Giovanni Battista del Tasso

The Mercato Nuovo in Florence , 1548 .

Giovanni Battista del Tasso (* 1500 in Florence , † May 8, 1555 in Florence, often also Giovan Battista , Giovambattista or Giambattista ) was an Italian carver , sculptor and architect of Mannerism .

Live and act

Giovanni Battista del Tasso comes from a traditional family of craftsmen who had lived in the Florentine quarter around the church of Sant'Ambrogio since the Quattrocento . His training originally took place in the renowned workshop of his father Marco del Tasso , later he stayed in Rome to study with Benvenuto Cellini, who was of the same age .

An early masterpiece of the young carver is the artfully inlaid ceilings and the chairs in Michelangelo's Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence, a work that Giovanni Battista began around 1526. In the following years his participation in the construction of ephemeral fixed apparatus and carvings on galleys for the Medici and Andrea Doria in Genoa are also proven. From the mid-1540s onwards, he took on the official role of court artist for Duke Cosimo I de 'Medici and carried out several commissions, including increasingly architectural work, relating, for example, to fortifications and architectural decorations in smaller Tuscan cities and Florence. From 1548 he was in charge of the renovations and extensions of the Palazzo Vecchio (in this role he would be replaced by Giorgio Vasari after his death ), and also in 1548 Giovanni Battista del Tasso began his most famous work today, the free-standing Mercato , which is still used as a market hall nuovo , which will be built halfway between the Palazzo Vecchio and the Ponte Vecchio .

After his death on May 8, 1555, Giovanni Battista was buried in the family chapel in Sant'Ambrogio. His son Domenico del Tasso continued the family tradition, but did not attain a leading position within the artistic community of Florence comparable to his father.

The Biblioteca Laurenziana with Giovanni Battista del Tasso's ceiling inlays, from 1526 .

Giovanni Battista del Tasso had contacts with academic circles, as evidenced by his correspondence with the scholar Niccolò Martelli , but above all by his participation in Benedetto Varchi's survey on the art-theoretical problem of the Paragone . However, since the most important chronicler of the artistic discussions and art production of these years, Giorgio Vasari , saw Tasso as a competitor for personal and professional reasons, he denied him his own vita in the artist biographies he wrote and expresses himself in the few places in which he comes to speak of Tasso, exclusively negative. The Damnatio memoriae Vasaris has an effect to this day, so that research has only been able to reconstruct a fraction of the artist's biography and presumed oeuvre .

literature

• Marco Collareta: Una restituzione al Tasso legnaiolo . In: Paragone , 35 : 81-91 (1984).
• Marco Collareta:  Del Tasso, Giambattista. In: Massimiliano Pavan (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 38:  Della Volpe-Denza. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1990, pp. 299-302.
• Gabriele Morolli: Il palazzo del giovane duca: Giuliano di Baccio d'Agnolo, Baccio Bandinelli, Giovan Battista del Tasso . In: Carlo Francini (ed.): Palazzo Vecchio. Officina di opere e di ingegni . Milan 2006, pp. 130-147.

Web links

Commons : Giovanni Battista del Tasso  - Collection of images, videos and audio files