Rosso Fiorentino

Rosso Fiorentino, the redheaded Florentine, was one of the painters who broke early with the calm balance of the High Renaissance. His Deposition of 1521 in the Tuscan town of Volterra is all sharp angles, acid pinks and greens, and figures perched on spindly ladders, grief pushed into something jagged and almost modern-looking.

For years he moved around Italy scraping a living, and he was in Rome when imperial troops sacked the city in 1527, an experience that left him briefly destitute. Then his luck turned completely. In 1530 the French king Francis I brought him north to decorate the palace of Fontainebleau.

There Rosso became the leading artist of the French court, inventing with Francesco Primaticcio a new style of painted panels framed in sculpted plaster and elaborate strapwork. That Fontainebleau manner spread across northern Europe through prints. He died in France in 1540, having exported the Italian Mannerism he had helped invent.