Tomb of Leonardo Salutati (detail)

The Cathedral of Fiesole, a small town near Florence, is the site of the tomb of Leonardo Salutati (died 1466), who was the local bishop in the fifteenth century. The tomb comprises three main elements: a portrait bust of the bishop (with the coat of arms of the Salutati family and the artist’s initials on its base), a marble sarcophagus, and an architectonic frame. As the Latin funerary poem on the sarcophagus indicates, Salutati ordered his own tomb while he was still alive from the architect and sculptor Mino da Fiesole, who was trained in Florence. In 1907, the Museum of Fine Arts ordered a plaster cast of the entire tomb. After World War II, however, the cast was dismantled. Today the sarcophagus and the architectonic frame are the sole surviving elements.