The Artist - Sebastiano Mainardi
Sebastiano Mainardi was born in 1466 in the Tuscan town of San Gimignano, the son of a wealthy apothecary. He received his artistic training in the late 1470s in the thriving Florentine workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, one of the most distinguished and prolific masters of the Italian Renaissance.
Most of Mainardi’s surviving works are frescoes and altarpieces painted after 1500 for churches in San Gimignano, Pisa, and Florence. His conservative style, derived from Ghirlandaio, is characterized by its formal sobriety, iconographic clarity and compositional symmetry. In this perfectly balanced work, the Virgin and Child are framed by the Renaissance architecture of a marble throne and flanked by the standing figures of St. Justus of Volterra and St. Justina. Signed and dated in 1507, the Indianapolis altarpiece is considered a major work of the artist’s late period.
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Mainardi’s career as a painter is inextricably linked to that of Ghirlandaio and his family. Even after becoming an independent artist, Mainardi continued to work in collaboration with his former master’s shop and, in 1494, he married Domenico’s sister.
Mainardi’s late works, especially altarpieces like the one at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, are exceptional in the history of Renaissance art because they are invested with a conscious artistic simplicity that amplifies the immediacy of their religious message. In this case, the devotional focus on the Mother of God is concentrated by the spare formality of the composition. Her frontal pose and outward gaze are captioned by the opening words of a familiar prayer, prominently inscribed on the base of her throne: AVE GRATIA PLENA (Hail full of grace).