Biography

Niccolò di Piero (Pietro) Lamberti (called il Pela), sculptor and architect, member of an Italian family of artists. Both Niccolò di Piero Lamberti and his son Piero di Niccolò Lamberti produced sculpture of average quality, but they were important for exporting the Tuscan style to Venice, where they were active in the late 1410s and 1420s.

Vasari confused Niccolò di Piero with Niccolò di Forzore Spinelli of Arezzo, a mistake that was not rectified until 1928. The first certain reference to Niccolò di Pietro Lamberti occurs in the records of Florence Cathedral in 1391, when he was called magister, implying that by that date he was an independent artist. Consequently he must have been born by 1370 and possibly earlier. It has been suggested that Niccolò was one of the carvers in the first campaign of work on the Porta della Mandorla of Florence Cathedral, but there is no explicit connection between Niccolò and this commission until 1406, when work was already under way on the decorative mouldings framing the tympanum. Niccolò was married in Florence in 1392.

He worked mostly in Florence on decorations for the cathedral and for the Church of Orsanmichele and in Venice on the façade of St Mark's.