Mino da Fiesole
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Mino da Fiesole (c.1429—1484) was a Florentine sculptor. He is noted for his portrait busts. His work was influenced by his master Desiderio da Settignano and by Antonio Rossellino, and is characterized by its sharp, angular treatment of drapery. Unlike most Florentine sculptors of his generation, Mino passed two lengthy sojourns in Rome, from about 1459 to 1464 and again from about 1473/1474 until 1480.
His most arduous and complicated commissions, which define his intellectual and artistic nature, are the monumental wall monuments for the church of the Benedictine monastery in Florence known as the Badia. (The monuments have been reinstalled in the rebuilt church.) The first, completed about 1468, was essentially a private commission for the Florentine jurist Bernardo Giugni. The second, directly commissioned by the monks and finished in 1481, honored the memory of their founder, the tenth century Ugo, count of Tuscany. The wall monuments exercised Mino's skills: portraits and bas-reliefs are worked into complex tectonic aedicular structures with elaborate highly individualistic decorative moldings. Art historians have revelled in the extraordinary diversity of contemporary and ancient sources that Mino marshaled in these tombs, which distinguish him from other sculptors active in mid quattrocento Florence (Zuraw 1998).
His other works include:
- a portrait bust of Piero de Medici (1453)
- a portrait bust of Niccolò Strozzi (1454)
- a bust of Astorgio Manfredi (1455)
- the ciborium over the high altar of Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome
- a bust of Dietisalvi Neroni, adviser to Piero de Medici (1464)
- companion pieces of Charity and Faith, most probably designed for a wall tomb (1475/1480)
Giorgio Vasari's vita of Mino da Fiesole in his Lives of the Artists dismisses him as a mere follower of Desiderio da Settignano, his master.
