Marco Bigio

Almost everything about Marco Bigio is uncertain, starting with who he was. No date of birth or death survives for him. He painted in Siena in the first half of the 16th century and was most likely a pupil of Sodoma, the painter from Vercelli who was then the leading artist in the city. His name came down through Siena's own tradition, and in the 1780s the Franciscan scholar Guglielmo Della Valle attached it to a large canvas of the Three Fates.

The rest had to be pieced together. In 1988 the art historian Fiorella Sricchia Santoro built a small group of works around that canvas, among them a Venus with allegorical figures in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena and an Apollo and Daphne in the Palazzo Chigi Saracini, also in Siena. In 2017 the scholar Gabriele Fattorini went a step further and proposed identifying the painter with Girolamo Magagni, a pupil of Sodoma known as Giomo del Sodoma.