ORDONEZ, BARTOLOMÉ. – A Castilian sculptor, born in Burgos around the last decades of the 15th century, but still young in Carrara on 10 December 1520. Biographical details about him are very scarce.
In 1517 he worked in Carrara, but from the previous year, together with his partner Diego de Sileo, he was in Naples where he worked on the Caracciolo Chapel of Vico in S. Giovanni a Carbonara. In 1518 he was commissioned the sepulchral monument to Cardinal Ximenes in the church of S. Ildefonso in Toledo; in the same year, Ordóñez undertook the construction of the tombs of King Ferdinand, Queen Isabella, and the Bishop of Burgos. On 5 December 1520 he made a will in favor of his son Diego, who was under twenty-one years of age. From this circumstance, it can be deduced that it is not possible to assign the extensive Neapolitan production hitherto attributed to the young Diego to him, but rather to the aforementioned Diego de Silos.
Ordóñez’s brief stay in Naples was marked by important commissions that significantly influenced local sculpture. The marble altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi in the Caracciolo Chapel, which Ordóñez certainly carved after a trip to Tuscany, shows a clear influence from Leonardo’s unfinished Adoration of the Magi and other generic Florentine derivations. Among the works executed in Spain, the following are noted: the funerary monument of Cardinal Cisneros in the cathedral of Alcalá and that of Antonio Fonseca, both left unfinished, as well as those of King Philip and Joanna the Mad in the cathedral of Granada. He is also attributed the stalls of the choir of the cathedral of Barcelona, executed in 1517.