Melozzo da Forlì

In 1477 Pope Sixtus IV was turning the Vatican into a centre of learning, and he had just founded a public library. To record the moment he called on Melozzo da Forlì, a painter from the small Romagna town of Forlì who had made his name in Rome. The fresco Melozzo gave him shows the pope enthroned, appointing the humanist scholar Platina as the library's first keeper, a real event painted as if you had walked into the room.

Melozzo's gift was foreshortening, figures built to be seen from steeply below so they seem to lean out over you. He carried it furthest in an Ascension of Christ for the church of Santi Apostoli. That fresco was broken apart in the 1700s when the apse was rebuilt, but fragments survive: angels playing lutes and viols, tipped back at impossible angles, and a few apostles gazing upward.

Those salvaged angels now hang in the Vatican Pinacoteca, a short walk from the Platina fresco, which was itself lifted off the wall and transferred onto canvas in the 19th century.