Mino da Fiesole

MINO DA FIESOLE (M. di Giovanni Mini da Poppio or M. da Florentia). - Sculptor, b. at Poppi in Casentino between 1430 and 1431, d. at Florence in 1484. He worked at Florence, Perugia, Volterra, and Rome. A pupil or follower of Desiderio da Settignano, from 1454 he made frequent journeys to Rome; he is in fact to be found there again between 1461 and 1463, when he was working on the pulpit for the blessing of Pius II, and he settled there permanently between 1473 and 1480. Among his earliest and most characteristic works, besides certain busts more or less disputed by critics, is the monument to Bishop Salutati in the cathedral of Fiesole (ca. 1466), where a marble triptych is also by M. At Florence, works of his are the tomb of Bernardo Guigni (1468) in the church of Badia, where there is also the altar with a marble triptych carved by him for Diotisalvi Neroni (1470), and the later funeral monument of Count Ugo. Still at Florence, a ciborium in S. Croce and a tabernacle in S. Ambrogio (1481) are his, while in the Museo nazionale del Bargello certain reliefs must be assigned to him, among them a very refined Madonna with the Child and the bust of Rinaldo della Luna, considered his masterpiece in the field of portraiture. At Volterra a tabernacle in the Duomo is by M., at Perugia an altarpiece in the church of S. Pietro (1475), and at Rome, besides various collaborations in the various undertakings of Andrea Bregno, the monument to Card. Forteguerri (1473) in S. Cecilia and the truly elegant one of Francesco Tornabuoni (1480) in S. Maria sopra Minerva.

The judgment passed on M. by Vasari: "more graceful than well-founded in art," after the exaltations of the 19th century, has once again come to be considered valid. This has been made possible because the values of the most noble sculpture of Desiderio da Settignano, from which M.'s art descends, have been more clearly established. And it descends from it as an entirely external imitation, if anything directed at perfecting the technical working of marble into extreme refinements that add only a superficial grace to the images, to which it would nevertheless be unjust to deny positive qualities of elegance and compositional balance. This is attested, if by nothing else, by the parallel that can be drawn at 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.

Emilio Lavagnino