Gianfrancesco Penni

Three sons of a Florentine family of weavers ended up painting for three different courts. Bartolomeo Penni worked for King Henry VIII in England in the 1530s, decorating royal palaces alongside another Florentine, Antonio Toto. Luca Penni went to France, joined the Italian painters at Fontainebleau, the château of King Francis I, and later made designs for engravers in Paris. Their sister married Perino del Vaga, one of the painters trained in Raphael's workshop.

Gianfrancesco was the brother who stayed closest to Raphael. When he was born is not settled, and the sources give either 1488 or 1496. He entered the master's Roman workshop young and worked on the frescoes of the Vatican rooms and of the Villa Farnesina, the banker Agostino Chigi's villa by the Tiber. In the Hall of Constantine in the Vatican, the museum gives him the figures of the Baptism and the Donation of Constantine.

He spent his last years in Naples, working for the Marquis del Vasto, a commander in the emperor's service, and died there in 1528. A full-size copy of Raphael's last altarpiece, the Transfiguration, which the Prado in Madrid now credits to him and Giulio Romano, hung in a church in Naples before it went to Spain.