Benozzo Gozzoli

Benozzo Gozzoli painted one of the most gorgeous rooms of the Italian Renaissance, and it doubles as a family album. In the private chapel of the Medici palace in Florence he covered the walls around 1459 with the Journey of the Magi, the three kings riding to Bethlehem in a long, glittering procession through a springtime landscape of castles and cypress hills.

The kings and their retinue are stuffed with real faces. The Medici family and their allies ride among the crowd in gold and brocade, along with foreign dignitaries who had recently visited Florence, so a sacred story becomes a shimmering portrait of the city's rulers at the height of their power. Gozzoli even tucked in his own face, with his name written on his cap.

He had trained under the sober Fra Angelico, but his own gift was for colour, pattern and cheerful abundance rather than deep feeling. He spent much of his later career in smaller Tuscan towns, filling church walls with big, crowded, storytelling frescoes until his death in 1497.