Nanni d'Antonio di Banco

NANNI D'ANTONIO di BANCO. - Sculptor, b. in Florence probably in 1390, d. there in 1421.

In 1406 he was enrolled in the Guild of Master Stonecutters and Woodworkers; between 1407 and 1408 he worked with his father on the framing of the Porta della Mandorla in S. Maria del Fiore; in 1408 he received, together with his father, the commission to execute a statue of Isaiah for the facade of the same church, and then, on his own, again for S. Maria del Fiore, he made a statue of St. Luke, completed in 1413. In 1414 he was commissioned to sculpt the pediment of the Porta della Mandorla, a work he carried on until the year of his death (1421). Other sculptures of his are the statues of St. Philip, St. Eligius and the Sts. Four Crowned Martyrs in Orsanmichele, and a prophet figure in relief in a panel on the exterior of the same building.

N., certainly as gifted as few other sculptors of his age, especially in the formidable image of St. Luke, his masterpiece, shows that he had grasped the meaning of the new times and had known how to look to the art of Donatello, only a few years his senior, and of Jacopo della Quercia; not for this, however, does he renounce his own austere vision of form, strongly articulated in its plastic values, at times simplified with an archaicizing taste (Sts. Four Crowned Martyrs), at other times underscored by flowing, undulating lines, marking the boundaries between zones of shadow and light (pediment of the Porta della Mandorla). - See pl. CVI.

Emilio Lavagnino