Giovanni Francesco Caroto

Around 1520 in Verona, Giovanni Francesco Caroto painted a red-haired boy grinning straight out of the panel and holding up a sheet of paper. On the paper is a child's scribble, a little stick figure. Nothing else in 16th-century Italian portraiture looks remotely like it, and that small picture, now in Verona's Castelvecchio museum, is why his name still travels.

Caroto had trained in Verona and spent time in Milan while Leonardo da Vinci was working there, and it shows. The soft modelling of the face, the close foreshortened view, the plain amusement in the boy's expression all come from what he had watched Leonardo do. He brought that manner home to a city then ruled from Venice and painted altarpieces and frescoes for its churches for decades.

Most of what he made is conventional devotional painting of its day, calm and competent. The grinning boy with his stick-figure drawing is the exception, and the one work of Caroto's that people still cross the country to see.