Antonio del Pollaiuolo (UK: POL-eye-WOH-loh, US: POHL-, Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo del pollaˈjwɔːlo]; 17 January 1429/1433 – 4 February 1498), also known as Antonio di Jacopo Pollaiuolo or Antonio Pollaiuolo (also spelled Pollaiolo), was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, engraver, and goldsmith, who made important works in all these media, as well as designing works in others, for example vestments, metal embroidery being a medium he worked in at the start of his career.
His most characteristic works in his main media show largely naked male figures in complicated poses of violent action, drawing from classical examples and often centred on a heroic Hercules. He, or possibly his brother, was also an innovative painter of wide landscape backgrounds, perhaps having learnt from Early Netherlandish painting. His two papal tombs were the only monuments to survive the demolition of Old St Peter's in the next century and be reconstructed in the present St Peter's Basilica.
He very often worked in collaboration with his younger brother Piero del Pollaiuolo (c. 1443–1496), and distinguishing their contributions to satisfy modern ideas of authorship has proved exceptionally difficult, so that many paintings are just described as by the Pollaiuolo brothers. Contemporaries, and Giorgio Vasari, saw Antonio as by far the more talented, and responsible for the design and main painting of most works, but in recent decades the reputation of Piero has strengthened somewhat, and he is now given sole authorship of, for example, the small Apollo and Daphne (1470–1480) by its owner, the National Gallery. At the same time, contemporary references in lists of leading artists, of which there are a number, mostly mention the brothers together, and Vasari's Lives of the Artists treats them in a single life.
According to Kenneth Clark, two factors have reduced his prominence in the modern view of Quattrocento art: the loss of his large paintings of the labours of Hercules (surviving only in miniature copies), and "a name which looks difficult to pronounce". In his own day, and for several decades later, his "true position" as "one of the originating forces in the history of European art" was recognised.
He was born in Florence. The brothers took the nickname pollaiuolo meaning "poulterer" in Italian from the trade of their father Jacopo, who sold poultry, pollaio. This was a luxury trade at the time, and Jacopo's four sons were unlikely all to find room for careers in it. According to Benedetto Dei, the contemporary "fanatical enumerator" of Florentine life, there were only 8 poultry suppliers in Florence in 1472, but 44 goldsmith's workshops.
Antonio was the eldest son; the two middle brothers respectively went into poultry (eventually inheriting that business) and goldsmithing. The youngest brother, Piero, was also an artist, apparently only in painting, and he and Antonio very frequently worked together, though their workshops were physically "separate but mutually accessible". Their work shows both classical influences and an interest in human anatomy; reportedly, the brothers carried out dissections to improve their knowledge of the subject. If so, these would be "among the early Renaissance forays into anatomical research".
Antonio's first trade was goldsmithing and metalworking. Although documentation is probably missing, the statements of many near-contemporaries that he trained in the large workshop of Lorenzo Ghiberti may well be correct. This is not contradicted by the possibility that he was the "Antonio di Jacopo" listed in 1457 as a "lavorante" for Miliani Dei, twin brother of the chronicler and from a long-established goldsmithing family.
Vasari, whose account of the brothers' "early training contains a number of implausibilities", says that having decided to move from goldsmithing to painting, his brother gave him his first lessons. Piero was about ten years younger but had trained as a painter from the start. However, this seems unlikely; Andrea del Castagno was a great influence on him, and he may have trained with him, as Piero may have done, or possibly Domenico Veneziano.
By 1459 Antonio had his own workshop, as a goldsmith and painter, with his practice in sculpture and engraving developing later. In 1464 he signed a lease for well-located premises, on the Via Vaccherrechia opposite the Palazzo Vecchio. They had been previously used by another goldsmith, and so were arranged appropriately; the lease was periodically renewed up to 1493. In the following years apprentices were taken on.
He entered the silk-workers guild in 1466 and married his first wife (eighteen years old) in 1469, with a dowry of over 500 gold florins. That year he began to buy land in the country. in 1472 the two brothers and their father bought a house near their family home in the city, dividing it into three units, apparently for renting.
For over twenty years he had a successful career in Florence, rarely leaving the territory of the Republic of Florence, and by 1489 was described by Jacopo Lanfredini as the best artist in the city (this praise is often wrongly attributed to Lorenzo de' Medici). But by then a commission for a papal tomb, that of Pope Sixtus IV, St. Peter's, had taken him to Rome in 1484, or perhaps a little earlier. Thereafter both brothers seem to have spent most of their time in Rome, but returning to Florence at times.
By the time he had finished the first tomb, in 1493, the next pope had died, and he stayed in Rome to do his tomb as well. After a last visit to Florence in 1496, to put the finishing touches to the work already begun in the sacristy of Santo Spirito, he died in Rome in 1498 as a rich man, having just finished his tomb of Pope Innocent VIII, also in St. Peter's. He was buried in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, where a joint monument was raised to him and his brother, who had died in Rome two years earlier.
His departure for Rome meant that in his last years he avoided the depressing collapse of the Florentine "Golden Age" following the death of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492, the occupation by the French in 1494, followed by the brief leadership of Savonarola and continued political instability and military threats.
He had two daughters but no son, though a nephew (b. 1472) worked with him – he is last heard of being rejected by Michelangelo for work on the Tomb of Pope Julius II in 1507. There was some litigation in Florence over the assets Antonio left, in which his widow gave evidence in 1511.
Redistribution of paintings between the brothers
In recent years there has been a trend among art historians to increase the credit Piero is given for the paintings, led by Aldo Galli, whose Antonio and Piero Del Pollaiuolo: Silver and Gold, Painting and Bronze (2014) assigns the actual painting of many works to Piero that had long been given to Antonio, or both brothers. Galli only attributes to Antonio the reduced versions of the two Labours of Hercules (Uffizi), the Dancing Nudes fresco, and an early altarpiece with the Elevation of the Magdalen. At least one of the brothers was influenced by the landscape style of Early Netherlandish painting, and the revisionist school thinks that this was Piero. Attributions of works of sculpture and other media are unaffected.
Vasari began the tradition of stressing the contribution of Antonio rather than Piero to the paintings, which went largely unchallenged until the 20th century, despite suspicions by art historians such as Martin Davies, Director of the National Gallery. In the 21st century a full and partly successful challenge has been mounted, and some attributions changed by owning museums. This article gives the traditional attributions, or follows the owning museums, sometimes noting changes in recent years.
The dating of his work (before he went to Rome) is mostly uncertain, and much of his painting, especially of larger pieces, was apparently done together with his brother. A group of paintings are generally agreed to be relatively early, before about 1466. Contemporaries valued Antonio's work far above that of Piero, especially in respect of its disegno or drawing, for which Antonio was perhaps generally responsible.