the Roman documents that record him are relatively numerous, there are very few works that can be attributed to M. In fact, those documents chiefly signify that he was one of those stonecutters or master builders like Giovannino de' Dolci, Jacopo da Pietrasanta and Baccio Pontelli himself who, intensely active in Rome in the last forty years of the 15th century, sometimes rose, through the trust that patrons placed in them, from craftsmanship to genuine works of architecture. For M. d. C. the construction that can be attributed to him with the greatest certainty, on the strength of documents and stylistic characteristics, is the cathedral of Turin, where in the general layout of the fabric and in the characteristics of the construction there recur methods proper to the contemporary Roman milieu. - See pl. XLIII.

Emilio Lavagnino