Francesco Squarcione

Francesco Squarcione ran the most famous painting workshop in 15th-century Padua, a university town in northern Italy, and he ran it in an unusual way. Around 1440 he bought a house and filled it with his own collection of ancient sculptures, reliefs and architectural fragments, some of which he is said to have gathered on travels as far as Greece. Pupils learned by drawing these antiquities, absorbing the forms of Roman art at a time when that was still rare north of Rome.

As many as 137 young painters are recorded as passing through his school, which drew students from all over Italy. His own surviving paintings are few, and it is really as a teacher that he matters.

His most gifted pupil was Andrea Mantegna, who entered the studio as a boy. In 1448, aged about 17, Mantegna won his freedom and promptly took Squarcione to court, arguing that the master had profited from work the boy had produced under his own name. He was not the only one. Squarcione spent years tangled in similar suits with former apprentices. The love of antique fragments he drilled into that workshop runs straight through Mantegna's later paintings, crowded with stone arches, carved reliefs and Roman detail.