Francesco Granacci

In 1489 Lorenzo de' Medici, the man who effectively ran Florence, asked the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio to send over his two most promising apprentices. Ghirlandaio sent a teenage Michelangelo and, alongside him, Francesco Granacci. The two had already grown close in the workshop, and it was Granacci, a few years older, who walked his friend into the Medici sculpture garden near San Marco, the collection of antique marbles where Michelangelo first learned to carve.

That friendship shaped much of Granacci's life. When Michelangelo took on the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1508, he called Granacci to Rome to help gather and manage the Florentine assistants who ground colours and prepared the vast plaster surface. Granacci had trained in the same tradition, first perhaps under the painter Filippino Lippi, then Ghirlandaio, and his own panels carry that clear, decorative Florentine line.

He spent most of his career at home, painting altarpieces and designing the elaborate street decorations for Medici festivals and ceremonial entries into the city. Vasari, who knew the Florentine art world from the inside, gave him a place in his Lives and noted that his high altarpiece for the church of Sant'Apollonia in Florence was designed by Michelangelo himself. Granacci died in the city in 1543, in his mid-seventies.