Liberale da Verona

Two painted panels in the Metropolitan Museum in New York once formed the front of a chest. In one, a young man looks up at a girl leaning from a window. In the other, the pair sit over a chessboard, and she is about to lose. Their bleached, frizzy blond hair was the height of fashion in 15th-century Siena, and that is where Liberale painted them, around 1475.

He was a Veronese, registered in his home city in 1455 as a boy of ten, and he spent his most productive years far from it. From 1467 to 1476 he worked in and around Siena, illuminating huge choir books with miniatures for the cathedral and for the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore in the hills to the south. The cathedral's books are still shown in its Piccolomini Library.

Back in Verona he turned to altarpieces and frescoes, among them an Adoration of the Magi in the cathedral, and trained a generation of local painters, including Giovanni Francesco Caroto and Francesco Torbido. He dictated his will in August 1527, leaving his property to his wife Eva and to Torbido's daughters, and a Verona register of 1529 already lists him as dead.