Presentation of childhood (busts of St John the Baptist, for some of which the attribution still remains uncertain between the two artists). Entirely antithetical to the style of Bernardo, who in the Bruni monument had produced a solemn prototype of a wall tomb, is the tomb of the Cardinal of Portugal, dissolved in a fanciful and free pictorial rhythm. In the following years R. alternates between the broad pictorial style of the Matteo Palmieri, a masterpiece of vivid portraiture, and the pathetic St Sebastian of Empoli, the somewhat trite and overloaded manner of the Monteoliveto altar in Naples (which has even led to the supposition of the intervention of a collaborator); and he concludes with the plastic solidity of the Madonna del Latte, perhaps executed under the influence of Benedetto da Maiano.
BERNARDO, architect and sculptor, b. at Settignano in 1409, d. at Florence on 23 Sept. 1464, brother of Antonio.
As an architect he was a pupil of Leon Battista Alberti, with whom he collaborated in Florence on the Palazzo Rucellai (1450–55). But his first work seems to have been the crowning of the façade of the Confraternity of the Misericordia at Arezzo (now the Palazzo dei Tribunali, 1433–35), pierced and light, adorned, among other things, with a relief lunette which also represents his debut as a sculptor. Having gone to Rome, he carried out the restoration of S. Stefano Rotondo (renewing the pavement