DESIDERIO DA SETTIGNANO.

(1428-1464.)

Desiderio, the son of a stone-cutter named Bartolomeo di Francesco, called Ferro, was born at Settignano in 1428, just forty-seven years before the infant Michelangelo was left there by his parents in charge of a stone-cutter's wife. We know nothing about this sculptor but that he had two brothers, Francesco and Gesi; that he became Donatello's pupil, that he was admitted to the sculptors' guild in 1453, that he died on January 16th, 1464, leaving a wife and two children, and that he was buried in the church of San Piero Maggiore. Young as he still was at the time of his death, he had gained a reputation which his few extant works fully justify. "Nature, indignant at being outdone by him," sang an anonymous poet in verses laid upon his tomb, "cut short his days; but her vengeance proved vain, for he had given immortality to his living marbles and they to him." Vasari calls him "an imitator of Donatello's manner," but in this we cannot agree, for it is dramatic, vigorous and energetic, while that of Desiderio is quiet, gentle and unimpassioned. We have little to judge him by—a bust, a monument, and a tabernacle-but these are sufficient to show his exquisite taste in ornament, his great technical skill and his originality.

The bust is that of Marietta Palla Strozzi, wife of Celio Calcagnini, of Ferrara, which has lately passed from the palace of her ancestors at Florence to the Royal Museum at Berlin. The face is not beautiful, but it fascinates and rivets the attention. The drooping eyelids seem about to close as in sleep or death, and the almost unnaturally calm features contrast strikingly with the elaborately arranged hair, the richly brocaded dress, and the broad band of marble below the shoulders, sculptured with recumbent figures and little genii in low relief. Whether the artist thus represented this highborn dame with a meaning, or from mere caprice, we cannot

* Dr. Bode (p. 32, Lief. 62, Kunst und Künstler, etc.) questions whether this can be the bust of the Marietta di Palla Strozzi whose second husband Celio Calcagnini was a minion of Borso d' Este-as she was but sixteen when Desiderio died (1464), and the person represented in the bust looks at least ten years older.

say, but his work is a masterpiece, in which the best characteristics of quattro-cento sculpture are combined, while their attraction is enhanced by the charm of mystery.

The qualities which give value to this portrait bust shine out at Sta. Croce in Desiderio's monument to the learned scholar Carlo Marsuppini (d. 1455), whilome secretary to Pope Eugenius IV., and to Florence. A recess formed by the projecting architrave and pilasters, both of which are richly decorated with classic ornaments, contains the effigy of the deceased with his hands crossed upon a book, lying upon a parade bed, placed on the top of a lion-footed sarcophagus, whose ends and sides are enriched with elegantly disposed acanthus leaves, intertwined with ribbons attached to a mortuary tablet. It stands on a sculptured platform raised above an ornate base, at either end of which nude children hold armorial shields. They are balanced in the upper part of the tomb by other children, placed at either end of the entablature to bear up the ends of a long pendant festoon which falls from a sculptured vase on the top of the lunette, against which they lean for support. This lunette contains a charming bas-relief of the Madonna and Child with two praying angels. Every part of the surface is enriched, but the ornamental details are so symmetrically disposed, and so delicately sculptured, that the monument does not appear to be overloaded.

We shall not describe Desiderio's tabernacle at San Lorenzo, with its leaf ornament, its praying angels, and its Pietà in flat relief, nor dwell upon the frieze of angels' heads which he and Donatello sculptured for the Cappella Pazzi,* nor make more than a passing reference to the wooden statue of the Magdalen, at Santa Trinità, which was finished by Benedetto da Majano after our sculptor's death in 1464. He who knows his masterworks, the bust of Marietta Strozzi, and the Marsuppini monument, knows Desiderio in his possibilities and his limitations. Artists like Donatello, or writers like Shakespeare, may reveal new phases of genius in every added work, but sculptors like Desiderio, or poets like Gray, tell us in a few perfect marbles and poems all that they would have said had their works been infinitely multiplied.

* Alberti's Memoriale (1510) mentions this frieze as a joint work, and speaks of Desiderio as Donatello's scholar. Bode, op. cit. p. 30.

BERNARDO ROSSELLINO (1409-1464), AND HIS BROTHER

ANTONIO (1425–1478).

The three finest Renaissance tombs in Tuscany are those of Lionardo Bruni (1444), by Bernardo Rossellino, at Sta. Croce, of Carlo Marsuppini (1454), by Desiderio, in the same church, and of Cardinal James of Portugal, by Antonio Rossellino (1459), at San Miniato. The first, which served as a type of the other two, is severely simple in effect, the second extremely rich, though equally quiet in line; while the third attains the golden mean in point of ornament, thanks to the judicious contrast preserved between adorned and unadorned spaces, the substitution of the simply disposed folds of a curtain upon the archivolt for a heavy festoon outside the arch, and the opposition of angels and putti in action, to the stillness and repose of the sepulchral effigy. In each the deceased reposes upon a draped parade bed, placed on the top of a sarcophagus standing in a recess, and in each the lunette is filled with a circular relief of the Madonna and Child, supported by kneeling or flying angels; but here the resemblance ends, for while Bernardo has placed eagles, and Antonio seated genii at the head and foot of the bier, Desiderio has dispensed with both, and where he introduced children with shields below and above it, Antonio placed winged angels with emblems upon either end of the entablature above the sepulchral effigy. The Madonna and Child under the arch of the Cardinal's tomb is relieved against a blue background, studded with stars, the flat space around it is enriched with cherubim, and the wreath which enframes it is supported by flying angels. The occupant of this beautiful monument, a member of the royal house of Portugal, who served the Florentine Republic as ambassador at the court of Spain, "lived in the flesh," says his biographer, as if he were freed from it, like an angel rather than a man, and died in the odour of sanctity at the early age of twentysix."

