Maso Finiguerra

Vasari only ever credited him with paper impressions of his nielli, rather than engravings made from special printing-plates, in the usual sense of the word; in fact there probably never were any such engravings by him. Although he clearly was an important artist of his time, few surviving works, and no surviving prints, can now be definitely attributed to him, so scholarly interest in him has greatly reduced. Over 100 drawings in the Uffizi, and others elsewhere, remain attributed to him. He died in his late thirties, and his influence lived after him in the works of the early Florentine engravers and drawings related to them, especially the shadowy figure of Baccio Baldini, who Vasari associates with him.

He was the son of Antonio, and grandson of Tommaso Finiguerra or Finiguerri, both goldsmiths of Florence, and was born in Santa Lucia d'Ognissanti in 1426. He worked with his family as a goldsmith and was early distinguished for his work in niello. In 1449, there is a note of a sulfur cast from a niello of his workmanship being handed over by the painter Alessio Baldovinetti to a customer in payment or exchange for a dagger. In 1452 Maso delivered and was paid for a niellated silver pax commissioned for the Florence Baptistery by the Arte di Calimala or cloth merchant's guild. By 1457 he had left his father's workshop and partnered with the goldsmith Piero di Bartolommeo di Sail, who worked with Antonio del Pollaiuolo, when the firm had an order for a pair of silver candlesticks for the church of San Jacopo at Pistoia. In 1459 in the Palazzo Rucellai, artworks by Finiguerra are annotated as belonging to Giovanni Rucellai. In 1462 he is recorded as having supplied another wealthy Florentine, Cino di Filippo Rinuccini, with waist buckles, and in the years next following with forks and spoons for christening presents. In 1463 he drew cartoons, the heads of which were colored by Alessio Baldovinetti, for five or more figures for the sacristy of Florence Cathedral, which was being decorated in intarsia or wood inlay by a group of artists with Giuliano da Maiano at their head. On 4 December 1464 Maso Finiguerra made his will, and died shortly afterwards.

The only fully documented works by Finiguerra which survive are the intarsia figures for the cathedral, over half life-size, executed from his cartoons for the sacristy. But these seems so fully in the style of Antonio del Pollaiuolo that Konrad Oberhauser thought it "extremely doubtful" that he actually designed them himself. But he is thought to be responsible for a number of other works: a few nielli, and sulphur casts from them and others, and over a hundred drawings.

The attribution of a group of nielli, in particular some in the Bargello, is complicated by problems arising from the matching up of documentary records, and the remarks of Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini, with the surviving works. As mentioned above, in 1452 Maso made a niello silver pax for the Florence Baptistery, commissioned by the Arte di Calimala. In 1455 the guild ordered a second pax from another goldsmith, Matteo Dei. The subject of neither piece is known from the records. Two paxes with matching frames in the Bargello museum are thought to come from the baptistry, but their styles are considered too different to be by the same artist. One, of the Coronation of the Virgin is generally thought superior in quality and assigned to Finiguerra. The other shows a Crucifixion, and is often thought to be Dei's piece of 1456. The problem arises because Cellini praises a pax by Finiguerra with a Crucifixion scene with horses, and Vasari praises one with scenes of the Passion of Christ. Other surviving paxes are enlisted to match these descriptions, while still forming a group with a sufficiently consistent style. Some of the nielli have surviving sulphur casts, which might strengthen the association with Finiguerra.

In the last years of the 18th century, Vasari's account of Finiguerra's invention was held to have received a decisive and startling confirmation under the following circumstances. There was in the Baptistery at Florence (now in the Bargello) a beautiful 15th-century niello pax of the Coronation of the Virgin. The Abate Gori, a connoisseur of the mid-century, had claimed this conjecturally for the work of Finiguerra; a later and still more enthusiastic virtuoso, the Abate Zani, discovered first, in the collection of Count Seratti at Ligorno, a sulfur cast from the very same niello (cast now in the British Museum), and then, in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, a paper impression corresponding to both. Here, then, he proclaimed, was the actual material first fruit of Finiguerra's invention and proof positive of Vasari's accuracy. Zani's famous discovery is now discredited among serious students. For one, the art of printing from engraved copperplates had been known in Germany and in Italy for years prior to the date of Finiguerra's alleged invention. For another, Finiguerra's pax for the baptistery, if Cellini is to be trusted, represented not a Coronation of the Virgin but a Crucifixion. In the next place, its recorded weight does not at all agree with that of the pax claimed by Gori and Zani to be his. Again, and perhaps this is the strongest argument of any, all authentic records agree in representing Finiguerra as a close associate in art and business of Antonio del Pollaiuolo. Now nothing is more marked than the special style of Pollaiuolo and his group; and nothing is more unlike it than the style of the Coronation pax, the designer of which must obviously have been trained in quite a different school, namely that of Filippo Lippi.