The Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence has purchased an unprecedented early Renaissance sculpture which portrays Filippo Brunelleschi (Florence, 1377-1446), the great architect already celebrated by his contemporaries for the grandiose undertaking of the Dome of the Florence Cathedral and which supporter of the Renaissance of the arts in the early fifteenth century. It is a terracotta head (25.6 x 22.1 x 20.2 cm) modeled without the aid of a cast, shaping a compact, almost full block of clay, as also demonstrated by the considerable weight (7 kg, 1), by Andrea di Lazzaro Cavalcanti known as Buggiano (1412 – 1462), adopted son and sole heir of Brunelleschi, following his father’s death.
The exceptional discovery is due to art historians Giancarlo Gentilini and Alfredo Bellandi who identified this sculpture as the model created by Buggiano, presumably between February and March 1447, for the marble bust of Brunelleschi intended for the commemorative monument in the Cathedral of Florence entrusted to him by the Workers of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore.
The sculpture, found among the furnishings of a historic residence in the Florentine area – incredibly having survived almost 700 years of life, considering the delicacy of the material it is made of – was purchased by the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore for 300 thousand euros and, after the restoration, it will be exhibited and will then become part of the collection of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.
For art historians it can undoubtedly be said that this is an exceptional discovery because, in addition to the undoubted value of Andrea Cavalcanti’s art, portraits of Brunelleschi from the same period or shortly after his death are very rare. Apart from the one in the marble monument in the Cathedral of Florence and the death mask in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, only two others are known in painting: the youthful profile inserted by Masaccio in the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel in the Carmine, in the scene depicting Saint Peter in the chair (1427-28), and the much more modest one in the well-known panel preserved in the Louvre Museum in Paris, attributed by Vasari to Paolo Uccello and today discussed with a dating to around 1470.
It is one of the oldest terracotta effigies in existence, not far from the famous bust of Niccolò da Uzzano referring to Donatello or Desiderio da Settignano (Florence, National Bargello Museum) which therefore also constitutes a significant testimony to the rebirth of a genre which was the sculptural portrait among the most representative of the new spirit of Humanism.
“The terracotta head with the features of Filippo Brunelleschi’s face was shaped by Andrea Cavalcanti (il Buggiano), who was Filippo’s adopted son and heir – states the art historian Antonio Natali, councilor of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore , former director of the Uffizi – It is known that both had notable assignments from the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore: Brunelleschi does not matter to say, while Buggiano should be remembered for the admirable humanistic washbasins in the sacristies of the cathedral and, in this juncture, above all the monument celebration of Brunelleschi in the cathedral, which has its own model in today’s terracotta head, of which, with these premises, everyone will understand how the acquisition by the Opera of Santa Maria del Fiore was even inevitable”.
“We believe that it is truly an exceptional opportunity, an unthinkable privilege, to be able to present the unprecedented, vivid portrait of Filippo Brunelleschi, modeled by his adopted son, Andrea Cavalcanti, in the aftermath of his death, say Giancarlo Gentilini and Alfredo Bellandi – underlines Natali – As can be deduced from many formal and technical aspects, the work we present here is therefore to be considered the model prepared by Buggiano for the execution of the marble portrait, considering that Brunelleschi was notorious ‘small in person and features’ (Vasari 1568), and the dimensions of the face (perhaps slightly reduced by the usual ‘shrinkage’ of the clay) are substantially comparable to those seen in the plaster death mask and the marble effigy, but compared to the facial cast the image, now free of the contraction of rigor mortis, takes on more harmonious proportions, the face can almost be inscribed in a sphere”.
The work requires restoration, as although intact (apart from a single gap in the chin, which an old, clumsy plaster addition makes it appear larger), it presents widespread scratches and residues of a chalky glaze and traces of various layers pictorial (one with apparently naturalistic tones and at least two of brown colour, perhaps to simulate bronze, subsequent to the restoration of the chin).
The phases of the story
On 15 April 1446 Brunelleschi died in his home in Florence and Buggiano probably created the funerary mask on the same day and place, where he also lived, according to a custom of the ancient Roman world well known and practiced in Florence. On 30 December of the same year, the Consuls of the Wool Guild established that Brunelleschi’s body, temporarily placed in Giotto’s Bell Tower, be buried in the Cathedral. On 18 February of the following year, 1447, the workers of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore decided to create a wall monument in honor of him, consisting of his “natural figure” and an epigraphic celebratory ‘memory’ entrusted at Marsuppini. Shortly afterwards, on 27 February, Andrea Cavalcanti, who had long been active in the construction site of Santa Maria del Fiore, received from the Opera the marble necessary to create the monument.
Between February and March 1447, Cavalcanti created the model for the clipeated bust of the commemorative monument in the Cathedral of Florence. The monument will be finished in 1447, we know that it was still being worked on towards the end of May when the text composed by Marsuppini was approved. Presumably, after the construction of the monument, the model was relegated to the sculptor’s workshop among study and subsidiary materials. The state of conservation of the work testifies to its subsequent reuse as an independent sculpture, probably preserved for a long time with the awareness of the illustrious identity of the depicted figure which later fell into oblivion.
Andrea di Lazzaro Cavalcanti known as Buggiano from the village of Valdinievole where he was born in 1412, son of the sharecropper of Brunelleschi’s brother, was adopted at the age of seven by Filippo, already established and influential as a sculptor and architect, who included him in the main construction sites of the Florentine churches where he sculpted notable works largely designed by Brunelleschi himself, such as the two splendid sinks in the Sacristies of the Cathedral and the Medici Sepulcher in the center of the Old Sacristy in San Lorenzo. A prolific and versatile sculptor in marble, wood, terracotta and stucco, he is remembered by Antonio Manetti in the Notizia di Filippo di ser Brunellesco (Life of Filippo Brunelleschi) (ca. 1487) as “his disciple” and “his heir”, and of this Vasari’s illustrious city tradition is nourished in the Torrentina edition of the Lives where he traces a brief profile of the sculptor who died in Florence on 21 February 1462.
An artist of Donatello extraction with an austere style of velvety marble delicacy in his children full of vigorous physiognomic expressionism who populate old-fashioned sarcophagi, washbasins and Marian reliefs, Buggiano stands out in the classicist revival of the early fifteenth century for a revisitation of ancient art guided by philological knowledge and by his adherence to fifteenth-century naturalism inspired by Donatello, Michelozzo, Luca della Robbia and Bernardo Rossellino – who involved him around 1450 for the crowning of the Bruni Monument in Santa Croce -, through whom he developed his composite style with a deliberately archaistic tone that distinguishes it in the pentagram of Renaissance sculpture.