Sidney Colvin

“ Both agree strictly with the accounts of Finiguerra’s drawings left us by Vasari and Baldinucci, and disagree in no respect with the character of the inlaid figures of the sacristy. That the draughtsman was a goldsmith is proved on every page of the picture-chronicle by his skill and extravagant delight in the ornamental parts of design—chased and jewelled cups, helmets, shields, breastplates, scabbards and the like,—as well as by the symmetrical metallic forms into which he instinctively conventionalizes plants and flowers. ”

“ We thus find ourselves in presence of a draughtsman of the school of Pollaiuolo, some of whose drawings bear an ancient attribution to Finiguerra, while all agree with what is otherwise known of him, and one or two are exactly repeated in extant works of niello, the craft which was peculiarly his own; others being intimately related to the earliest or all but the earliest works of Florentine engraving, the kindred craft which tradition avers him to have practised, and which Vasari erroneously believed him to have invented. ”

“ Zani, Materiali per servire, &c. (1802) ; Duchesne, Essai sur les nielles (1824) ; Dutuit, Manuel de l’amateur d’estampes, vol. i. pref. and vol. ii.; and for a full discussion of the whole question, with quotations from earlier authorities and reproductions of the works discussed, Sidney Colvin, A Florentine Picture Chronicle (1898) . ”