MONTORSOLI, GIOVANNI ANTONIO. — Sculptor, born in Villa Montorsoli near Florence (from which he derived his name) in 1507, died in Florence on 31 August 1563. At a very young age, he worked alongside Michelangelo; the chronology of his early works nevertheless remains uncertain, such as the monument to Angelo Aretino in S. Pietro di Arezzo and the tomb of Jacopo Sannazzaro in S. Maria del Parto in Naples. On 7 October 1530 he donned the habit of the Servites at the Annunziata in Florence, and from 1531 worked on the new sacristy of S. Lorenzo, sculpting the S. Cosimo.
After 1537 he was in Volterra, where he was engaged on the tomb of Mauro Maffei in the Cathedral; then, between 1540 and 1546, he is documented as active in Genoa, where he executed works for Palazzo Doria and S. Matteo, among them the notable group of the Pietà. During those same years he must have abandoned the religious habit. Summoned in 1542 by the Senate of Messina to construct the Orion Fountain in the city’s cathedral square, he also assumed the office of master sculptor of the Cathedral, beginning the series of Apostles, which was badly damaged during the last war. The Neptune Fountain followed the Orion Fountain, completed around 1551. After leaving Messina as a result of Paul IV’s Edict against apostates and those expelled, he re-entered the Order in 1557 and executed, precisely for a Servite church in Bologna, the high altar. In 1561 he returned to Florence, where he remained until his death.
From his earliest works, M. displays a rich and restless personality, with accents of emphasis and an almost baroque sensuality. M.’s maturity is fully revealed in the impetuous reliefs of the Messinese fountains, in which elements of exquisite elegance, such as the naiad caryatids of the basin of the Orion Fountain, or of intense dramatic force, such as the Scylla of the Neptune Fountain, are incorporated into a prodigious architectural structure.