Alonso Berruguete

When the ancient statue of Laocoon was dug out of a Roman vineyard in 1506, its writhing, agonized bodies stunned every artist in the city, and a young Spaniard named Alonso Berruguete was there to see it. He had come to Italy from Castile after the death of his father, the court painter Pedro Berruguete, and in Rome he was among the artists asked to make a copy of the Laocoon. He lost that contest to a rival, but the statue's twisting anguish never left his work.

Back in Spain from about 1518, Berruguete set painting aside and turned mainly to sculpture. The Habsburg emperor Charles the Fifth made him a court artist, and he ran a busy workshop in Valladolid producing retablos, the towering multi-storey altarpieces of carved and painted wood that fill Spanish churches.

His figures strain and twist and seem caught in mid-torment, the Italian Mannerism he had seen pushed to an emotional extreme. His masterpiece is in Toledo Cathedral, where he carved part of the upper choir stalls in walnut and, near the end of his life, an alabaster Transfiguration above them. He died in Toledo in 1561, still at work in the cathedral.