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If Donatello founded no school, this was far more the case with Ghiberti. His supposed pupil, Antonio del Pollajuolo, showed no sign of Ghiberti's influence, but struck out for himself a style distinguished by almost brutal energy and bizarre realism characteristics the very opposite to those of his master.
Among the bronze-founders it is enough to name Ghiberti, Antonio Filarete, Antonio Pollajuolo, Donatello and his pupil Bertoldo, Andrea Riccio, the master of the candelabrum in S. Antonio at Padua, Jacopo Sansovino, the master of the door of the sacristy in S. Mark's at Venice, Alessandro Leopardi, the master of the standard-pedestals of the Piazza of S. Mark's.
Are Raphael and Michelangelo only provisionally eclipsed by Botticelli and by Donatello and Mino da Fiesole, or are they remanded to a lasting limbo? I find I have said in my notes that the Moses is improbable and unimpressive, and I pretended a more genuine joy in the heads of the two Pollajuolo brothers which startle you from their tomb as you enter the church.
And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a "comprehensive" as those with the sixth or synthetic sense have been named by Lombroso? Botticelli, beginning as a goldsmith's apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle), ended as a painter, the most original in all Italy. His canvases have a rare, mysterious power of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and the brothers Pollajuolo, and his inward vision must have been something more than paint and pattern and subject. A palimpsest may be discerned by the imaginative or, let us say, fanciful, since Coleridge long ago set forth the categories whose secrets are not to be deciphered easily, yet are something more than those portrayed by the artist on the flat surface of his picture. He painted the usual number of Madonnas, like any artist of his period; yet he did not convince his world, or the generations succeeding, that this piety was orthodox. Suspected during his lifetime of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, has in our times been definitely ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and still a mystic. Doesn't the perverse clash in such a complex temperament give us exotic dissonances? All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli walked its narrow ways and lived its splendid coloured life. His sensitive nature absorbed as a sponge does water the impulses and motives of his contemporaries. The lurking secrets of the "new learning" doctrines that made for damnation, such as the recrudescence of the mediæval conception of an angelic neuter host, neither for Heaven nor Hell, not on the side of Lucifer nor with the starry hosts were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its note is in Citt
Pollajuolo, like so many Florentine artists, was a goldsmith, a painter, and a worker in niello, before he took to sculpture. As a goldsmith he is said to have surpassed all his contemporaries, and his mastery over this art influenced his style in general.
In 1366 the altar was destroyed, but the parts in bas-relief by Cione were retained and incorporated into the new work, which was finished in 1478. Ghiberti, Orcagna, Verocchio, and Pollajuolo, all executed various details of this magnificent monument. Goldsmiths did not quite change their standing and characteristics until late in the sixteenth century.
Of the famous artists of the day, Lucretia must likewise have known Antonio di Sangallo, her father's architect, and also Antonio Pollajuolo, the most renowned sculptor of the Florentine school in Rome during the last decades of the fifteenth century. He died there in 1498. But the most famous of all the artists then in Rome was Michael Angelo.
The fiercest emotions of the Renaissance find expression in the clenched teeth, strained muscles, knotted brows, and tense nerves, depicted by Pollajuolo with eccentric energy. We seem to be assisting at some of those combats a steccato chiuso wherein Sixtus IV. delighted, or to have before our eyes a fray between Crocensi and Vallensi in the streets of Rome.
And while the silver forks were just dallying with the appetising delicacies that introduced the more serious business of the supper such as morsels of liver, cooked to that exquisite point that they would melt in the mouth there was time to admire the designs on the enamelled silver centres of the brass service, and to say something, as usual, about the silver dish for confetti, a masterpiece of Antonio Pollajuolo, whom patronising Popes had seduced from his native Florence to more gorgeous Rome.
Criticised in detail, each separate figure may be faulty. The composition, as a whole, is picturesque and grandiose. The same can scarcely be said about the tomb of Innocent VIII., erected by Antonio and his brother Piero del Pollajuolo. While it perpetuates the memory of an uninteresting Pontiff, it has but little, as a work of art, to recommend it. The Pollajuoli were not great sculptors.
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