Benvenuto Tisi

In the small court city of Ferrara, in northern Italy, Benvenuto Tisi was known by a flower. He signed some of his paintings with a little carnation, garofano in Italian, and the nickname stuck: Garofalo.

As a young man he had gone south to Rome and worked near Raphael, the reigning master of the age, in the painted rooms of the Vatican. He carried that soft, balanced grace back north and applied it to altarpieces and frescoes across Ferrara, often working alongside his friend and rival Dosso Dossi, the duke's court painter. Ferrarese writers came to call him the Raphael of Ferrara for it.

He kept painting into his seventies, steady and prolific, until his sight began to fail. He lost the use of one eye around 1550 and had gone fully blind by the time he died in 1559.