Cosimo Rosselli

In 1481 Pope Sixtus IV summoned a team of the best painters in central Italy to fresco the walls of his new chapel in the Vatican, the one now called the Sistine. Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and Perugino were there, and so was the Florentine Cosimo Rosselli, a solid, less brilliant master who got the commission all the same. Vasari tells a story, probably embroidered, that Rosselli, worried his work looked weak beside the others, drowned his frescoes in gold and bright ultramarine, and that the pope, no great connoisseur, declared his the best of the lot.

Rosselli ran a busy Florentine workshop and painted altarpieces across the city, competent and conservative while younger men were changing everything around him. His lasting importance may be less his own pictures than the people who came through his shop. Both Piero di Cosimo, the eccentric painter of strange mythologies, and Fra Bartolomeo, later a leading figure of the High Renaissance, trained under him.

He worked steadily into old age and died in Florence in 1507, the year Raphael was arriving in the city and the world Rosselli had learned his craft in was already being left behind.