Domenico Puligo

Vasari wrote a life of him and could not settle on praise. Domenico di Bartolomeo Ubaldini, called Puligo, painted with a softness that puts his figures in a haze of air. Vasari admired the colour, then remarked that the blurring conveniently covered faults of drawing, and that the man was idle and took whatever fee was offered.

He was Florentine, born in 1492, and trained with Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, whose father had taught the young Michelangelo. He worked alongside Andrea del Sarto, the leading painter in the city, and the two became friends. Portraits were what Florence wanted from him. Vasari says one of his sitters was Barbara the Florentine, a courtesan admired for her manners and for singing divinely. She is usually identified with Barbara Salutati, whom Machiavelli was in love with in his last years, though no document proves it.

Puligo caught the plague in the Florentine epidemic of 1527 and died at 35, buried at San Lorenzo. In October 2024 the Uffizi opened three rooms at the end of its Third Corridor and brought his Mary Magdalene over from the Pitti, moving its date back by roughly a decade, to about 1515 to 1519. A portrait of a young man in a sash and gloves stayed at the Palatine Gallery, where it went under Andrea del Sarto's name until the art historian Carlo Gamba gave it to Puligo in 1909.