Federico Barocci

Federico Barocci spent nearly his whole career in Urbino, the small hill court where Raphael had been born a generation earlier, far from the art capitals. Early on he had worked in Rome, but he came home convinced that jealous rivals there had tried to poison him at a picnic, and a lasting stomach illness kept him from ever staying away for long.

Working in that isolation, he arrived at a tender, luminous style ahead of its time. His altarpieces glow with shot pinks, lilacs, and blues, and his figures turn and smile with a soft-focus sweetness that looks forward to the Baroque. He was among the first to work out his compositions in coloured chalk studies, building the final colour before he touched the panel.

Collectors across Italy competed for his slow output, and Peter Paul Rubens, passing through Italy as a young man, studied him closely. He kept painting into old age despite the illness he never shook.