Tomb of Antonio Roselli

Pietro transformed Tuscan Renaissance prototypes into a Venetian style, as seen in his earliest projects, the chancel of S Giobbe, Venice, and the tomb of Antonio Roselli in Sant'Antonio (Il Santo), Padua, and that of Doge Pasquale Malipiero in SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice. The typical features of this style, a simple, planar architecture covered with beautifully carved low-relief ornament, were so widely imitated that the designation Lombardesque was coined to characterize it as a Venetian phenomenon of the late 15th century and the early 16th.

The most important of Pietro Lombardo' surviving works in Padua is the monument of Antonio Roselli in the Santo. Roselli was a jurisconsult from Arezzo, and the tomb (which was completed in 1467) was planned as a Florentine humanist monument. Its sources were the Bruni monument of Bernardo Rossellino, which had been in existence for about fifteen years, and Desiderio da Settignano's more recent Marsuppini monument. In the Roselli monument, however, the achievement falls short of the intention in a number of respects. In the first place the tomb is set inside an immense architectural frame, inspired by Bernardo Rossellino but in its effect totally un-Florentine, and in the second the figure sculpture, by the standard of Rossellino's and Desiderio's monuments, is rigid and inhibited.