#renaissance

For a long time this was just filed as 'Portrait of a Man' — someone eventually managed to make out the barely-legible letter he's holding, addressed to himself, and that's apparently how they worked out who he was.

I couldn't dig up much on this one — no name for her, nothing about why it was painted. If anyone knows, I'd take the story.

The long, low shape is the giveaway, apparently: pictures built this wide were often part of the furniture — a bench back, or the panel set above a bed — rather than something hung by itself. There are wasps up in one corner that some people read as a pun on a family's name.

This scene was standard issue in Florence then — workshops turned them out constantly for churches and chapels that wanted one. It came out of his apprentice years in someone else's studio, which is apparently why people still argue about how much of it is his hand at all.

The Three Graces come out of Greek and Roman myth — three sisters standing in for charm, beauty and good cheer, and painters kept returning to them for centuries as a reason to put a trio of women together in one frame. Past that I couldn't turn up much on this particular one; even the photo of it going around is black and white.

Painting a ceiling wasn't the job he wanted — he thought of himself as a sculptor and took it on under pressure, then spent four years craning upward at it. This is one panel out of a long run of scenes across the whole ceiling, which I hadn't realised. Supposedly it all looked far dimmer until a cleaning in the eighties that people argued about for years afterwards.

It's painted straight onto a church wall, and for about three hundred years nobody could see it — someone stuck an altarpiece in front of the whole thing, and it wasn't uncovered again until the 1800s. The kneeling pair are the couple who paid for it, though no one seems certain who they actually were. The writing under the skeleton, they say, comes out as roughly: I was once what you are, and what I am you will be.

Story goes this was a two-person job - an older workshop master and one of his apprentices - and the apprentice's angel on the left came out so much better that the older one supposedly quit painting for good after that.

This was made for a church altar rather than a gallery. According to what I found, Pope Julius II was the one who commissioned it — about as prestigious a job as a painter could land back then.

A lot of the faces in this crowd are said to be portraits of Raphael's own circle - the bald figure slumped over a block up front is supposedly Michelangelo, added in after Raphael got a peek at the Sistine ceiling next door, and the man crouched down sketching on a slate at the right is thought to be a stand-in for the architect Bramante.

This is chalk on paper — the kind of sheet that was a step towards something else rather than the thing itself. He's said to have burned a lot of his own drawings late in life, supposedly so nobody would ever see the working-out behind the finished stuff. Ones like this got out anyway, and now they're framed and lit the same way the paintings are.

This one got mistaken for a Raphael self-portrait for a long time. Turns out it's actually a portrait of one of his patrons — a wealthy Florentine banker who helped fund some of his other work.

This one's grouped with two other Dürer engravings as his 'Master Prints,' from what I've read — three prints meant to show off everything the medium could do.

It's painted on canvas rather than a wooden panel, which was still an odd choice at the time, and it seems to have been made for a Medici cousin's country house rather than a church. Who exactly ordered it, and what for, nobody seems to have settled.

The juniper behind her is supposedly a pun — 'ginepro' is Italian for juniper, so it doubles as a nod to her name. It's also, they say, the only Leonardo painting on public display anywhere in the Americas, part of why it made headlines when a museum bought it for a record sum in the 1960s.

The odd name comes from the Cowper family, who used to own it — nothing to do with the subject. Like a lot of British collections, it eventually made its way into an American museum in the early 1900s.

Apparently not everyone who studies Leonardo's other work is convinced this one is fully his — some think it's more workshop than master.

It was made for the dining hall of a monastery in Venice — a whole wall of feasting to eat your own supper under. French troops carried it off in 1797 and, it's said, cut it in half to get it out of the building.

Nobody actually knows who she is. She gets called Venus by tradition, from what I can find, but there's no story attached — just a young woman on a bed in a grand house, a sleeping dog, and two maids in the back digging through a chest like it's any other afternoon. It sat finished for years before anyone bought it, apparently.

Apparently this was painted after he was already dead — he was stabbed at Mass in 1478 as part of a plot against his family, and pictures like this got made afterward so people had something to remember him by.