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Updated: June 20, 2025
All the work of Antonio Rossellino, Matteo Civitali, Mino da Fiesole, and Benedetto da Majano, is distinguished by sweetness, grace, tranquillity, and self-restraint as though these artists had voluntarily imposed limits on their genius, refusing to trespass beyond a traced circle of religious subjects, or to aim at effects unrealisable by purity of outline, suavity of expression, delicacy of feeling, and urbanity of style.
The second group of distinguished craftsmen Verocchio, Luca della Robbia, Rossellino, Da Maiano, Civitali, Desiderio da Settignano expired at the commencement of the century. It seemed as though a gap in the ranks of plastic artists had purposely been made for the entrance of a predominant and tyrannous personality.
Matteo Civitali of Lucca made the wooden lectern behind the high altar, and Giovanni da Bologna forged the crucifix, while Andrea del Sarto, not at his best, painted the Saints Margaret and Catherine, Peter and John, to the right and left of the altar. The capital of the porphyry column here is by Stagio Stagi of Pietrasanta, while the porphyry vase is a prize from a crusade.
Civitali, by singular good fortune, was chosen in the best years of his life to adorn the cathedral of his native city; and it is here, rather than at Genoa, where much of his sculpture may also be seen, that he deserves to be studied. For the people of Lucca he designed the Chapel of the Santo Volto a gem of the purest Renaissance architecture and a pulpit in the same style.
It is a Madonna of Civitali that greets you at the corner of the most characteristic church of Lucca, S. Michele. There, under the great bronze S. Michele, whose wings seem to brood over the city, you come upon that strange fantastic and yet beautiful fagade which Guidetto built in 1188.
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