Francesco Francia

Francesco Francia trained as a goldsmith, and he never quite left the trade. He ran the mint in Bologna, the city's coin-making house, signed some paintings 'aurifex', goldsmith, and brought a jeweller's precision to the soft, sweet-faced Madonnas that made him the leading painter of his city around 1500.

For a while he worked alongside Lorenzo Costa, a fellow Bolognese painter, and he taught the young Marcantonio Raimondi, who would become the great engraver of Raphael's designs and carry them across Europe.

The most famous thing about Francia is a story that may not be true. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Italian artists, wrote that when Raphael sent his Saint Cecilia altarpiece to Bologna around 1515, Francia was asked to install it, saw how far the younger man had surpassed him, and died of grief soon after. Modern scholars doubt the tale, partly because the two men seem to have been on friendly terms.

Francia did die in 1517, in the city where he had spent his whole life, still holding his post at the mint.