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Antonio Rossellino, who sculptured his tomb, and his brother Bernardo, who made that of Lionardo Bruni, apostolic secretary, chancellor of the Republic, and eminent scholar (1369-1444), were the sons of Matteo di Domenico Gam

berelli.* Bernardo, the elder of the two, was the favourite architect of Popes Nicholas V. and Pius II., for whom he is commonly supposed to have built the Piccolomini Palace and the Town Hall at Cosignano (Pienza), the Pope's birthplace, as well as some important edifices at Siena. It is however possible that another Florentine of the same name built them, and not Rossellino.t whose many important works in sculpture would seem to preclude the devotion of so much time to architecture as their erection would have demanded. Besides the Bruni monument at Sta. Croce, already described, he made that of the Beata Villana (1451), a Florentine saint of the fourteenth century, at Sta. Maria Novella, and the monument of Filippo Lazzari (1464), doctor of laws, in the church of San Domenico at Pistoja. These tombs, and the busts of the youthful St. John and Battista Sforza at the Bargello, give evidence of remarkable artistic ability, high technical training, and refined taste. They do not however show those qualities of charm and grace which give value to the works of his brother Antonio, who ranks with Desiderio, Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da Majano, among the first sculptors of his time. Although Vasari mentions him among the scholars of Donatello, Antonio really belonged to the school of Ghiberti. His pictorial tendencies are evident in the angels of the Cardinal's monument at San Miniato already described, and are fully manifested in the basreliefs of the monument of Mary of Aragon (d. 1470), in the church of Monte Oliveto at Naples, which he made for her husband the Duke of Amalfi.‡ The Nativity is a picture in marble, charming in expression, excellent in composition, perfect in execution, but not a bas-relief properly so called, and the same may be said of the Resurrection and the relief of the

Matteo had five sons, all artists, viz., Bernardo, Domenico, Maso, Giovanni and Antonio.

The Vatican registers of Pius II.'s reign, mention M° Bernardo di Fierenza, as architect of the buildings at Pienza, but do not give his family name. Pius II. in his Commentaries, speaks of him as Bernardus Florentinus. M. Eugene Müntz, op. cit., vol. iv. p. 234, after careful research, discusses the question whether this Bernardo is Rossellino or Bernardo di Lorenzo, without being able to decide it definitely.

The Duke was so delighted with the monument of the Cardinal di Portogallo, that he commissioned Antonio Rossellino to repeat it at Naples.

Virgin, St. John, and the Magdalen at the foot of the Cross, over an altar in the same chapel, as they are equally pictorial in style, and like Ghiberti in all but one particular, the flatter treatment of planes. In this Antonio Rossellino followed Donatello, but otherwise he worked after the manner of his rival. His circular relief at the Bargello of the Madonna adoring the Infant Jesus, shows this even more markedly, in the gradual flattening of the relief planes, the landscape background, the sky, and the treatment of figures and accessories in perspective. However skilfully managed, the use of these pictorial artifices in sculpture, here borrowed from the second gates of the Baptistry, cannot be defended. In the busts of Giovanni di San Miniato, doctor of laws (1456), at South Kensington, and that of Matteo Palmieri (1468) at the Bargello, Antonio seized and expressed the character of his subjects with force and truth, putting into them that extraordinary vitality which gives a unique value to the best Florentine heads of the fifteenth century in terra-cotta and marble. The finest single statue by this sculptor is that of St. Sebastian in a niche over an altar in the parochial church at Empoli. It has two kneeling angels with the emblems of martyrdom, placed above the cornice, like those above the sepulchral effigy of the Cardinal of Portugal at San Miniato.†

Among the minor works of Antonio Rossellino, we have yet to mention a Madonna and Child, enframed with cherubim, in the church of Sta. Croce, called the Madonna della Latte, which formed part of the monument ordered by Francesco Neri for himself, before he fell under the daggers of the Pazzi conspirators who slew Giovanni de' Medici in the Cathedral on the 26th of April, 1478. As this is the last year in which Antonio Rossellino is recorded as a tax-payer in the Guild of Sculptors, it is probable that he died shortly after, though Vasari says that he lived as late as 1490.

* The fine "gesso duro" of this relief belonging to C. Drury Fortnum, Esq., of Stanmore, which is in some respects superior to the marble. perhaps represents the master's original conception.

+ Dr. W. Bode, op. cit. p. 38, speaks of this statue in terms of high praise.