The late Renaissance sculptor Leone Leoni (1509-1590) came from modest beginnings, but died as a nobleman and knight with a house and art collection envied by the nobility. Leoni's success as an artist and his social and intellectual achievements outdid those of any of his predecessors. Through extensive archival research, Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio sheds new light on Leoni's background and character, as well as on unknown aspects of his career, his social position in Milan, and the contents of his impressive art collection. Di Dio has collected and analyzed a sizeable body of unpublished material that, along with contemporary accounts, fleshes out Leoni's multiple roles as imperial sculptor, aristocrat, scholar, and criminal. She further examines the visual manifestations of these roles in his house, collection, and tomb, as well as Leoni's influence on artists in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.
The late Renaissance sculptor Leone Leoni (1509-1590) came from modest beginnings, but died as a nobleman and knight. His remarkable leap in status from his humble birth to a stonemason's family, to his time as a galley slave, to living as a nobleman and courtier in Milan provide a specific case study of an artist's struggle and triumph over existing social structures that marginalized the Renaissance artist
Based on a wealth of discoveries in archival documents, correspondence, and contemporary literature, the author examines the strategies Leoni employed to achieve his high social position, such as the friendships he formed, the type of education he sought out, the artistic imagery he employed, and the aristocratic trappings he donned
Leoni's multiple roles (imperial sculptor, aristocrat, man of erudition, and criminal), the visual manifestations of these roles in his house, collection, and tomb, the form and meaning of the artistic commissions he undertook, and the particular successes he enjoyed are here situated within the complex political, social and economic contexts of northern Italy and the Spanish court in the sixteenth century.
