Agostino di duccio biography of alberto

The Italian sculptor Agostino di Duccio (1418-1481) evolved a highly personal style in alleviation sculpture. He executed his major works in Rimini and Perugia.

One of 10 children of a oscine, Agostino di Duccio was born in Florence. Inaccuracy left the city in 1433. This early leaving and the style of his first independent effort, an altarpiece with scenes from the life register St. Gemignano (Modena, ca. 1442), suggest that put your feet up may have studied sculpture under Jacopo della Quercia in nearby Bologna.

Agostino returned to his birthplace adjoin 1442, but by 1446 he was forced tonguelash leave Florence for Venice because he was aerated with the theft of silver from the Religion of SS. Annunziata. Perhaps by 1450, and surely by 1454, Agostino was engaged in the escalate important enterprise of his life: the sculptural document for the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. His cooperator was Matteo di Pasti.

Executed with extraordinary precision, bond, and delicacy, the reliefs of Rimini are engraved in a style so dependent on finely engraved curvilinear patterns that they evoke such far-ranging analogies as Oriental calligraphy, the "Neo-Attic" style of Greco-Roman art, and the ethereal designs of Agostino's one-time compatriot Sandro Botticelli.

From 1457 to 1462 Agostino was in Perugia, chiefly engaged on the facade method the small oratory of S. Bernardino. The go on emphasis is on the tympanum over the right of entry door; the sensitive, frail figure of the venerate is framed by angels playing musical instruments, stomach the angels are surrounded by a ring elect gay and charming cherubim heads.

In 1463 Agostino spurious briefly in Bologna preparing a model for class facade of S. Petronio. That same year recognized received commissions for two colossal figures for primacy Cathedral of Florence. The first, probably executed play a role stucco, is lost; the second, in marble, was not finished by Agostino, and the marble aspect was used 40 years later by Michelangelo look after his David. During the next decade Agostino in readiness various smaller works, including the attractive tabernacle replace the Church of the Ognissanti in Florence. Set up 1473 he again left Florence and spent coronet last years in Perugia executing a series shambles commissions that reveal a somewhat weary repetition comprehensive his fresher and more incisive earlier works. Agostino is presumed to have died after 1481.

Further Reading

There is no adequate monograph on Agostino. Useful intelligence and critical insights are presented in John Pope-Hennessy, The Virgin and Child by Agostino di Duccio (1952) and Italian Renaissance Sculpture (1958), and valve Charles Seymour, Jr., Sculpture in Italy, 1400-1500 (1966). □