MINO da FIESOLE (M. di GIOVANNI MINI da POPPIO or M. da FLORENTIA). — Sculptor, born at Poppi in Casentino between 1430 and 1431, died at Florence in 1484. He worked in Florence, Perugia, Volterra, and Rome. A pupil or follower of Desiderio da Settignano, from 1454 onward he made frequent journeys to Rome; indeed, he was still there between 1461 and 1463, when he worked on the pulpit for the blessing of Pio II, and he settled there altogether between 1473 and 1480. Among his oldest and most characteristic works, besides several busts whose attribution has been more or less disputed by critics, is the monument to Bishop Salutati in the cathedral of Fiesole (c. 1466), where there is also a marble triptych by M. In Florence, his works include the tomb of Bernardo Guigni (1468) in the church of Badia, which also contains the altar with a marble triptych sculpted by him for Diotisalvi Neroni (1470), and the later funerary monument of Count Ugo. Also in Florence are a ciborium in S. Croce and a tabernacle in S. Ambrogio (1481), while in the Museo nazionale del Bargello several reliefs are attributed to him, including a most delicate Madonna with the Child and the bust of Rinaldo della Luna, considered his masterpiece in portraiture. In Volterra, M. executed a tabernacle in the Duomo; in Perugia, an altarpiece in the church of S. Pietro (1475); and in Rome, besides various collaborations in the different projects of Andrea Bregno, the monument to Cardinal Forteguerri (1473) in S. Cecilia and the truly elegant monument to Francesco Tornabuoni (1480) in S. Maria sopra Minerva.
The judgment passed on M. by Vasari—“more graceful than grounded in art”—after the exaltations of the nineteenth century, has once again come to be regarded as valid. This has been made possible because the values of the most noble sculpture of Desiderio da Settignano, from which M.’s art derives, have been established with greater clarity. And it derives from it as an entirely external imitation, if anything aimed at perfecting the technical working of marble through extreme refinements that add only a superficial grace to the figures, although it would nevertheless be unjust to deny them positive qualities of elegance and compositional balance. This is attested, if by nothing else, by the comparison that can be made in Rome between his works and those of Mino del Reame, who in the ciborium of S. Maria Maggiore and in other marbles imitated the forms of his Tuscan namesake.