Background
Pagno di Lapo was born at Fiesole, near Florence.
Pagno di Lapo was born at Fiesole, near Florence.
In 1426-1428 Pagno di Lapo was working as a stone-cutter in the joint shop of Donatello and Michelozzo in Pisa, during the production of the Coscia and Brancacci tombs. In 1428 he collaborated with two obscure stone-cutters on the decorative elements of the baptismal font in the Duomo of Siena, and as a garzone in Donatello"s shop in connection with the resumed work on the pulpit for Prato, 1434. In Florence he was occupied between 1448 and 1451 with decorative carving executed concurrently for the Basilica of San Lorenzo and Palazzo Medici (both projects under Michelozzo again).
Documents show that he was working on chapels for the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna between 1451 to about 1469, never designated there as a scultore but as a stone-cutter or marble-worker
Nevertheless, he is credited with designing Palazzo Isolani on Piazza Santo Stefano, which was built between 1451-1455. Modern scholars, however, assign to Michelozzo other sculptures Vasari assigns to Pagno di Lapo in the same passage, which Vasari had claimed for Michelozzo in the first edition of his Lives, and more recent documentation reassigns to Pagno di Lupo a less exalted role as a sculptor of decorative stonework.
When Piero de" Medici planned to commission a marble tabernacle in the Gothic Chiesa della Santissima Annunziata, the church of the Servi di Maria, Florence, he consulted Michelozzo, who seems to have provided the design, but left the execution of its architectural enframement to Pagno di Lapo, whose inscription runs round the inside of the architrave. The sole surviving identifiable work by Pagno di Lapo is the inscribed tabernacle frame, which Jansen found "shows him to have been a skillful carver of ornament, but the plastic décor of the structure contains so little of true sculpture that it yields small evidence of his artistic ability." Jansen considered the possibility that the altar table from the tabernacle, now in the Museo Bardini, Florence, was also Pagno"son