Piero del Pollaiuolo
Their work shows both classical influences and an interest in human anatomy; according to Vasari, the brothers carried out dissections to improve their knowledge of the subject (though modern scholars tend to doubt this).
[3] Giorgio Vasari, who wrote several decades after both brothers were dead, includes a joint biography of Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
Vasari says that Antonio was especially highly regarded for his disegno or drawing,[4] and it may be that on shared works he did most of the underdrawing, leaving Piero and their assistants to complete the painting.
In some cases these have changed over the years, for example the Apollo and Daphne in the National Gallery in London was long attributed to Antonio, but by 2023 is described by the museum as by Piero.
[9] In the traditional distribution of authorship, Piero (and his workshop) was usually given the smaller altarpieces and portraits, with mythological subjects, especially several with Hercules, given to Antonio.
[17] The situation is not entirely clarified by Piero's documented, important and very public commission in 1479 for a set of full-length paintings of the Seven Virtues for the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of government of the Republic of Florence.
[22] A recently re-attributed Portrait of a Youth sold at Sotheby's in 2021 for 4,564,200 GBP (6,261,764 USD), the first "fully attributed work" by Piero ever to come to auction.
The brothers took their nickname from the trade of their father Jacopo, who sold poultry, pollaio meaning "hen coop" in Italian,[25] and pollaiuolo "poulterer".
The Florentine painter Andrea del Castagno (d. 1457) has been considered as a possible master (sometimes for both brothers) on stylistic grounds and the authority of Vasari, but problems with the dating makes this questioned by many scholars.
[29] In a surviving letter by Antonio of 1494 he says that he and a brother (presumed to be Piero) painted the three huge canvases of three Labours of Hercules for the Medici Palace thirty-four years before; these were famous in their time, but are now lost.
He said in 1903 that the Coronation of the Virgin in San Gimignano was "a picture of unalloyed mediocrity, with scarcely a touch of charm to repay the absence of life and vigour".
According to Galli, "What they all have in common is a pronounced taste for precious effects, the highly efficacious imitation of jewels, brocades, velvets, with an illusionistic and tactile treatment based on the extensive and experimental use of oil-based binders (at the height of the reign of tempera in Florence), in open emulation of the Flemish masters.
This refulgent pictorial treatment characterizes compositions that are highly studied, always somewhat artificial, populated with rather lanky and awkward figures, often seen with bottom-to-top perspective, with hands and feet that are nervously articulated, somewhat affected, emerging in their aristocratic pallor from silks and velvets studded with rubies and gilded trimmings".
