Simone Martini

Simone Martini was the great painter of Siena in the early 14th century, when that Tuscan city rivalled Florence and prized a style of luxury and grace. His Annunciation, made in 1333 for the cathedral with his brother-in-law Lippo Memmi, shows the angel Gabriel in a swirl of gold and the Virgin recoiling in alarm, the gilded surface worked like a goldsmith's panel. It now hangs in the Uffizi in Florence.

Late in life he made an unusual move for a painter. Around 1336 he went to Avignon, in southern France, where the popes were then living instead of Rome, drawn by the money and prestige of that displaced court. There he met Petrarch, the poet who was shaping the modern love sonnet, and the two became friends.

Petrarch asked him to paint a portrait of Laura, the woman his poems adored, and wrote two sonnets praising the result. That little picture is lost, but the sonnets survive, which makes Simone one of the first European painters we can name as the subject of a poem by a great writer. He also decorated a copy of Virgil that Petrarch owned, and that painted frontispiece is still kept in a library in Milan.