MICHELOZZO di BARTOLOMEO. — Sculptor and architect, born in Florence in 1396, died there on 7 October 1472. His early activity was in the field of sculpture, when he is found collaborating in 1420 with Lorenzo Ghiberti, who was then engaged on the works for the St Matthew at Orsanmichele and the first door of the Baptistery, and with Donatello during the time when the latter master was working on the tabernacle for St Louis outside Orsanmichele (1425), the tomb of John XXIII in the Baptistery, the other for Cardinal Brancacci in Sant’Angelo a Nilo in Naples, the Aragazzi tomb, later partly dismantled, in the cathedral of Montepulciano, and 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 without trace, on the library of the convent of San Giorgio.
Of such a stay in the Veneto, however, one may recognize the memory in the crowning of the portal of Sant’Agostino in Montepulciano, of unmistakably Venetian taste, and, if it can be shown to be the result of a late completion of works previously begun, in those of the tombs of John XXIII and Cardinal Brancacci. In 1436 M. again collaborated with Ghiberti, this time on the second door of the Baptistery. His further activity, however, was devoted exclusively to architecture: he began with the rebuilding of the convent of San Marco in Florence (1437–51), continued with the construction of the chapels of the Novitiate and of the Medici in Santa Croce, the tabernacles of San Miniato al Monte and of the Annunziata, while as early as 1444 he began that Palazzo dei Medici in Via Larga, later the Riccardi palace, which is one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance architecture. In 1451 he worked on the villas of Il Trebbio and Cafaggiolo in the Mugello, in 1454 on the arrangement of various rooms in the Palazzo Vecchio, and in 1459 on the villa of Careggi. In 1462 he was in Milan to raise the Portinari chapel in Sant’Eustorgio and the palace of the Medici Bank, of which only the portal remains in the Archaeological Museum in Milan, while two years later, in 1464, he was in Ragusa in Dalmatia to provide designs useful for the reconstruction, later carried out largely with his own ideas by Giorgio di Sebenico, of the Palazzo dei Rettori of that city. Younger than Donatello and Brunelleschi, but not so much so as not to belong to their generation, M. took up, with vigour, their expressive languages in turn, displaying a certain greater robustness, so that in his sculptures he sometimes seems to have felt the charm of the works of Jacopo della Quercia, and in his architecture to have foreshadowed and accompanied the Albertian taste.