Girolamo Genga

Girolamo Genga trained in the best company an ambitious young painter of his day could hope for. As a boy he was apprenticed in Orvieto to Luca Signorelli, a master of muscular figures, then spent three years in the workshop of Pietro Perugino beside a fellow pupil named Raphael, who would soon be the most famous painter in Italy.

Genga stayed closer to home. He came from near Urbino, one of the small, brilliant courts of Renaissance Italy, and its ruling Della Rovere dukes kept him busy for decades — first with paintings and stage sets for court festivities, then, more and more, as an architect.

His largest work is a place you can still visit: the Villa Imperiale above Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast, a hillside retreat he rebuilt from an old castle in the 1530s. He did not decorate it alone. He gathered a team of painters to fresco the rooms, among them the young Bronzino, who would later become court portraitist in Florence.