Raffaellino del Garbo

For a long time art historians believed Raffaellino del Garbo was three different painters. Pictures from Florence around 1500 carried different signatures, Raphael de Caponibus on some and Raphael Karli on others, and scholars built a separate career around each name. Archive research later put them back together. He was born Raffaello dei Carli around 1466 in the countryside south of Florence, lost his parents young, and grew up in the household of the Capponi, a Florentine patrician family whose name he also used. "Del Garbo" came last, from the Via del Garbo, a street where he rented a workshop in the 1510s.

He trained with Filippino Lippi, son of the painter-friar Filippo Lippi, and followed him to Rome in the 1490s to help with the frescoes of the Carafa Chapel in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Back in Florence he painted altarpieces in a clear, bright manner, among them the Resurrection now in the Galleria dell'Accademia and a Coronation of the Virgin of 1511 now in the Louvre.

Vasari, the painter who wrote the lives of the Florentine artists a generation later, told the rest less kindly. In his account Raffaellino started better than he finished, took on too much cheap work to support his family, and ended up drawing designs for church embroidery. Some of those designs survive, among them a cartoon of the angel of the Annunciation made for an embroidery, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.