Carlo Dolci

In 17th-century Florence, while the Medici court filled its galleries with grand mythologies, Carlo Dolci painted almost nothing but prayer. He worked so slowly that his biographer Baldinucci said he could spend weeks on a single foot, and claimed the painter murmured 'ora pro nobis' — pray for us — between brushstrokes.

The results are small, close-up devotional pictures: a half-length Virgin, a saint, a Christ, lit against deep shadow and finished to an almost enamel smoothness. He repeated his best compositions many times, and his daughter Agnese made copies too, so the same tender face turns up in collections across Europe.

Dolci was a favourite of the Medici, the banking family who ruled Tuscany, and the leading Florentine painter of his century, though the fashion for that intense, polished piety faded after him. He was said to fall into deep melancholy when he saw how quickly younger, looser painters worked. One of his signed self-portraits, made in 1674, shows him holding a drawing of his own aged face, a picture within the picture.