Desiderio da Settignano

[1] Desiderio matriculated into the Arte dei Maestri di Pietra e Legname, Florence's guild of Stone and Woodworkers, in 1453[2] and shortly thereafter already was supplying cherub head medallions for the frieze running across the front of the Pazzi Chapel in the second cloisteryard of the Basilica of Santa Croce.

Desiderio took over the essential compositional scheme of an elevated triumphal arch containing a sarcophagus and effigy bier from the Bruni monument but transformed the sobriety of the earlier memorial into a work of heightened decorative fancy.

In the Marsuppini tomb, Desiderio placed standing children holding heraldic shields on either side of the sarcophagus, draped long festoons from an ornate candelabra which surmounts the arch of the lunette, and positioned running youths above the pilasters which frame the funeral niche.

To increase the visibility of the deceased scholar and statesman, he tilted Marsuppini's effigy forward toward the viewer and carved elaborate floral decorations on the rounded corners of the lion-footed sarcophagus.

For Desiderio's handling of "flattened relief" we must turn to his panel of Saint Jerome at Prayer in the Desert (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) or his tondo of the Meeting of Christ and John the Baptist as Youths (Louvre Museum, Paris).

"[4] Beyond the Marsuppini tomb and the San Lorenzo tabernacle, little of Desiderio's work is documented or dated and a chronological reconstruction of his artistic development is a matter of conjecture based upon stylistic comparisons.

Throughout his brief career, one of the most telling characteristics of his technique was his unusual ability to give to his sculptures a textural sensuousness that might seem to demand touch: of all Quattrocento sculptors, Desiderio was, perhaps, the most tactile in his appeal.

His work displays true understanding for the crystalline luminosity of marble and how a gently polished and modulated surface could produce an inner glow and how Donatello's famed rilievo schiacciato could be further refined to convey a sense of light softly diffused by its passage through atmosphere.

According to Vasari, his last work was the painted wooden statue of St. Mary Magdalene, now in Santa Trinita, left unfinished and completed by Benedetto da Maiano after Desiderio's death.