Lorenzo d'Alessandro
1445–1503 · Italian · Renaissance
The story
Lorenzo d'Alessandro spent his entire life in and around a single town, San Severino Marche, in the hills of the Adriatic side of central Italy, where he was born about 1445. He is often called Lorenzo da Sanseverino, after that home town.
His painting grew from a local tradition, the delicate late-Gothic manner of the Salimbeni brothers, earlier painters of the same town. Onto it he grafted what was arriving from outside: the sharp, jewelled line of Carlo Crivelli, a Venetian then working in the Marche, and the calm geometry of Piero della Francesca, the great master of perspective from neighbouring Tuscany. The result kept the gold and pattern of the old style alongside a new sense of space.
He trained pupils, among them Bernardino di Mariotto of Perugia, and passed the craft to his own sons. Several of his panels still hang in the civic gallery of San Severino, the town he never left, where he died in 1503.
