LEOPARDI, Alessandro

(b. ~1460 Venezia, d. ~1522 Venezia)

Italian bronze-founder. Born into a well-known Venetian family, he is mentioned in 1482, first as a goldsmith and then as a jeweller, which suggests that he might have been carving hard stones. In 1484 he was employed at the Mint as an engraver of dies. Exiled in August 1487 for his part in an inheritance fraud, he was recalled from Ferrara in September 1488 to cast the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni from the clay model left by Verrocchio at his death. He completed the casting, putting his signature on the girth strap (ALEXANDER LEOPARDUS V.F. OPUS), and designed and executed the high pedestal with marble columns and bronze frieze himself. His execution of the pedestal clearly shows his familiarity with the Classical orders. The monument was erected in the Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo in 1494.

He was employed again at the Mint in January 1496, working as master engraver of dies alongside Vittore Gambello, and he was still drawing a salary for this position in November 1521. He appears to have died early in the following year.

Equestrian Statue of Colleoni

In 1479 the Venetian authorities had decided to erect a monument to the mercenary Bartolomeo Colleoni of Bergamo who had died in 1475, leaving funds for an equestrian in his honour. He naively stipulated that it be sited in Piazza S. Marco, too prominent a place for this potentially dangerous symbol of power. Instead the authorities decided cleverly to put it before the remote Scuola di S. Marco. A competition was held and Verrocchio sent a life-size wax model of the horse in 1483. It was unfinished at his death in 1488, although he had completed the figure and horse in clay. In his will, he enjoined his pupil Lorenzo di Credi to finish it, but this responsibility was transferred in 1490 to the Venetian bronze caster Alessandro Leopardi (who designed the base and signed on the horse’s girth).

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Flagstaff base

Alesssandro Leopardi not only signed the Verrochio’s Colleoni statue but also the flagstaffs in Piazza San Marco. The central one, “facto per Alexandro de Leopardi” (made by Alessandro Leopardi) was installed in 1505, the other two in 1506. These bases replaced the older ones, far simpler and in stone, that had been made twenty years earlier by Pietro Lombardo’s workshop.

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