Mino da Fiesole

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Portrait of Mino da Fiesole, metalpoint with white gouache on blue-grey prepared paper cut to an oval, Chatsworth House. Subject identified based on the similarity to the woodcut illustration in the Lives of Vasari, for which it is a probable source. Alfred Scharf's attribution of the drawing to Filippino Lippi has been generally accepted.[1]

Mino da Fiesole (c. 1429 – July 11, 1484), also known as Mino di Giovanni, was an

Italian Renaissance sculptor from Poppi, Tuscany
. He is noted for his portrait busts.

Career

Mino's 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.

Mino was a friend and fellow-worker of Desiderio da Settignano and Matteo Civitali, all three being about the same age. Mino's sculpture is remarkable for its finish and delicacy of details, as well as for its spirituality and strong devotional feeling.[2]

Of Mino's earlier works, the finest are in the

cathedral of Fiesole, the altarpiece and tomb of Bishop Leonardo Salutati (died 1466)[2]

His most arduous and complicated commissions, which define his intellectual and artistic nature, are an altarpiece and tombs 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).

The earliest dated Renaissance portrait bust, 1453, by Mino da Fiesole of Piero de' Medici

The pulpit in

bas-reliefs of great minuteness, but somewhat weakly designed.[2]

In 1473 he went to

St. Maria in Trastevere
bears the inscription Opus Mini.

Several monuments in

Bishop of Burgos Ortega Gomiel (d. 1514), however, have also been attributed to the school of Andrea Bregno
.

Some of Mino's portrait busts and profile bas-reliefs are preserved in the

Verrocchio and other sculptors of his time.[2]

Several museums house Mino's work, some of which include

Musée du Louvre in Paris, France, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, Alabama, and National Gallery of Art
in Washington, D.C.

His other works include:

Lives of the Artists dismisses him as a mere follower of Desiderio da Settignano
, his master.

Piazza Mino da Fiesole [it] in Fiesole

Gallery

See also

Notes

  1. ^ George R. Goldner, "Portrait of a Man Looking Down (Mino da Fiesole)," cat. no. 20, in G.R. Goldner et al., The Drawings of Filippino Lippi and His Circle, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1997, p. 136.
  2. ^ a b c d Chisholm 1911.
  3. ^ Butterfield, Andrew (March 8, 2012). "They Clamor for Our Attention". The New York Review of Books 59 (4): 11

References

  •  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Mino di Giovanni". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  • Handley, M. L. (1913). "Mino di Giovanni" . In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

External links

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