Gherardo Starnina

Gherardo Starnina was a Florentine painter who did something unusual for his day: he went to work in Spain. Trained in Florence, by the biographer Giorgio Vasari's account under Antonio Veneziano and then Agnolo Gaddi, he left for the Iberian courts around 1380 and spent years in Valencia through the 1390s, with work also linked to the cathedral of Toledo.

When he came home to Florence he carried the bright, decorative International Gothic manner he had absorbed abroad, and his strongly Gothic style helped shape the next generation of Florentine painting. For a long time much of his output was gathered under an invented name, the Master of the Bambino Vispo, the 'master of the lively child', after the wriggling Christ children in his Madonnas. Scholars now generally match that anonymous hand to Starnina himself.

He died around 1413, back in the city where he had started.