ANTONIO

See also:

• ANTONIO ROSSELLINO (1427-c. 1479)

ROSSELLINO (1427-c. 1479)  , Florentine sculptor, was the son of Matteo di Domenico Gamberelli, and had four brothers, who all practised some branch of the fine arts . Almost nothing is known about the life of Antonio, but many of his works exist, and are full of religious sentiment, and executed with the utmost delicacy of touch and technical skill . The style of Antonio and his brother Bernardo is a development of that of Donatello and Ghiberti; it possesses all the refinement and sweetness of the earlier masters, but is not equal to them in vigour or originality . Antonio's chief work, still in perfect preservation, is the lovely tomb of a young cardinal prince of Portugal, who died in 1459 . It occupies one side of a small chapel, also built by Rossellino, on the north of the nave of San Miniato al Monte.' The recumbent effigy of the cardinal rests on a handsome sarcophagus, and over it, under the arch which frames the whole, is a beautiful relief of the Madonna between two flying angels . The tomb was begun in 1461 and finished in 1466; Antonio received four hundred and twenty-five gold florins for it . A reproduction of this tomb with slight Marble Relief by Antonio Rossellino . alterations, and of course a different effigy, was made by Antonio for the wife of Antonio Piccolomini, duke of Amalfi, in the ' Illustrated by Gonnelli, Mon . Sepol. della Tosca•,aa (Florence, 1819), pl. xxiii.church of S . Maria del Monte at Naples, where it still exists . For the same church he also executed some delicate reliefs, which perhaps err in being too pictorial in style, especially in the treatment of the backgrounds . A fine medallion relief by him in marble, originally modelled in terra-cotta, is preserved in the Bargello at Florence (see fig.) .