Ordoñez, Bartolomé

ORDOÑEZ, BARTOLOMÉ. - Castilian sculptor, b. in Burgos toward the last decades of the 15th century, d. still young at Carrara on 10 Dec. 1520. Biographical information is very scarce.

In 1517 he had commissions at Carrara, but already from the previous year, together with his partner Diego de Silos, he was in Naples, where he worked for the Caracciolo di Vico chapel in S. Giovanni a Carbonara. In 1518 the sepulchral monument to Card. Ximenes in the church of S. Ildefonso in Toledo was allotted to him: in the same year O. undertook to build the tombs of King Ferdinand, Queen Isabella and the bishop of Burgos. On 5 Dec. 1520 he made his will in favor of his son Diego, who was under twenty-one years of age. From this circumstance it follows that it is not possible to assign to the young Diego the vast Neapolitan production hitherto attributed to him, which must instead be referred to the aforementioned Diego de Siloe.

O.'s brief stay in Naples was dense with very important developments for local sculpture. The marble altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi on the altar of the Caracciolo chapel, which O. certainly carved after a journey to Tuscany, shows a clear influence of Leonardo's unfinished Adoration of the Magi and other generic Florentine derivations. Of the works executed in Spain, mention is made of: the funeral monument of Card. Cisneros in the cathedral of Alcalá and that of Antonio Fonseca, both left unfinished, and that of King Philip and Joanna the Mad in the cathedral of Granada. The choir stalls of the cathedral of Barcelona, executed in 1517, are also attributed to him.

Giovanni Carandente