Pietro Torrigiano

Pietro Torrigiano , 1472-1528, Florentine Renaissance sculptor. Upon leaving Florence in 1492, he worked in Rome and small Italian cities until his departure for the Netherlands, where he worked for the court. By 1511 he was in England, where his gilt bronze masterpiece, the tomb of King Henry VII and his queen, is preserved in Westminster Abbey. In Spain from c.1522, he executed the fine terra-cotta statues of St. Jerome and the Virgin and Child (both: Seville Mus.). Two male portrait busts in the Metropolitan Museum exemplify his firmly modeled, refined, and dignified style. Torrigiano is said to have broken Michelangelo's nose in a quarrel when they were fellow students.

Torrigiano, Pietro (or Pietro Torrigiani) (b Florence, 22 Nov. 1472; d Seville, July/Aug. 1528). Florentine sculptor, active outside Italy for most of his career, particularly in England. He trained under Bertoldo in the Medici ‘academy’ and in a quarrel he broke the nose of his fellow student Michelangelo, permanently disfiguring him. This assault on his favourite is said to have so angered Lorenzo de' Medici that Torrigiano fled Florence and in the 1490s he seems to have worked mainly in Rome; he is also said to have spent some time as a mercenary soldier (Cellini says that he had ‘a most arrogant spirit, with the air of a great warrior rather than a sculptor’). In 1504 he is documented in Avignon, and in 1509–10 he worked in the Netherlands for Margaret of Austria (see Habsburg). By 1511 he had moved to England (probably following an earlier visit, c.1507–8), and it was there that he created his most important works, chief among them the tomb of Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth of York (1512–18, Westminster Abbey), which has been described by Pope-Hennessy as ‘the finest Renaissance tomb north of the Alps’. The two sensitive bronze effigies have a Gothic elegance, but the figures of child angels at the corners of the tomb and the exquisite decorative work introduced a pure Renaissance style into England. It had little immediate influence, however, in a country where the medieval tradition in art was still so vigorous.

In 1519 Torrigiano was commissioned to make a companion tomb for Henry VIII and his then wife Catherine of Aragon, and he visited Florence to recruit help; Cellini (who turned down the invitation when he learned that Torrigiano had broken his hero's nose) says that he continually boasted of his ‘gallant feats among those beasts of Englishmen’. Torrigiano brought several Italian artists to England (including perhaps Giovanni II da Maiano), but the tomb was abandoned when he moved to Spain in about 1522. According to Vasari, his notoriously violent temper led to his death; infuriated by low payment for a statue of the Virgin and Child, he smashed the work, was imprisoned for this sacrilege, and starved himself to death (possibly to avoid the shame of execution).

Torrigiani, Pietro di Torrigiano d'Antonio (1472–1528). Italian sculptor. In 1510 he was working in England on the tomb of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby (1443–1509), mother of King Henry VII (reigned 1485–1509), and in 1512 contracted to build the funerary monument of the King and Elizabeth of York (1465–1503) in the Lady Chapel (now Mortuary Chapel of Henry VII), Westminster Abbey, completed 1518. He also carried out various other works while in England, much of it portrait-sculpture. His importance lies in the fact that his work was the first mature Italian Renaissance design to be created and realized in England.

Bibliography

Chilvers, Osborne, & Farr (eds.) (1988);
W. Papworth (1892);
Jane Turner (1996)