Pollaiuolo,
surname of two Italian artists of the Renaissance, Antonio (c.
1432–1498) and Piero (c. 1441–1496), who, as brothers,
shared a busy workshop in Florence. Patronized by the Medici family,
the firm produced articles of gold, bronze sculpture, paintings, and
decorative work. They are both recorded as being painters, sculptors,
and goldsmiths, but there are considerable problems in attempting to
disentangle their individual contributions.
Several documented
paintings by Piero are known, all of fairly mediocre quality, but
none by Antonio, and as certain pictures from the studio of the two
brothers are so much better than Piero's independent work, Antonio's
collaboration has usually been assumed. The most important these
pictures is the Martyrdom of St Sebastian in the National Gallery
in London, probably painted in 1475. The figures of the archers in
the foreground reveal a mastery of the nude paralleled in certain
bronzes generally accepted as Antonio's (e.g. the Hercules and Antaeus
in the Bargello, Florence), in his only surviving engraving (The
Battle of the Nude Men, c. 1460), and in his numerous pen drawing
in which his typically wiry figures are seen in vigorous and
expressive movement. Piero did three of the paintings known as
the Seven Virtues (1469–1470, Uffizi, Florence), and probably
collaborated with Antonio on three others (the seventh was by
Botticelli).
Antonio's main
contribution to Florentine painting lay in his searching analysis
of the anatomy of the body in movement or under conditions of
strain, but he is also important for his pioneering interest in
landscape, seen in the St Sebastian and other works. Antonio is
said to have anticipated Leonardo in dissecting corpses in order to
study the anatomy of the body. Antonio's two principal works were
the bronze tombs of Pope Sixtus IV (signed and dated 1493) and
Pope Innocent VIII (1492–98) both in St Peter's, Rome.
The latter contains the first sepulchral effigy that simulated the
living man.