MAINARDI, Bastiano

Bastiano (Sebastiano) Mainardi, Italian painter, the brother-in-law of Domenico Ghirlandaio.

Vasari mentioned that Mainardi was a pupil of Domenico Ghirlandaio and that he was still working in the studio at the time of his master’s death. Vasari also claimed that Mainardi collaborated with Ghirlandaio on several works between 1475 and 1477, including the frescoGLOSSARYWall painting technique in which pigments are applied to wet (fresh) plaster (intonaco). The pigments bind with the drying plaster to form a very durable image. Only a small area can be painted in a day, and these areas, drying to a slightly different tint, can in time be seen. Small amounts of retouching and detail work could be carried out on the dry plaster, a technique known as a secco fresco. decoration of the chapelGLOSSARYa small separate place for worship, either part of a large church or a separate building. of S Fina in the Collegiata, San Gimignano, and on the frescoes in the abbey of Passignano in Val di Pesa, near Florence. Given the dates of these works, it was thought that Mainardi was born between 1450 and 1460 and that he was, if not a contemporary of Ghirlandaio’s, certainly one of his earliest collaborators, together with Ghirlandaio’s brother Davide. The discovery that Mainardi was born in 1466 (Venturini) would suggest that the two painters’ relationship was that of master and pupil, at least until the early 1480s. Certainly Mainardi could not have collaborated on the frescoes in the Collegiata.