Antonio Sandrini

Anna Maria Giusti (ed.), Dagli spendori di corte al lusso borghese: L’Opificio delle Pietre Dure nell’Italia unita, 2011, p.249;

Anna Maria Massinelli, Painting in Stone: Modern Florentine Pietra Dura Mosaic, 2014, p.113, figs.78.

Antonio Sandrini was the head of one of the most accomplished workshops in Florentine mosaic in the second half of the 19th century, although its origins going back to 1820. Together with his brothers Carlo and Felice, he built the workshop’s reputation with regular participations in the Universal Exhibitions. In the Paris Exhibition of Paris 1867, they have received an honourable mention, whilst in London in 1870 a silver medal, a bronze medal in Milan 1871 having also exhibited in Philadelphia in 1876 and Paris again in 1878.

The revered Gilbert Collection has a panel by Sandrini from the same period (on loan and on permanent view at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London), when the workshop was probably under the leadership of Gino Panerai, who had started as an apprentice to Sandrini (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O157789/flirtation-firescreen-sandrini-antonio/). He was praised as ‘the most skilled worker in this art’ in the journal Arte, Industria Artigianato of 1899. It is possible that he worked also as a painter, and he collaborated with Giovanni Montelatici, “to whom he submitted a wash drawing for a mosaic of a swordsman in seventeeth century dress” (Massinelli, p.90)

An identical panel after the same painting was presented by Oreste Innocenti at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 (location unknown, Massinelli, p.113, figs.78). The original painting by Francesco Vinea is also reproduced by Massinelli, p.113, fig.79 (Bencini Archive, Florence).