Giovanni dal Ponte (attr.), Cenotaph of Pietro Corsini

Funerary monument to the cardinal and former bishop of Florence, Pietro Corsini (Florence, early decades of the 1300s - Avignon, 16 August 1405); fresco painted in 1422, attributed to Giovanni di Marco dal Ponte, transferred to canvas in the 19th century.

The painting is designed as a faux funerary monument in stone, composed of superimposed wall-mounted elements: large corbels, a reredos with the figures of the Theological Virtues, the sarcophagus, and finally the effigy of the reclining deceased.

Pietro Corsini was an important figure of the Church in the European political scene of the second half of the 14th century. Born into the Florentine Corsini family (cousin of Saint Andrew Corsini, bishop of Fiesole), he ended his life in the papal see of Avignon. However, his body was brought to Florence around 1411 by will of Pietro Corsini himself: in 1391 he had erected a private chapel in this Cathedral, but his remains were probably buried in the family chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine. Nonetheless, 17 years after Corsini's death, having resolved some legal issues, the consuls of the Wool Guild arranged for the present funeral monument to be created in the Cathedral. The commission was entrusted to a painter from Ghiberti's circle, identified by scholars only in 1990 as Giovanni dal Ponte. With this painting, the artist invented a typology that would be taken up again in the complementary monument, that of Bicci di Lorenzo for Luigi Marsili, and in the two "knights" by Paolo Uccello and Andrea del Castagno, all of these demonstrating the extraordinary ability of early renaissance artists in receiving the novelties of classical taste.