Michele Tosini

Florentines knew Michele Tosini by his teacher's name. After early training with Lorenzo di Credi, he joined the workshop of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, son of the famous Domenico, and became so much a part of it that he was called Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio. According to Vasari, the painter and biographer, Michele went on to run a large shop turning out altarpieces and portraits for Florence and the towns around it.

In his fifties his manner changed. From 1556 he assisted Vasari himself in decorating the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Duke Cosimo de' Medici, and began to borrow openly from Michelangelo. His painting of Night, now in the Galleria Colonna in Rome, reworks Michelangelo's marble Night from the Medici tombs. The same late style shows in a matching pair of half-length heroines in the Galleria Borghese, a Leda with her swan and a Lucretia, painted in the 1560s. In those years he also frescoed three of Florence's city gates, and his pupils included Bernardino Poccetti, later a prolific fresco painter in the city.