Benedetto da Rovezzano
(b Canapale, nr Pistoia, 1474; d Vallombrosa, nr
Florence, c. 1554).
Italian sculptor, active also in England. The son of Bartolommeo de’
Grazzini, Benedetto took his name from the town outside Florence
where he owned a farm. His earliest known works are a marble
singing-gallery of 1499 (Genoa, S Stefano) and the figures of Louis,
Duke of Orléans, and his wife Valentina Visconti (1502; marble;
Paris, St Denis), for the tomb of the Dukes of Orléans, which was
commissioned from four artists by Louis XII. In 1505 Benedetto went
to Florence and began his most ambitious work, the marble sepulchre
of St Giovanni Gualberto for Santa Trìnita. Substantially completed
by 1515, the monument was wrecked during the Siege of Florence in
1530; several surviving reliefs (Florence, S Salvi) demonstrate
Benedetto’s rather hard, linear figural style. In 1508 he completed
(‘rinettato’) Michelangelo’s bronze David (untraced). The tomb of
Piero Soderini (marble; Florence, S Maria del Carmine; damaged and
rebuilt in the 18th century) was finished by 1510, and the marble St
John the Evangelist (Florence Cathedral) by 1513. Benedetto was in
England by 1524, remaining until at least 1536. There he made a tomb
with many bronze statuettes for Cardinal Wolsey, which Henry VIII
later claimed for himself (destr. 1646; marble, gilt bronze and
touchstone; sarcophagus now part of Nelson’s tomb in St Paul’s
Cathedral, London). In Florence again by 1543, Benedetto became
blind some time later. The work generally considered to be his last,
the Sernigiani Altar (Florence, Santa Trìnita), inscribed 1552, was
assembled from fragments of the Gualberto monument. According to
Vasari, he died ‘a few years’ after 1550. An almost exact
contemporary of Michelangelo, Benedetto continued an essentially
15th-century style well into the 16th century.
