Bartolomeo Ammanati

Bartolomeo Ammanati , 1511-92, Italian sculptor and architect. He studied under Bandinelli in Florence and assisted Jacopo Sansovino in his work on the Library of St. Mark's, Venice. Ammanati, whose style was greatly influenced by Michelangelo's Medici tombs, made a colossal statue of Hercules, at Padua. In Rome he collaborated with Vignola and Vasari in their work at the villa of Pope Julius III. His best work here was in the Ruspoli Palace and in the court of the Collegio Romano. Returning to Florence in 1557, he became architect to Cosimo de' Medici. He made the Santa Trinita bridge over the Arno and a number of fountains, among them the Neptune fountain for the Piazza della Signoria. He built the court facade of Pitti Palace, the Guigni Palace, and a cloister of Santo Spirito. Pious in his old age, he wrote a recantation of his secular work and destroyed some of it. The poet Laura Battiferri was his wife.

Ammanati, Bartolomeo or Ammannati, Bartolomeo (1511–92). Born near Florence, Ammannati was a gifted Mannerist sculptor, but he also designed buildings, including the elegant Ponte Santa Trinità in Florence (1567–70), rebuilt after its destruction in 1944. He was involved in the design of the sunken cortile and fountain grottoes at the Villa Giulia in Rome (1551–5) with Vignola and Vasari, and later extended the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (1558–70), for which he designed the heavily rusticated garden-front and cortile, where the influence of the Mint in Venice by Sansovino (with whom Ammannati had worked earlier) is clear. He supervised the construction (and may have played a part in the design) of Michelangelo's entrance vestibule and staircase to the Library of San Lorenzo, Florence (1524–50s). Among his designs for churches were San Giovannino (1579–85), Florence, and Santa Maria in Gradi, Arezzo (1592), both of which were influenced to some extent by Il Gesù in Rome. His connection with the Collegio Romano in Rome is at best tentative, for it was designed by Giuseppe Valeriano (1542–96). He probably built most of the Palazzo Provinciale, Lucca (1577–81), in which the centrepiece is a Serlian loggia derived from that employed by Vasari at the Uffizi in Florence.

Bibliography

Fossi (1967);
Heydenreich (1996);
Kiene (1995);
Lotz (1977);
Jane Turner (1996)