Maso Finiguerra - Surviving Works

Surviving Works

The only fully authenticated specimens which exist are the above-mentioned tarsia figures, over half life-size, executed from his cartoons for the sacristy of the duomo. But he is thought to be responsible for a number of other works: a set of drawings of the school of Pollaiuolo at the Uffizi, some of which are actually inscribed "Maso Finiguerra" in a seventeenth-century writing, probably that of Baldinucci himself; and secondly in a very curious and important book of nearly a hundred drawings by the same hand, acquired in 1888 for the British Museum.

The Florence series depicts for the most part figures of the studio and the street, to all appearance members of the artists own family and workshop, drawn direct from life. The museum volume, on the other hand, is a picture-chronicle, drawn from imagination, and representing parallel figures of sacred and profane history, in a chronological series from the Creation to Julius Caesar, dressed and accoutered with inordinate richness according to the quaint pictures which Tuscan popular fancy in the mid-15th century conjured up to itself of the ancient world. Except for the differences naturally resulting from the difference of subject, and that the one series are done from life and the other from imagination, the technical style and handling of the two are identical and betray unmistakably a common origin.