Michelozzo di Bartolomeo

MICHELOZZO di BARTOLOMEO. - Sculptor and architect, b. in Florence in 1396, d. there on 7 Oct. 1472. His first activity took place in the field of sculpture, when we find him collaborating in 1420 with Lorenzo Ghiberti, at the time when the latter was engaged in the works for the St. Matthew of Orsanmichele and the first door of the Baptistery, and with Donatello at the time when that master was working on the tabernacle for the St. Louis on the exterior of Orsanmichele (1425), on the tomb of John XXIII in the Baptistery, on the other for the Cardinal Brancacci in S. Angelo a Nilo in Naples, on the Aragazzi one, later in part dismembered, in the cathedral of Montepulciano, and on the pulpit for the cathedral of Prato. Then between 1433 and 1434 M. followed Cosimo de' Medici into exile in Venice, where he worked, though no trace of it remains, in the library of the convent of S. Giorgio.

Of such a stay in the Veneto one can nevertheless recognize the memory in the crowning of the portal of S. Agostino in Montepulciano, of undoubtedly Venetianizing taste, and, where it can be shown to be the fruit of a late completion of the works previously begun, in those of the tombs of John XXIII and of Cardinal Brancacci. In 1456 M. was again collaborating with Ghiberti, this time on the second door of the Baptistery. M.'s further activity, however, was directed exclusively to architecture: it begins with the reconstruction of the convent of S. Marco in Florence (1437-51), continues with the construction of the chapels of the Novitiate and of the Medici in S. Croce, of the tabernacles of S. Miniato al Monte and of the Annunziata, while as early as 1444 he was beginning that Palazzo Medici in Via Larga, later become the Palazzo Riccardi, which is one of the architectural masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. In 1451 M. was working on the villas of Trebbio and Cafaggiolo in Mugello, in 1454 on arranging various rooms in the Palazzo Vecchio, and in 1459 on the villa of Careggi. In 1462 he was in Milan to erect the Portinari chapel in S. Eustorgio and the palace of the Banco Mediceo, of which only the portal remains in the Milanese Archaeological Museum, while two years later, in 1464, he was in Ragusa, in Dalmatia, to provide designs useful for the reconstruction, later carried out for the most part with his own ideas by Giorgio di Sebenico, of that city's Palace of the Rectors. Younger than Donatello and Brunelleschi, but not so much as not to feel himself of their same generation, M. successively took up their expressive languages with vigor, displaying a certain greater robustness, so that sometimes in his sculptures he seems also to have grasped the fascination of the works of Jacopo della Quercia, and in his architectures to prelude and accompany the Albertian taste.

Emilio Lavagnino