More than five centuries after his birth, the contradictions embodied by the Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli (1493-1560) remain as mysterious as ever. Revered by contemporaries as one of the most important sculptors of his time, he was reviled by his enemies as a truculent, foul-mouthed, avaricious, sycophantic, craven humbug. But the originality & power of Bandinelli's work, & the long shadow it cast over the arts in 16th-cent. Florence & Rome, are as clear today as they were to the artists Medici patrons, who recognized his art as a potent tool for constructing an image of dynastic legitimacy. Based on a decade of research in archives all over Italy, this book brings this great, but often neglected, Renaissance artist into sharper focus for modern scholarship. It comprises a comprehensive collection of the documentation on Bandinelli's life & work. The great majority of the texts included in this volume were discovered by the author & are published for the first time, & many come from the private archive of the Bandinelli family. All the documents are furnished with historical commentary and textual apparatus discussing their broader historical context, problems of chronology & interpretation, & later interpolations -- including hundreds of forged passages inserted by the artist's grandson, genealogist Baccio Bandinelli the Younger (1578-1636), whose role as forger of the Bandinelli legacy is exposed here for the first time. "An incomparable achievement of scholarship". "A very sizable contribution to the entire range of the Renaissance art historical academic community".