MONTORSOLI, GIOVANNI ANTONIO. - Sculptor, b. in Villa Montorsoli near Florence (from which he derived his name) in 1507, d. in Florence on 31 Aug. 1563. Very young, he worked alongside Michelangelo; the chronology of his early works is still uncertain, however, 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 Oct. 1530 he took the habit of the Servites in the Annunziata in Florence, and from 1531 he worked on the new sacristy of S. Lorenzo, carving the St. Cosmas.
After 1537 he was in Volterra, and was working on the tomb of Mauro Maffei, in the Cathedral; then, between 1540 and 1546, he is found active in Genoa, where he executed works for the Doria Palace and for S. Matteo, among which the group of the Pietà is notable. In those same years he must have abandoned the religious habit. Summoned in 1542 by the Senate of Messina to build the fountain of Orion in the square of the city's cathedral, he also held the post of master builder and sculptor of the Cathedral, beginning the series of the Apostles, much damaged during the last war. The fountain of Orion, completed around 1551, was followed by that of Neptune. Having left Messina following the Edict of Paul IV against apostates and the expelled, he re-entered the Order in 1557, and executed, precisely for a church of the Servites, in Bologna, the high altar. In 1561 he returned to Florence, where he remained until his death.
From his earliest works the M. shows a rich and restless personality, with accents of emphasis and of an almost Baroque sensuality. The maturity of the M. is fully revealed in the impetuous reliefs of the Messinese fountains, in which elements of exquisite elegance, such as the caryatid naiads of the basin of the fountain of Orion, or of intense dramatic quality, such as the Scylla of the fountain of Neptune, are grafted onto a prodigious architectural structure.
Bibliography
Eugenio Battisti