MONTORSOLI, GIOVANNI ANTONIO. — Sculptor, born in Villa Montorsoli near Florence (from which he took his name) in 1507, died in Florence on 31 August 1563. Very young, he worked alongside Michelangelo; however, the chronology of his earliest works remains uncertain, such as the monument to Angelo Aretino in S. Pietro in Arezzo and the tomb of Jacopo Sannazzaro in S. Maria del Parto in Naples. On 7 October 1530, he took the habit of the Servites at the Annunziata in Florence, and from 1531 he worked for the New Sacristy of S. Lorenzo, sculpting the figure of St. Cosmas.
After 1537 he was in Volterra, where he worked on the tomb of Mauro Maffei in the Cathedral; then, between 1540 and 1546, he was active in Genoa, where he executed works for Palazzo Doria and for S. Matteo, among which the group of the Pietà is notable. In those same years he must have abandoned the religious habit. Called in 1547 by the Senate of Messina to build the Fountain of Orion in the city’s cathedral square, he also held the position of chief sculptor of the Cathedral, beginning the series of Apostles, much damaged during the last war. Following the Fountain of Orion, completed around 1551, came that of Neptune. Having left Messina following the Edict of Paul IV against apostates and the excommunicated, he rejoined the Order in 1557 and executed, for a church of the Servites in Bologna, the high altar. In 1561 he returned to Florence, where he remained until his death.
Montorsoli reveals from his earliest works a rich and restless personality, with accents of emphasis and sensuality almost Baroque in character. The maturity of Montorsoli is fully revealed in the impetuous reliefs of the Messina fountains, in which elements of exquisite elegance, such as the graceful naiads of the basin of the Fountain of Orion, or of intense drama, such as Scylla of the Fountain of Neptune, are grafted onto a prodigious architectural structure.