Neroccio di Bartolomeo de' Landi

By the time Neroccio di Bartolomeo de' Landi was at work, in the second half of the 15th century, Florence had gone all in on the new Renaissance, with its hard perspective and muscular figures. Fifty miles south, Siena kept painting much as it had for over a century: gold backgrounds, slender saints, and a sweetness inherited from masters like Simone Martini generations before.

Neroccio belonged to that older Siena, and he became its finest painter of the Madonna, giving her a pale, ethereal face and a quiet melancholy that people still recognize at once as Sienese. For several years he shared a workshop with Francesco di Giorgio Martini, the painter and engineer who would go on to design fortresses across Italy, and together the two shaped a new blonde ideal of female beauty before parting around 1475.

He worked in stone as well as in paint. Among his sculptures is the marble tomb of a bishop in Siena Cathedral, carved with the same delicacy he gave his painted Virgins. He died in Siena in 1500, still working in the gold-ground manner that Florence had abandoned two generations earlier.