The Deeply Unpopular Baccio Bandinelli

Separating the man from the artist is a difficult exercise even today, and one 16 th century Italians clearly found impossible. The creator of numerous celebrated commissions and official sculptor to the Medici court, the arrogant Baccio Bandinelli attracted a great deal of opprobrium from his contemporaries. His pupil Vasari, for instance, hardly treated him with kid gloves in his Lives . Following the mysterious destruction of a cartoon by Michelangelo, an act Bandinelli was suspected of committing, he wrote "He was unanimously considered envious and false, and with good reason." Judged "incapable…