Domenico Beccafumi's mature personal style fully blossoms…

Domenico Beccafumi's mature personal style fully blossoms in his emotionally charged The Birth of the Virgin, painted around 1543.

As in The Fall of the Rebel Angels, painted nearly two decades earlier, Beccafumi works with elongated figures, suffusing the painting’s vivid colors with glowing light, and achieving dramatic perspective effects.

A sculptor and architect as well as a painter, most of his work is done in Siena, and his many commissions there include a number of floor mosaics for the cathedral.

Only mildly influenced by the gestured Mannerist trends dominating the neighboring Florentine school, Beccafumi is considered one of the last undiluted representatives of the Sienese school of painting.