Biagio d'Antonio

In 1481 the pope gathered a team of Tuscan painters and sent them to Rome to fresco the walls of a new chapel in the Vatican, the one that would take the name of Pope Sixtus IV, the Sistine Chapel. Among the hands at work was Biagio d'Antonio, a Florentine who helped Cosimo Rosselli paint the Last Supper and the Crossing of the Red Sea on the lower walls, decades before Michelangelo climbed the scaffold to paint the ceiling.

Back in Florence, Biagio moved in the busiest circle of his day. He learned from Filippo Lippi and worked beside Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose workshop ran the leading fresco business in the city. In 1487 he joined Ghirlandaio and others to paint panels for the wedding chamber of Lorenzo Tornabuoni, a young Florentine of the Medici orbit.

For a long time his work was scattered under other names, some of it filed under an invented label, the Master of the Johnson Nativity, until scholars pieced his identity back together. He also worked in Faenza, east of Florence, and died in Florence in 1516.