FINIGUERRA, Maso - b. 1426 Firenze, d. 1464 Firenze

Maso (originally Tommaso) Finiguerra, Italian Renaissance goldsmith, engraver, draftsman and designer. He is known for his work in niello, a type of decorative metalwork, and as one of the first major Italian printmakers.

Finiguerra is believed to have worked as a young man with Lorenzo Ghiberti; he later associated himself with the Florentine artist Antonio Pollaiuolo. His own style reflects theirs; in fact, it is believed that Finiguerra engraved many of Pollaiuolo’s designs during a possible period of collaboration from 1459 to 1464. None of his productions as a goldsmith is known, save perhaps the “Thewalt Cross” (c. 1464, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), decorated with niello plaques that may have been designed by him. He had been producing nielli, metal objects decorated with engraved designs filled with black enamel-like sulphur alloys, before 1450. Finiguerra frequently preserved his designs for niello by making sulphur casts of the engraved silver ground. He also made niello prints, which are impressions from engraved silver on paper. Examples of his sulphur casts and niello prints are still in existence.

From the niello print it was only a step to the copperplate print, which he produced shortly after 1460. Though he did not invent copperplate engraving, Finiguerra remained the great popularizer of the new medium in Italy.

Seated apprentice

In Florence, as early as the first half of the fifteenth century, the practice began of having one’s workshop colleagues pose for one - in the attitude of a thorn-remover, a horse-tamer from the Quirinal, a Donatello statue of David, a crucified Christ, of a kneeling saint, a by-stander shepherd, or of an apprentice in various sleeping, day-dreaming, reading, writing or drawing poses etc. and, depending on the context, either nude or clothed in timeless, classical, contemporary, secular or monastic, ceremonial or everyday costume.

The present drawing shows a seated painters’s apprentice at drawing.