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| Neri di Bicci Coronation of the Virgin ca. 1460-61 tempera on panel Palazzo Pretorio, Prato |
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| Neri di Bicci Virgin and Child with Angels ca. 1460 tempera on panel Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| Neri di Bicci Martyrdom of St Sebastian with St Blaise and St Anthony Abbot ca. 1475-90 tempera on panel Chiesa di San Biagio, Montecatini Val di Cecina |
"Neri di Bicci was the second son and pupil of Bicci di Lorenzo. He was the last artist in a family whose workshop can be traced back to his grandfather, Lorenzo di Bicci. Under Neri's direction the workshop was extremely successful and catered to a wide number of patrons. The details of its activity, including the names of the many pupils and assistants that passed through it, are recorded from 1453 to 1475 in the workshop diary. This journal, the most extensive surviving document relating to a 15th-century painter, is preserved in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. . . . Though active throughout most of the 15th century, Neri remained faithful, at least in content, to the tradition established by his father and grandfather. . . . Of his four sons and two daughters, not one became an artist."
– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Canada
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| Andrea del Verrocchio and workshop Tobias and the Angel ca. 1470 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Andrea del Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi Virgin and Child with Two Angels ca. 1476-79 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Andrea del Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi Virgin and Child with Two Angels (detail) ca. 1476-79 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
"Verrocchio trained not only as a goldsmith and sculptor, but also as a painter, probably with the early Renaissance master Fra Filippo Lippi. Verrocchio's altarpieces and devotional pictures are distinguished by their emphatic sense of three-dimensional space and volume, derived from his experience in sculpture. They reveal a subtle play of light and shadow, and fine detail in the rendering of objects such as veils, cloths, and brooches. The artist ran a busy workshop with many gifted collaborators and students, including Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Sandro Botticelli. Leonardo spent his formative years in the master's studio, where he learned to model in light and dark and to depict energetically twisting figures. Above all, Leonardo and other pupils acquired from Verrocchio a spirit of inquiry and experimentation in the making of art. As a Florentine humanist wrote in the early 1500s, "Whatever painters have that is good, they drank from Verrocchio's spring."
– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
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| Domenico Ghirlandaio and workshop Man of Sorrows ca. 1475 tempera on panel Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht |
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| Domenico Ghirlandaio Portrait of a Young Man ca. 1480-90 tempera on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Domenico Ghirlandaio Portrait of a Young Woman ca. 1490 tempera on panel Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon |
"Born in 1449, Domenico di Tommaso Bigordi was called Ghirlandaio because his goldsmith father specialized in creating gold and silver garlands (ghirlande). Though presumably trained in his father's profession, Ghirlandaio worked under Alesso Baldovinetti, according to Vasari. And he may also have assisted Andrea del Verrocchio, as his early panel paintings and frescoes clearly betray that master's influence. In temperament and approach, however, Ghirlandaio differed from both of his putative painting teachers. "Pronto, presto, e facile," as Vasari described him, Ghirlandaio simplified their painstakingly realistic styles into one more suitable for fresco. The artist was, in fact, primarily active in that medium, creating extensive fresco cycles. . . . To complete such vast undertakings, Ghirlandaio employed a highly organized workshop, which included his brothers Davide and Benedetto but also his brother-in-law Sebastiano Mainardi, and even the young Michelangelo."
– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
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| Davide Ghirlandaio Portrait of Selvaggia Sassetti ca. 1487-88 tempera on panel Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Sandro Botticelli The Birth of Venus 1484-85 tempera on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Sandro Botticelli Pallas and the Centaur ca. 1482 tempera on canvas Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Bartolomeo della Gatta The Annunciation (detail) ca. 1480 tempera on panel Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon |
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| Raffaellino del Garbo The Annunciation ca. 1490 tempera on panel Chiesa di San Donato in Polverosa |
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| Piero di Cosimo Mary Magdalen Reading ca. 1490-95 tempera on panel Palazzo Barberini, Rome |
"Piero di Cosimo was a decade younger than Leonardo da Vinci and thirteen years older than Michelangelo. He was keenly aware of Leonardo's ideas about nature, but his training provided an altogether more conservative background. As a youth he worked on the frescoes decorating the walls of the Sistine Chapel, under the direction of his teacher Cosimo Rosselli. He thus worked alongside Botticelli, Perugino, and Signorelli. He was, in short, a painter with a foot in two worlds, and although Vasari places Piero's biography firmly among the "moderns" – between Correggio and Bramante – he went out of his way to emphasize the artist's eccentricities."
– from biographical notes at the Metropolitan Museum, New York
"Giorgio Vasari wrote two biographies of the Florentine painter Piero de Cosimo: the text published in the second edition of his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1568 is a much-revised version of the first, printed in 1550. Both works are profoundly teleological, since they are both based on a misleading notion of artistic progress: the first culminating in the figure of Michelangelo, who mastered all three major arts, and the second ending with the eulogy of the Accademia del Disegno, recently founded (1563) under the political auspices of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. . . . Piero's lives do not fit the theoretical model, and their meaning can be fully appreciated only when they are embedded in a network that connects Vasari's récit of Paolo Uccello's biography with his fictional life of Jacopo Pontormo. All three were represented as improper intellectual figures deeply absorbed in their creative process, and their behavior allegedly endangered Vasari's efforts to promote a new figure of the artist perfectly integrated into the courtly society of his own time."
– from biographical notes at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC