Bramantino

His real name was Bartolomeo Suardi, but everyone called him Bramantino, the little Bramante, after Donato Bramante, the great architect he trained under in Milan. The nickname stuck to a painter who was strange and hard to place, fond of clear geometry, cool light and figures who seem frozen in a still, silent space.

He worked through decades when Milan kept changing hands between the French and the Sforza dukes. Around the turn of the 16th century he designed one of the finest things to survive from that world, a set of twelve tapestries of the Months made for the soldier and statesman Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, each month a crowded scene of the season's labour. They are still in Milan, in the Castello Sforzesco.

For the same family he built a funerary chapel beside the church of San Nazaro, a severe stone room that shows how seriously he took architecture. In 1525, near the end of his life, Francesco Maria Sforza, the last of that line to rule Milan, named him court painter and architect, partly in thanks for staying loyal while the city was under siege.