Bernardo di Matteo Gamberelli (1409 – 1464), better known
as Bernardo Rossellino, was an Italian sculptor and architect, the elder brother of the
painter Antonio Rossellino.
Biography
Rossellino was born in Settignano, near Florence.
As a young man he was the pupil and collaborator of Leone Battista Alberti,
from whose sketches and plans he constructed the Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, one of the
very first fully Renaissance palazzi. It bears three orders on flat pilasters inscribed on a surface of delicate and varied
rustication, beeneath a corbelled cornice without a frieze. At Arezzo he applied a façade all'antica to the
late Gothic structure of the charitable confraternity, the Fraternità della
Misericordia.
Rossellino was active in Tuscany and Rome, where he worked a
lot for Pope Nicholas V, enlarging the transept and apse of the Old St. Peter's Basilica (1452–55) that was swept away in the following generation. Among
lesser projects carried out in Rome for Nicholas was restoration of Santo Stefano
Rotondo, c. 1450, where Rossellino's altar may still be seen.
Rosselino became famous most of all for the idealized replanning of Pienza, the ancient
district of Corsignano, where Pope Pius II wanted to make a monument of his natal place,
designed according to the principles of the Renaissance urbanistics and architecture. He
made the center with the square and main constructions, the Duomo, Palazzo Pubblico, the Bishop's Palace (Palazzo Vescovile) and the Palazzo Piccolomini, which were to be surrounded by the rest of the little city. In the Palazzo Piccolomini
Rossellino took up again the façade organization of Palazzo Rucellai [1]. For Pius Rossellino also designed the Sienese palazzi of the Nerucci and the beautiful Palazzo Piccolomini.
In architecture he innovated the mural funeral monument, with the wall tomb of Leonardo
Bruni in Santa Croce in Florence, (1444 –
1447) [2], undocumented but immediately famous. In it he depicted the late Florentine
chancellor lying in repose on a sarcophagus, in a shallow reveal within the thickness of the wall, set within an arched
entablature supported on pilasters, recalling the central opening of a triumphal arch,
with a relief of the Madonna in the tympanum. This type of tomb was taken up by
other artists, first of all by Rossellino's townsman Desiderio da Settignano.
Among other sculptural commissions in architectural formats, Bernardo designed the tomb of La Beata Villana in the Church of
Santa Maria Novella, Florence, and that of the jurist Filippo Lazzari in
the Church of San Domenico at Pistoia. He provided a richly ornamented marble doorway for the
Palazzo Pubblico at Siena, and a terracotta panel representing the Annunciation is in the cathedral at Arezzo.
Rossellino died in Florence in 1464.
References
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