Rossellino, Family

ROSSELLINO, FAMILY. - ANTONIO, sculptor, son of Matteo Gamberelli, b. at Settignano in 1427, d. at Florence in 1479.

The following works can be attributed to him: some capitals in the church of S. Lorenzo in Florence (1449); the bust of Giovanni Antonio Chellini, signed and dated 1456, and the tabernacle of S. Chiara (c. 1465), both at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the tomb of Card. of Portugal in S. Miniato al Monte in Florence (1461-66) and the bust of Matteo Palmieri (1468) in the Museo nazionale del Bargello of the same city; the St. Sebastian of Empoli (Museo della Collegiata, c. 1470); the altar dossal with the Nativity in S. Maria di Monteoliveto in Naples (c. 1475); the pulpit erected in the form of a holy-water stoup in the cathedral of Prato, with the collaboration of Mino da Fiesole (1473); the Madonna del latte, in S. Croce in Florence (before 1478). This list must be supplemented with many undated works, among which it will suffice to mention the St. John the Baptist of the Compagnia Vanchetoni in Florence, now in the Museum in Washington; the other two in the Bargello and in the Museum of Faenza; the marble reliefs with the group of the Madonna and Child of S. Clemente at Sociana, of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, of the Hermitage in Leningrad, of the Metropolitan Museum in New York (replicated in a great number of plaster and terracotta copies). Finally, two works must be added in which R.'s participation is limited: the Mazzari monument in the cathedral of Pistoia, after a design by his brother Bernardo, and the tomb of Maria d'Aragona in S. Maria di Monteoliveto, for which R. provided only the design, later executed by Benedetto da Majano. Trained in the workshop of his elder brother Bernardo, with whom he had a workshop in 1457, he did not delay in undertaking his own researches, evolving rapidly from a minute, incisive manner, defined more in its contours than in its masses (Chellini bust in London), toward a soft picturesqueness, made of delicate transitions and epidermal preciousness, which clearly reveals an approach to the manners of his contemporary and fellow-countryman Desiderio, and with him he vies in the delicate and sensitive representation of childhood (busts of St. John the Baptist, for some of which the attribution still hangs uncertain between the two artists). Entirely antithetical to the style of Bernardo, who in the Bruni monument had given a solemn prototype of the wall tomb, is the tomb of Card. of Portugal, dissolved into a fanciful and free pictorial rhythm. In the following years R. alternates with the broad picturesqueness of the Matteo Palmieri, a masterpiece of portrait-like vivacity, and of the pathetic St. Sebastian of Empoli, the somewhat trite and heavy manner of the Monteoliveto altar in Naples (which has also suggested the intervention of a collaborator); and he concludes with the plastic solidity of the Madonna del latte, executed perhaps 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 disciple 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 facade of the Confraternita della Misericordia at Arezzo (now Palazzo dei Tribunali, 1433-

(phot. Ristovalcografia Civicchioni, Chiavari). ROSSELLINO, FAMILY - Courtyard of the Palazzo Piccolomini after a design by Bernardo R. - Pienza. 1435) pierced and light and adorned, among other things, with a relief lunette that also represents his debut as a sculptor. Having gone to Rome, he carried out the restoration of S. Stefano Rotondo (renewing the floor and building the entrance portal, that of the atrium, some bifora windows and the altar) and, in the capacity of "engineer of the Palace," he participated (1451-55) with Alberti in the works undertaken by Nicholas V in the Vatican Palaces and in S. Peter's, works in which, however, the recognition of the respective parts is quite arduous, while the intervention of R. in the Palazzo di Venezia and in the church of S. Marco remains uncertain to this day. Sent to Tuscany by Pius II for the architectural renewal of Corsignano (later Pienza), he erected the Palazzo Piccolomini, the Cathedral, the Episcopal Palace and renewed the Palazzo pubblico (1460-63), drawing on the light and serene forms of the early Alberti, especially in the Palazzo Piccolomini, which repeats the facade of Alberti's Palazzo Rucellai. B. shows greater originality in the courtyard of the same Palace and above all in the airy facade onto the garden, entirely open with loggias, as well as in the Cathedral which, Gothic in its interior by the will of the Pope, has a front of broad Renaissance breath, rhythmically articulated by great blind round arches. In his last years (1461-64) he attended to the completion of the lantern of the Florentine Cathedral.

Of his activity as a sculptor, while his participation in the works for the chapel of Eugene IV in the Vatican is uncertain, for which the documents name among others a "Magister Bernardus," the following are certainly his works, besides the aforementioned Aretine lunette with the representation of the Madonna della Misericordia: the Monument to Leonardo Bruni in S. Croce in Florence (1444-51); the Annunciata in S. Stefano at Empoli (1447); the tabernacle in S. Egidio in Florence (1450); the tombs, also in Florence, of the b. Villana in S. Maria Novella (1452-53) and of Orlando Medici at the S.ma Annunziata (1455), the sepulchre of Giovanni Chellini in the church of S. Miniato al Tedesco (1461), as well as the design for the monument of F. Lazzari in the cathedral of Pistoia (1462), executed, after B.'s death, by his brother Antonio. His style, rather than the sensitive dynamism of Donatello, reflects the solid plasticity and the naive and somewhat awkward classicism of Michelozzo, enlivened nevertheless, from time to time, by Ghibertian curvilinear rhythms.

In Florentine sculpture of the 15th century the work of R. is important for the example of a firm and organic connection between plastic and architectural elements, such as that which stamps with severe composure the Bruni sepulchre, a work more of an architect than of a sculptor, which he ingeniously renews, with an openly Renaissance spirit, the scheme of wall monuments. - See pl. LXXXV.

Quattrocento, Rome 1942, passim; G. Galassi, La scultura fiorentina del Quattrocento, Milan 1949, p. 138 ff. and passim.

Amalia Mezzetti