Pietro Torrigiano - Biography

Sculptor, born in Florence, NC Italy. He studied alongside Michelangelo at the Academy of Lorenzo de' Medici. After working in Bologna, Siena, Rome, and Holland, he went to England, where he introduced Italian Renaissance art. He created the tombs of Margaret Beaufort in Westminster Abbey, and of her son Henry VII and his queen. He settled in Spain and died in the prisons of the Inquisition.

Biography

Torrigiano was born in Florence.

Benvenuto Cellini, reporting a conversation with Torrigiano, relates that he and Michelangelo, while both young, were copying the frescoes in the Carmine chapel, when some slighting remark made by Michelangelo so enraged Torrigiano that he struck him on the nose, and thus caused that disfigurement which is so conspicuous in all the portraits of Michelangelo. Soon after this Torrigiano visited Rome, and helped Pinturicchio in modelling the elaborate stucco decorations in the Apartamenti Borgia for Pope Alexander VI.

After some time spent as a hired soldier in the service of different states, Torrigiano was invited to England to execute the magnificent effigial monument for Henry VII and his queen, which still exists in the lady chapel of Westminster Abbey. After this Torrigiano received the commission for the altar, retable and baldacchino which stood at the west, outside the screen of Henry VII's monument. part of its frieze still exists, as do also a large number of fragments of the terra-cotta angels which surmounted the baldacchino and parts of the large figure of Christ. Henry VIII also commissioned Torrigiano to make him a magnificent funerary monument, somewhat similar to that of Henry VII, but one-fourth larger, to be placed in a chapel at Windsor; For Henry VII's monument he contracted to receive £1500, for the altar and its fittings £1000, and £2000 for Henry VIII's monument. Other works attributed from internal evidence to Torrigiano are the monument of Margaret of Richmond, mother of Henry VII, in the south aisle of his chapel, and a terra cotta effigy in the chapel of the Rolls.

While these royal works were going on Torrigiano visited Florence in order to get skilled assistants. He tried to induce Benvenuto Cellini to come to England to help him, but Cellini refused partly from his dislike to the brutal and swaggering manners of Torrigiano, and also because he did not wish to live among "such beasts as the English". The latter part of Torrigiano's life was spent in Spain, especially at Seville, where, besides the painted figure of St Hieronymus in the museum, some terra-cotta sculpture by him still exists.