Bastiano Mainardi

Bastiano Mainardi (1466–1513) was a painter of the Early Renaissance, born in San Gimignano and active there and in Florence. He was the pupil and brother-in-law of Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Vasari records him among the figures in Ghirlandaio's frescoes in the Sassetti and Tornabuoni chapels. His secure works are strongly indebted to Ghirlandaio, and he kept a lifelong tie to the family workshop. They include frescoes of 1490 now in the Bargello, the Madonna della Cintola in Santa Croce and a run of altarpieces for churches in and around San Gimignano; one of the last, commissioned in 1511 for Sant'Agostino there, was finished after his death by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. The discovery that he was born in 1466 overturned many older attributions, among them a Louvre tondo of the Madonna and Child with the infant Saint John and three angels, which he could probably not have painted. Here: Madonna and Child with St Justus of Volterra and St Margaret of Antioch.