Bernardo Rossellino

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Rossellino's tabernacle in the church of San Lorenzo, Florence.

Bernardo di Matteo Gamberelli (1409 – 1464), better known as Bernardo Rossellino, was an Italian sculptor and architect, the elder brother of the painter Antonio Rossellino.

[edit] Biography

Rossellino was born in Settignano, near Florence.

As a young man he was the pupil and collaborator of Leone Battista Alberti, from whose sketches and plans he constructed the Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, one of the very first fully Renaissance palazzi. It bears three orders on flat pilasters inscribed on a surface of delicate and varied rustication, beeneath a corbelled cornice without a frieze. At Arezzo he applied a façade all'antica to the late Gothic structure of the charitable confraternity, the Fraternità della Misericordia.

Rossellino was active in Tuscany and Rome, where he worked a lot for Pope Nicholas V, enlarging the transept and apse of the Old St. Peter's Basilica (1452–55) that was swept away in the following generation. Among lesser projects carried out in Rome for Nicholas was restoration of Santo Stefano Rotondo, c. 1450, where Rossellino's altar may still be seen.

Rosselino became famous most of all for the idealized replanning of Pienza, the ancient district of Corsignano, where Pope Pius II wanted to make a monument of his place of birth, designed according to the principles of the Renaissance urbanistics and architecture. He made the center with the square and main constructions, the Duomo, Palazzo Pubblico, the Bishop's Palace (Palazzo Vescovile) and the Palazzo Piccolomini, which were to be surrounded by the rest of the little city. In the Palazzo Piccolomini Rossellino took up again the façade organization of Palazzo Rucellai.^[1] For Pius Rossellino also designed the Sienese palazzi of the Nerucci and the beautiful Palazzo Piccolomini.

In architecture he innovated the mural funeral monument, with the wall tomb of Leonardo Bruni in Santa Croce in Florence, (1444 – 1447)^[2] undocumented but immediately famous. In it he depicted the late Florentine chancellor lying in repose on a sarcophagus, in a shallow reveal within the thickness of the wall, set within an arched entablature supported on pilasters, recalling the central opening of a triumphal arch, with a relief of the Madonna in the tympanum. This type of tomb was taken up by other artists, first of all by Rossellino's townsman Desiderio da Settignano. This tomb was used as a model throughout the entire Early Renaissance.^[3]

Among other sculptural commissions in architectural formats, Bernardo designed the tomb of La Beata Villana in the Church of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, and that of the jurist Filippo Lazzari in the Church of San Domenico at Pistoia. He provided a richly ornamented marble doorway for the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena, and a terracotta panel representing the Annunciation is in the cathedral at Arezzo.

Rossellino died in Florence in 1464.