Bartolomeo di Giovanni

For a long time the painter of a group of small Florentine narrative panels had no name. The American connoisseur Bernard Berenson, who spent his life sorting Italian Renaissance pictures by eye, gathered them together and called their author Alunno di Domenico, the pupil of Domenico. He chose the name because he saw the same hand in the predella beneath Domenico Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Magi, the high altarpiece of the Innocenti, Florence's foundling hospital, completed in 1488. Archival research later turned up the painter's real name, Bartolomeo di Giovanni.

That predella runs as a strip of seven small scenes under Ghirlandaio's altarpiece. Berenson also recognised his hand in the background of the main picture, where Herod's soldiers kill the children of Bethlehem, the Holy Innocents the hospital was named after. Bartolomeo worked with Ghirlandaio and with Sandro Botticelli, two of the busiest masters in the city, and much of what he made was narrative painting for furniture and walls, the chests and panels Florentine families commissioned for a marriage.

His birth is placed in the 1450s, and he died in 1501. A Virgin and Child with four saints that he painted in 1498 for the church of San Giovanni di Boldrone in Florence is now in the art museum of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.