Vecchietta, Lorenzo di Pietro, called Il

VECCHIETTA, Lorenzo di Pietro, called Il. - Painter, sculptor and architect, b. at Castiglione di Val d'Orcia in 1412, d. at Siena on 6 June 1480.

In 1441 he began working for the hospital of Siena (Sala del Pellegrino, the reliquary cupboard and the great sacristy); around 1450 he was entrusted with the pictorial decoration of the vault and the apse in the Baptistery of the Cathedral. After 1457, the V. also devoted himself to sculpture, executing the marble statues of Sts. Peter and Paul (Loggia dei Mercanti, 1460-62), of St. Catherine lying in state, in painted terracotta (c. 1461, in the oratory of the Compagnia di S. Caterina della Notte), and tomb figures in bronze of Bishop Girolamo Foscari (church of S. Maria del Popolo in Rome, 1464) and of the jurisconsult Mariano Sozzini the Elder (Museo del Bargello in Florence, 1467) and the great bronze ciborium of the high altar in the Cathedral of Siena (1467-72). To the master's last period, during which he also carried on a notable activity as architect and military engineer on commission from the Commune, belong the panel with the Madonna enthroned and saints (Pinacoteca of Siena, c. 1478), the bronze bas-relief with the Resurrection of Christ (Frick collection of New York, 1472), a wooden statue of St. Anthony (cathedral of Narni, 1473) and the bronze one of the risen Christ (1476) on the high altar of the church of the Sienese Hospital. The V. may be called the intermediary between the heritage of late Sienese Gothic taste and the naturalism of the early Florentine Renaissance. A temperament of the descriptive and analytical narrator, he almost always lacked the capacity for a complete imaginative synthesis; but in painting he attained considerable results (v. the triptych in the cathedral of Pienza, 1462), with the very delicate Assumption at the center and the well-relieved and dignified figures of Sts. Pius and Callistus and of Sts. Agatha and Catherine, in the side compartments) and in sculpture he asserted uncommon values of anatomical knowledge and realistic characterization, as in the figure of Sozzini and in that of St. Catherine lying in state. - See plate CXIX.