Giovanni Agostino da Lodi

For a long time this painter had no name of his own. His pictures drifted through collections under the label Pseudo-Boccaccino, parked beneath a stronger reputation, until the connoisseur Bernard Berenson pieced the real hand back together in the early 20th century and returned the work to Giovanni Agostino, a painter from Lodi in Lombardy.

His life ran through one of the great upheavals of northern Italy. Around 1499 Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan, lost his city to a French invasion and artists scattered. Agostino had been in Milan long enough to study Leonardo's Last Supper on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie, and he carried that lesson to Venice. You can see it in the Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles here in the Accademia, where the soft faces and the crowded, gesturing group owe a clear debt to Leonardo.

His one signed painting survives too, two saints now in the Brera gallery in Milan, and it still speaks the older Lombard language of Bramantino, a local master of hard, sculptural form. Late in life he was painting for the Certosa di Pavia, the grand monastery outside Pavia.