Lorenzo di Credi

Lorenzo di Credi trained in one of the most famous workshops in Florence, that of Andrea del Verrocchio, sculptor and painter, at the same time as a slightly older apprentice named Leonardo da Vinci. When Verrocchio died, Lorenzo inherited the studio and finished off his master's unfinished work.

His painting shows what steady discipline without genius looks like, smooth, careful, immaculately finished panels of Madonnas and saints, clearly marked by Leonardo's early manner but without the restless invention behind it. He was known as an exacting craftsman who ground his own colours and kept his surfaces flawless.

In the 1490s he fell under the spell of the preacher Savonarola, who urged Florentines to burn their vanities, and Lorenzo is said to have destroyed some of his own worldly pictures. He lived into his late seventies, dying in 1537, long after the workshop where he and Leonardo had met was gone.