Lorenzo Leonbruno

In April 1504 Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua, sent a painter of her household to Florence on two errands at once. He was to learn what he could from Perugino, the Umbrian master then at the top of his profession, and he was also to stand over the picture Perugino was painting for her studiolo and report back on how it was coming along. Leonbruno stayed until the following spring.

He had come into court work by inheritance. His adoptive father, Giovanni Luca de' Liombeni, painted for the Gonzaga, and Leonbruno took over the workshop when the old man died in 1495, then married his widow four years later. Isabella kept finding uses for him. In 1521 she sent him to Rome to see what painters there were doing, and the next spring he began a year on the vault of her Scalcheria, a small room in the ducal palace, filling it with grotesques, the weightless spindly ornament that Roman painters had copied out of the buried rooms of Nero's palace.

Giulio Romano, Raphael's chief assistant in Rome, arrived in Mantua in 1524, and the large commissions went to him. Leonbruno's answer was to change trade. By October 1531 he was in Milan working for Duke Francesco II Sforza as a military engineer. He had made his will two years before that, asking to be buried at Santa Maria del Carmine in Mantua, and his name stays in the Gonzaga salary records until 1537, the year he is presumed to have died.