Pietro Torrigiano

Torrigiano was a Florentine sculptor and painter who became the first proponent of the Italian Renaissance style in England. He was a student, along with Michelangelo, of Bertoldo di Giovanni at the Academy of Lorenzo de' Medici. Torrigiano left Florence and worked in Rome, Bologna, Siena, and Antwerp before making his reputation in England. His best-known works, the tombs in Westminster Abbey for King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, are full-length reclining figures cast in gilt bronze.

Text © National Portrait Gallery, London