Background
Maso Finiguerra was born in Italy in 1426. He was the son of Antonio, and grandson of Tommaso Finiguerra or Finiguerri, both goldsmiths of Florence, and was born in Santa Lucia d'Ognissanti in 1426.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0017IUP9A/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00166VY1G/?tag=2022091-20
Maso Finiguerra was born in Italy in 1426. He was the son of Antonio, and grandson of Tommaso Finiguerra or Finiguerri, both goldsmiths of Florence, and was born in Santa Lucia d'Ognissanti in 1426.
He was distinguished for his work in niello. In his twenty-third year (1449) there was a note of a sulfur cast from a niello of his workmanship being handed over by the painter Alessio Baldovinetti to a customer in payment or exchange for a dagger received. In 1452 Maso delivered and was paid for a niellated silver pax commissioned for the baptistery of St John by the consuls of the gild of merchants or Calimara. By this time he seems to have left his father's workshop: and it is know that he was in partnership with Piero di Bartolommeo di Sail and the great Antonio Pollaiuolo in 1457, when the firm had an order for a pair of fine silver candlesticks for the church of San Jacopo at Pistoia. On the 14th of December 1464 Maso Finiguerra made his will, and died shortly afterwards. These documentary facts are supplemented by several writers of the next generation with statements more or less authoritative. Thus Baccio Bandinelli says that Maso was among the young artists who worked under Ghiberti on the famous gates of the baptistery; Benvenuto Cellini that he was the finest master of his day in the art of niello engraving, and that his masterpiece was a pax of the Crucifixion in the baptistery of St John; that being no great draughtsman, he in most cases, including that of the above-mentioned pax, worked from drawings by Antonio Pollaiuolo. Vasari, on the other hand, allowing that Maso was a much inferior draughtsman to Pollaiuolo, mentions nevertheless a number of original drawings by him as existing in his own collection, "with figures both draped and nude, and histories drawn in water-color". Vasari's account was confirmed and amplified in the next century by Baldinucci, who says that he has seen many drawings by Finiguerra much in the manner of Masaccio; adding that Maso was beaten by Pollaiuolo in competition for the reliefs of the great silver altar-table commission by the merchants' gild for the baptistery of St John (this famous work is now preserved in the Opera del Duomo). Finiguerra was succeeded in the practice of engraving at Florence by a goldsmith called Baccio Baldini, who, not having much invention of his own, borrowed his designs from other artists and especially from Botticelli. In the last years of the r8th century Vasari's account of Finiguerra's invention was held to have received a decisive and startling confirmation under the following circumstances.
In 1459 Finiguerra was noted in the house-book of Giovanni Rucellai as one of several distinguished artists with whose works the Casa Rucellai was adorned. In 1462 he is recorded as having supplied another wealthy Florentine, Cino di Filippo Rinuccini, with waist buckles, and in the years next following with forks and spoons for christening presents. In 1463 he drew cartoons, the heads of which were coloured by Alessio Baldovinetti, for five or more figures for the sacristy of the Duomo, which was being decorated in wood inlay by a group of artists with Giuliano da Maiano at their head.
He was the first to print off impressions from niello plates on sulfur casts and afterwards on sheets of paper, and of having followed up this invention by engraving copper-plates for the express purpose of printing impressions from them, and thus became the inventor and father of the art of engraving in general. There was in the baptistery at Florence (now in the Bargello) a beautiful 15th-century niello pax of the Coronation of the Virgin. The Abate Gori, a savant and connoisseur of the mid-century, had claimed this conjecturally for the work of Finiguerra; a later and still more enthusiastic virtuoso, the Abate Zani, discovered first, in the collection of Count Seratti at Leghorn, a sulfur cast from the very same niello (this cast is now in the British Museum), and then, in the National library at Paris, a paper impression corresponding to both. Here, then, he proclaimed, was the actual material first- fruit of Finiguerra's invention and proof positive of Vasari's accuracy.
