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Mino Di Giovanni

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
• Mino Di Giovanni
The Catholic Encyclopedia
• Mino di Giovanni

MINO DI GIOVANNI (1431-1484), called DA Fiesole, Italian sculptor, was born at Poppi in the Casentino. He had property at Fiesole. Vasari's account of him is very inaccurate. Mino was a friend and fellow-worker with Desiderio da Settignano and Matteo Civitale, all three being about the same age. Mino's sculpture is remarkable for its finish and delicacy of details, as well as for its spirituality and strong devotional feeling. Of Mino's earlier works, the finest are in the duomo of Fiesole, the altarpiece and tomb of Bishop Salutati, executed before 1466. In the Badia of Florence are an altarpiece and the tombs of Bernardo Giugni (1466) and the Margrave Hugo (1481), all sculptured in white marble, with life-sized recumbent effigies and attendant angels. The pulpit in Prato Cathedral, in which he collaborated with Antonio Rossellino, finished in 1473, is very delicately sculptured with bas-reliefs of great minuteness, but somewhat weakly designed. Soon after the completion of this work Mino went to Rome, where he executed the tomb of Pope Paul II. (now in the crypt of St Peter's), the tomb of Francesco Tornabuoni in S. Maria sopra Minerva, and a beautiful little marble tabernacle for the holy oils in S. Maria in Trastevere. There can be little doubt that he was also the sculptor of several monuments in S. Maria del Popolo, especially those of Bishop Gomiel and Archbishop Rocca (1482), and the marble reredos given by Pope Alexander VI. Some of Mino's portrait busts and profile bas-reliefs are preserved in the Bargello at Florence; they are full of life and expression, though without the extreme realism of Verrocchio and other sculptors of his time.

See Vasari, Milanesi's ed. (1878-1882); Perkins's Italian Sculptors, Winckelmann and D'Agincourt, Storia della scultura (1813); Hans Semper, Architekten der Renaissance (Dresden, 1880); Wilhelm Bode, Die italienische Plastik (Berlin, 1893).