Maso Tommasoii Finiguerra (1426–1464) was an Italian goldsmith, niellist, draftsman, and engraver working in Florence, who was incorrectly described by Giorgio Vasari as the inventor of engraving as a printmaking technique. This made him a crucial figure in the history of old master prints and remained widely believed until the early twentieth century. However, it was gradually realised that Vasari's view, like many of his assertions as to the origins of technical advances, could not be sustained. Typically, Vasari had overstated the importance of a fellow-Florentine, and a fellow-Italian, since it is now clear that engraving developed in Germany before Italy.
Vasari only ever credited him with paper impressions of his nielli, rather than engravings made from special printing-plates, in the usual sense of the word; in fact there probably never were any such engravings by him. Although he clearly was an important artist of his time, few surviving works, and no surviving prints, can now be definitely attributed to him, so scholarly interest in him has greatly reduced. Over 100 drawings in the Uffizi, and others elsewhere, remain attributed to him.
He died in his late thirties, and his influence lived after him in the works of the early Florentine engravers and drawings related to them, especially the shadowy figure of Baccio Baldini, who Vasari associates with him.
Career
He was the son of Antonio, and grandson of Tommaso Finiguerra or Finiguerri, both goldsmiths of Florence, and was born in Santa Lucia d'Ognissanti in 1426. He worked with his family as a goldsmith and was early distinguished for his work in niello. In 1449, there is a note of a sulfur cast from a niello of his workmanship being handed over by the painter Alessio Baldovinetti to a customer in payment or exchange for a dagger. In 1452 Maso delivered and was paid for a niellated silver pax commissioned for the Florence Baptistery by the Arte di Calimala or cloth merchant's guild.
By 1457 he had left his father's workshop and partnered with the goldsmith Piero di Bartolommeo di Sail, who worked with Antonio del Pollaiuolo, when the firm had an order for a pair of silver candlesticks for the church of San Jacopo at Pistoia. In 1459 in the Palazzo Rucellai, artworks by Finiguerra are annotated as belonging to Giovanni Rucellai. In 1462 he is recorded as having supplied another wealthy Florentine, Cino di Filippo Rinuccini, with waist buckles, and in the years next following with forks and spoons for christening presents. In 1463 he drew cartoons, the heads of which were colored by Alessio Baldovinetti, for five or more figures for the sacristy of Florence Cathedral, which was being decorated in intarsia or wood inlay by a group of artists with Giuliano da Maiano at their head. On 4 December 1464 Maso Finiguerra made his will, and died shortly afterwards.
Surviving works
The only fully documented works by Finiguerra which survive are the intarsia figures for the cathedral, over half life-size, executed from his cartoons for the sacristy. But these seems so fully in the style of Antonio del Pollaiuolo that Konrad Oberhauser thought it "extremely doubtful" that he actually designed them himself. But he is thought to be responsible for a number of other works: a few nielli, and sulphur casts from them and others, and over a hundred drawings.
Drawings
Much the largest group of drawings is in the Uffizi, some of which are inscribed "Maso Finiguerra" in a seventeenth-century writing, probably by Filippo Baldinucci, curator of the Medici collections. These depict many figures of the studio and the street, to all appearance members of the artists own family and workshop, drawn direct from life, and used "as a repository of figural ideas that could be used by Finiguerra to speed up the compositional process". The Uffizi group includes 14 studies of birds and animals, some apparently copied from other drawings, such as a rather stylized cockerel.
There are two large drawings on vellum (both 28 x 41 cm, plus change) which show scenes from the Old Testament and are crowded with figures. These are Moses on Mount Sinai, and the Brazen Serpent below in the British Museum, and The Flood in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg. These were apparently intended as finished artworks, though both were later copied as engravings by Francesco Rosselli.