Funerary Monument to Bartolomeo Aragazzi

Architect and sculptor, collaborator and partner of Ghiberti, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Michelozzo asserts his own humanist interpretation of the relationship between contemporary reality and classical tradition, fully attested by the surviving fragments of the Aragazzi Monument (1427-1437). Every motif taken from reality is worked out by him with firm stylistic coherence, brought to a refined formal abstraction that grafts the rhythmic norms of the Gothic and the measures of rational proportion onto a limpid language that crystallizes and culturally ennobles the naturalistic data. The analytical description of physiognomies and anatomies is incorporated into the composite balance of the composition, in a programmatic evocation of Augustan sculpture.