Andrea del Castagno

Andrea del Castagno painted figures that look carved from stone. Working in Florence in the mid-15th century, he took the new science of perspective and the muscular solidity of Masaccio and pushed both to a hard, almost fierce extreme, with sharp outlines and severe faces.

His masterpiece is a Last Supper in the refectory of a Florentine convent, Sant'Apollonia, where the apostles sit in a cold, richly marbled room and a storm of veined stone rages on the wall behind the traitor Judas. Nearby he painted a series of famous men and women, Dante and Petrarch among them, standing like statues in painted niches.

For centuries his reputation carried a stain. The biographer Giorgio Vasari accused him of murdering a fellow painter, Domenico Veneziano, out of envy. It was a good story and completely false, since Domenico outlived him by four years. Castagno himself died young in 1457, in one of the outbreaks of plague that kept sweeping the city.