Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio

Ridolfo was 11 when his father died, and his father was famous. Domenico Ghirlandaio had run one of the busiest workshops in Florence and given the young Michelangelo his first training. The boy was raised and taught by his uncle Davide, who kept the family shop going.

He grew up into the generation of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, and he knew the last of them well. Around 1505 the two young painters were friends in Florence, and Ridolfo's work of those years shares Raphael's soft modelling and calm faces. In 1508, leaving for Rome and the papal apartments that would make his name, Raphael asked Ridolfo to come with him. Ridolfo stayed home.

He built instead a long, prosperous Florentine career, turning out altarpieces, frescoes and portraits and running a large workshop of his own. Among the pupils who passed through it was Michele Tosini, who became so close to him that he was known ever after as Michele di Ridolfo. Ridolfo went on painting in Florence for more than half a century, dying there in 1561, in his late seventies.