Maso Finiguerra
[3] He died in his late thirties, and his influence lived after him in the works of the early Florentine engravers and drawings related to them, especially the shadowy figure of Baccio Baldini, who Vasari associates with him.
In 1449, there is a note of a sulfur cast from a niello of his workmanship being handed over by the painter Alessio Baldovinetti to a customer in payment or exchange for a dagger.
[4] In 1452 Maso delivered and was paid for a niellated silver pax commissioned for the Florence Baptistery by the Arte di Calimala or cloth merchant's guild.
In 1462 he is recorded as having supplied another wealthy Florentine, Cino di Filippo Rinuccini, with waist buckles, and in the years next following with forks and spoons for christening presents.
[9] The only fully documented works by Finiguerra which survive are the intarsia figures for the cathedral, over half life-size, executed from his cartoons for the sacristy.
[11] Much the largest group of drawings is in the Uffizi, some of which are inscribed "Maso Finiguerra" in a seventeenth-century writing, probably by Filippo Baldinucci, curator of the Medici collections.
They agree strictly with the accounts of Finiguerra's drawings left us by Vasari and Baldinucci, and disagree in no respect with the character of the inlaid figures of the sacristy.
[17] The drawings are in black chalk, then ink and usually wash.[18] The attribution of a group of nielli, in particular some in the Bargello, is complicated by problems arising from the matching up of documentary records, and the remarks of Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini, with the surviving works.
[23] In the generations following Baccio Bandinelli said Finiguerra was among the young artists under Lorenzo Ghiberti working on the famous gates of the Baptistery, Florence; Benvenuto Cellini said he was the finest master of his day in niello engraving, and that his masterpiece was a pax of the Crucifixion in the baptistery of St. John; that being no great draftsman, he in most cases, including that of the above-mentioned pax, worked from drawings by Antonio del Pollaiuolo.
Vasari's account was confirmed and amplified in the next century by Baldinucci, who says that he has seen many drawings by Finiguerra in the manner of Masaccio; adding that Maso was beaten by Pollaiuolo in competition for the reliefs of the great silver altar-table commission by the merchants guild for the baptistery of St. John (this famous work is now preserved in the Opera del Duomo).
Again, and perhaps this is the strongest argument of any, all authentic records agree in representing Finiguerra as a close associate in art and business of Antonio del Pollaiuolo.
