Mino da Fiesole

Mino da Fiesole (c. 1429 – July 11, 1484), also known as Mino di Giovanni, was an Italian sculptor from Poppi, Tuscany. He is noted for his portrait busts.

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.

Of Mino's earlier works, the finest are in the cathedral of Fiesole, the altarpiece and tomb of Bishop Leonardo Salutati (died 1466)

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).

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