Domenico Ghirlandaio

In 1487 a Florentine painter named Domenico Ghirlandaio signed a contract taking on a new apprentice, a 13-year-old named Michelangelo Buonarroti. Ghirlandaio ran one of the busiest workshops in Florence, staffed by his own brothers and later his son, and could turn out fresco cycles at a pace few rivals matched. The contract survives, spelling out years of training and even a small wage for the boy. Michelangelo later played down the debt, at times claiming he was entirely self-taught, but the discipline of fresco painting he learned in that workshop stayed with him for the Sistine ceiling decades later.

Ghirlandaio's own reputation rested chiefly on frescoes, large-scale wall paintings that only a well-staffed workshop could turn out on schedule, above all the cycle he painted for the Tornabuoni family in the church of Santa Maria Novella. He filled biblical scenes with the faces and fashions of the Florentine merchant families who paid for them, so that a scene from the life of the Virgin doubles as a group portrait of the city's elite around 1490. He trained under Alesso Baldovinetti, a Florentine painter and mosaicist, and kept close ties to Botticelli and the Umbrian painter Perugino, part of the same generation shaping Florentine art before the High Renaissance.

He died in January 1494, just short of his 46th birthday, five days after a sudden fever took hold while he was preparing new commissions for Siena and Pisa.