Nicolas Froment

The Uffizi owns a three-panel altarpiece of the raising of Lazarus, signed and dated 1461 by a French painter named Nicolas Froment. It is the earliest work of his we can name, and it was made far from Italy. Froment painted in the Flemish manner then spreading across Europe, working in oil with the sharp realism and crowded detail of the Netherlandish masters.

He made it for Francesco Coppini, a bishop from Prato who was serving as a papal envoy in Flanders and England in those years. When the triptych is closed, the outer panels show Coppini himself kneeling in prayer before the Virgin. The picture later passed to the Medici and was given to a Franciscan convent in the Tuscan hills, which is how a French altarpiece ended up in Florence. It reached the Uffizi in 1841.

Later in his career Froment became court painter to René of Anjou, the art-loving king who ruled Provence, and around 1476 he painted the Burning Bush altarpiece still kept in the cathedral at Aix-en-Provence.