23
His art engages exactly in the Florentine Mannerism in the first half of the sixteenth century: and as well as Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino and Bronzino for painting, Bandinelli and Benvenuto Cellini are for carving the most important members of the Florentine generation that followed the way of the greats such as Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael.
One of the most common criticisms about Baccio’s style regards the abnormal proportions and the ungainly representation of the sculptures, causing his contemporaries to consider him coarse and rough: this kind of objection always infuriates the proud and conceited artist.
His fall into the oblivion gets definitive in the nineteenth century, when the translation of Giorgio Vasari’s “Vite” (lives)is spread all over the world: Vasari is a harsh detractor of Bandinelli, many times reaching true heights of unjust partisanship in preferring his hated enemy, Cellini.
The exhibition which is currently staged at the Bargello Museum, the largest museum of sculpture of the Italian Renaissance, does justice to the author of many beautiful and strongworks, and finally replaces Baccio Bandinelli in the primary circle of the artists of the Florentine mannerism, that has produced and left so much inheritance in the Italian figurative art.
By Enrico De Iulis
His Adam and Eve, sculpted for the Cathedral of Florence is ignored by everyone, and even the Hercules and Cacus that still stands in Piazza della Signoria, has always been consider ridicule. The rough and heavy design is obviously a deliberate stylistic choice, by an artist who, instead, shows in the drawings such grace to be copied and studied by generations of Italian and European artists.