Marco d'Oggiono

On 7 September 1490 Leonardo da Vinci noted in a memorandum that his young servant Salai had stolen a silver stylus worth 22 soldi from Marco, who was staying with him. That grumble is the earliest evidence that Marco d'Oggiono, then about 20, was working in Leonardo's Milan workshop.

Within a year he had a commission of his own. On 14 June 1491 the brothers of the late Leonardo Griffi, archbishop of Benevento, contracted two young painters to make an altarpiece for the family chapel in the church of San Giovanni sul Muro in Milan. They were Marco and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, another of the Milanese painters around Leonardo, and both were still legally under their fathers' authority when they signed. The panel is now in Berlin.

Leonardo left Milan in 1499 and left behind compositions that buyers wanted copies of. Marco supplied them for the rest of his life, repeating the Last Supper at full size more than once, one version of which hangs in the chapel of the chateau of Ecouen north of Paris. He did well out of the trade. In 1511 the Milanese painters' guild elected him one of its procurators, and the following year he inherited property from his father, a goldsmith who had come into the city from the town of Oggiono. Plague reached Milan in 1524. Marco died of it shortly before June, and his son Cinzio died in the same outbreak.