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.
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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.