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Updated: June 7, 2025
'As yet, to use the words of Roscoe, 'the characters rarely excelled the daily prototypes of common life; and their forms, although at times sufficiently accurate, were often vulgar and heavy.... To everything great and elevated, the art was yet a stranger: even the celebrated picture of Pollajuolo exhibits only a group of half-naked and vulgar wretches, discharging their arrows at a miserable fellow-creature, who, by changing places with one of his murderers, might with equal propriety become a murderer himself.
The greatest master of pure line, in his portraits and nudes we have forgotten his chilly pastiches of Raphael of the past century, Ingres has been and still is for Degas a god on the peaks of Parnassus. Degas is an Ingres who has studied the Japanese. Only such men as Pollajuolo and Botticelli rank with Degas in the mastery of rhythmic line.
Some one has said that he seemed to hold Giotto by one hand, and reach forward to Raphael with the other; and considering the pictures which were painted before his time, his works are as wonderful as Raphael's are beautiful. He died in 1429. ANDREA VERROCCHIO, LORENZO DI CREDI, and ANTONIO POLLAJUOLO were all good painters of the Florentine school of the last half of the fifteenth century.
The same remarks apply to the terra-cotta relief by Pollajuolo in the South Kensington Museum. This piece displays the struggles of twelve naked men, divided into six pairs of combatants. Two of the couples hold short chains with the left hand, and seek to stab each other with the right. In the case of another two couples the fight is over, and the victor is insulting his fallen foe.
At his death in 1455 they were unfinished, and a host of sculptors, including Brunellesco and Paolo Uccello, are said to have handled the work, Antonio del Pollajuolo being credited with the quail in the lower frame. Over the door stands the beautiful work of Sansovino, the Baptism of Christ.
On the 1st of April, Simone del Pollajuolo, called Il Cronaca, was commissioned to make the necessary preparations; but later on, upon the 30th, we find Antonio da San Gallo, Baccio d'Agnolo, Bernardo della Ciecha, and Michelangelo associated with him in the work of transportation. An enclosure of stout beams and planks was made and placed on movable rollers.
In 1467 Benedetto Salutati ordered made for such a pageant all the trappings for two horses, worked in two hundred pounds of silver by Pollajuolo; thirty pounds of pearls were also used to trim the garments of the sergeants. No wonder Savonarola was enthusiastic in his denunciation of such extravagance. Henry VIII. had "a pair of hose of purple silk and Venice gold, woven like a caul."
And then, in Florence at any rate, all the great churches were finished, or almost finished; it was necessary for the artist to find other patrons. Among those workers in metal who had assisted Ghiberti when he cast the reliefs of his first baptistery gate was the father of a man who had with his brother learned the craft of the goldsmiths. His name was Antonio Pollajuolo.
The mathematical distribution of these dreadful groups gives an effect of frozen passion; while the vigorous workmanship displays not only an enthusiasm for muscular anatomy, but a real sympathy with blood-fury in the artist. There was, therefore, a certain propriety in the choice of Pollajuolo to cast the sepulchre of Sixtus IV. in bronze at Rome.
Innocent VIII. had been the first to snare this lucrative guest in 1489. The Lance of Longinus was sent him as a token of the Sultan's gratitude, and Innocent, who built an altar for the relique, caused his own tomb to be raised close by. His effigy in bronze by Pollajuolo still carries in its hand this blood-gift from the infidel to the High Priest of Christendom.
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