TINO DI CAMAINO DI CRESCENZIO DI DIOTISALVI. - Sculptor and architect, b. in Siena around 1280, d. in Naples in 1336 or 1337.
The first evidence of his activity is in Pisa, where T. went, presumably as a collaborator of Giovanni Pisano on the work of the pulpit of the Cathedral, and where in 1312 he was adorning the Baptismal Font. In 1315, after having already for some time held the commission for the tomb of Henry VII, to be erected under the vault of that same great church, and after having been named master-builder of the construction, he was forced to abandon the city, having sided with the Guelphs and fought at Montecatini against the Pisans. In 1318 T. was in Siena, engaged together with his father, himself also a sculptor, and with others in the construction of the Cathedral, of which, between 1319 and 1320, he was made master-builder; then he went to Florence, but by 1325 he was already in Naples, where he remained until his death.
Among the earliest works of T. is the urn formerly on the altar of St. Ranieri in the cathedral of Pisa and subsequently transferred to the Camposanto. The sculpture perhaps belongs to the same time in which the young master collaborated with Giovanni on the pulpit, and the date 1306 seems the most probable. Then the clear evolution of T.'s plastic manner is understood by comparing that marble, where with cadenced rhythms and compact forms the images crowd together, detaching themselves almost with difficulty from the background, with the later works, such as the surviving fragments of the baptismal font and the tomb of Henry VII. This tomb, today disassembled between the Cathedral, where the sarcophagus with the recumbent figure is, and the Museo dell'Opera, for the vigorous, peremptory liveliness of the images, especially those of the five counselors who surround the emperor seated on his throne, must be placed among the most significant sculptures of our 14th century. Here T. inaugurates plastic manners clearly distinct from those of his master Giovanni; through them the images, synthetic, rounded, defined within weighty masses underscored in their sudden variation of planes by deep rectilinear hollows, have analogies with those painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Toesca). Analogous manners appear in the tomb of Card. Petroni in the Cathedral of Siena (1319-20), in the other of Gastone della Torre in the cloister of S. Croce in Florence, while in the sarcophagus of Bishop Orso, which is in the Cathedral, also in Florence, there is clear an evolution of the sculptor in a preciously Gothic sense, whereby he arrives at individual searches for linear rhythms that accentuate the plastic ones and sometimes replace them. Thus in a Madonna and Child that is in the Florentine national Museum.
In 1324 T. is in Naples and collaborates first on the tomb of Catherine of Austria in S. Lorenzo Maggiore, then, with the architect Gagliardo Primario, he erects the other for Maria of Hungary which is in S. Maria Donna-regina (1325). Later he sculpts the tomb of Charles of Calabria (1335) and that of Maria of Valois in S. Chiara, half-destroyed in the fire that devoured the church following the bombardments of 1943. In these works, as in the others of the same time that can be attributed to him, such as the tomb of Giovanni di Durazzo in S. Domenico, one observes a greater accentuation of Gothic inflections, and a more evident search for pictorial effects in the images that stand out against dark backgrounds.
Works of architecture by T. in Naples were the cloister of S. Martino, the immensely imposing fortifications of the adjoining castle of S. Elmo, and works in the port.
Having broken away from the stock of Giovanni Pisano, T., a most original sculptor, spread the new manners of 14th-century Tuscan plastic art in southern Italy, yet partially renewing his style there. In fact, during his Neapolitan period T., reacting to the artistic climate of a region already open for at least half a century to French culture and art, accentuated the fluidity of linear rhythms, which superimpose themselves with subtle elegance on the roughness of the rounded volumes of his marbles, and gave life to a series of works that are among the most significant of Italian sculpture of his time.
Bibliography6 works
Emilio Lavagnino