Contributions
Trained in the Medici garden in Florence alongside the young Michelangelo, Pietro Torrigiano was the man who carried the Italian Renaissance into England. Summoned to London under Henry VIII, he signed in 1512 the contract for the tomb of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. There he set two recumbent effigies of gilt bronze, serenely naturalistic, framed by cherubs, putti and roundels of a wholly Italian character on a base of black marble. Completed around 1518, the monument broke cleanly with the still-dominant English Gothic. Torrigiano had already carved the monument of Lady Margaret Beaufort, the king's mother, and modelled polychrome terracotta busts of Henry VII, Henry VIII and Bishop John Fisher — among the first truly Renaissance portraits made in England. He was preparing a colossal tomb for Henry VIII himself when the project collapsed.
Significance
Torrigiano's role is that of a conduit. Through him the Florentine vocabulary — antique proportion, putti, grotesques, lost-wax bronze casting — crossed the Alps and the Channel at a single stroke. John Pope-Hennessy judged the Henry VII tomb "the finest Renaissance tomb north of the Alps," an assessment rarely challenged. In an England where sculpture remained the business of masons and Gothic imagers, he offered a new model, instantly royal and visible to all at Westminster. His influence proved slower than his gifts promised: a prickly temper, repeated quarrels and his departure for Spain denied the island a lasting workshop, and it took decades for Netherlandish sculptors to take up the Italianate tomb again. Still, the bronze effigies at Westminster remain the founding landmark — the precise point at which English art turned from one age into another.
Influence
He naturalised in England the gilt-bronze effigy and the antique portrait bust, models that sculptors arriving from the Low Countries would revive a generation later. His royal tomb fixed the type of the Renaissance funerary monument at Westminster, a reference for all the great Elizabethan and Jacobean tombs that followed. He himself belonged by right to the first generation of the Florentine High Renaissance, formed in the bottega of Bertoldo di Giovanni under Lorenzo de' Medici and steeped in Masaccio's frescoes and antique statuary.
Anecdote
The episode that made him notorious is the broken nose of Michelangelo. As youths, the two rivals were copying frescoes in the Carmine; stung by a jibe, Torrigiano struck his companion so violently that he disfigured him for life. Benvenuto Cellini preserved his boast that he felt "bone and cartilage go down like biscuit" beneath his knuckles. The remark says everything about the man: a vast talent paired with a fiery temper. That same temper destroyed him. In Spain he died around 1528 in a Seville prison, accused of heresy by the Inquisition after reportedly smashing a statue of the Virgin whose patron had refused him a fair price.