Pedro Fernández de Murcia

For decades this painter existed only as a nickname. Art historians had grouped a set of altarpieces from Naples, Rome and Lombardy painted in a strangely intense manner, close in places to Bramantino, the Milanese painter and architect, and they called their unknown author the Pseudo-Bramantino, the false Bramantino. Only later was he matched with a man in the archives, a Spanish painter recorded in Italy as Pietro Ispano, Peter the Spaniard, and in Catalonia as Pedro Fernández.

He seems to have been born in Murcia, in south-eastern Spain, around 1480, and to have formed his style in Milan around 1500, where he came to know the work of Bramantino and of Leonardo da Vinci's followers. He is first documented in Naples in 1510, painting an altarpiece for the convent of San Gregorio Armeno, and he passed through Rome, where he saw the new work of Raphael and Michelangelo. In 1517 and 1518 he was in Lombardy again, on an altarpiece for the church of Bressanoro, near Cremona.

In November 1519 he signed a contract in Girona, in Catalonia, for the altarpiece of Saint Helena in the cathedral, working with a local painter, Antonio Norri. It was set up in 1521, and after that the documents lose him.