Compared to Verrocchio, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and other artists
working under Lorenzo the Great in Florence, Antonio and Piero del
Pollaiuolo, two enterprising sons of a poultry vendor, are rather
less known. Many, including Vasari, believed that Piero was simply
the assistant of his multi-talented elder brother Antonio, a
painter, sculptor, goldsmith and architect. But contemporaries in
the fifteenth century disagreed, identifying Piero as a painter and
Antonio as a supreme goldsmith and great master in bronze. Many of
the famous paintings usually credited to Antonio should in fact be
reattributed to Piero, including the altarpiece of the Cardinal of
Portugal in the Uffizi and the famous St Sebastian Martyr in the
National Gallery, London. These panels, shiny and soft owing to the
use of the new technique of oil paint, show a strong debt to
Flemish painting. Antonio's greatness is seriously underestimated
because much of his work has been melted down to recover the gold,
silver, enamel and precious stones of which it was made. Dozens of
his brooches, necklaces, bowls, candlesticks, crosses, censers,
chalices and reliquaries have been lost in this way, with only
documentary evidence surviving. Of what remains, the two bronze
tombs of the popes Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII in St Peter's, along
with an admirable corpus of drawings, attest to Antonio's visionary
greatness. In the drawings, his distinctively sharp style portrays
a race of fabled heroes, endowed with impossibly perfect physiques.
The two Vatican tombs astounded Antonio's contemporaries,
especially the monument to Sixtus IV, with its allegorical figures,
antique porphyry columns and frescoes by Perugino.
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