Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora

On 18 May 1491 Florence cathedral commissioned mosaics for one of its chapels, the one dedicated to Saint Zenobius, the city's early bishop. The work was shared among the brothers Domenico and Davide Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, and two other brothers who ran an illuminators' shop, Gherardo di Giovanni and Monte. It stopped in 1492. In December 1493 Gherardo and Monte were given the vault, and it was still unfinished when Gherardo died in 1497.

Tiny pages and large walls ran side by side through his career. From 1465 the brothers rented a shop from the monks of the Badia, the old abbey in the centre of Florence, and called themselves stationers and illuminators. In the 1470s they painted the miniatures of a large missal for the church of Sant'Egidio, at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and in the late 1480s they illuminated books for Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary. Giorgio Vasari, the biographer of the painters, praised Gherardo's 'sophisticated brain' and wrote that he also studied ancient letters and played music.