Giuliano Bugiardini

Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini (29 January 1475 – 17 February 1555) was an Italian Renaissance painter. He was born and was mainly active in Florence. He was a painter primarily of religious subjects but he also executed a number of portraits and a few works with mythological subjects.

Life and work Virgin and Child with Saints Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist, circa 1523. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists, devoted a biography to Bugiardini in which he claimed the artist began his career under the sculptor Bertoldo in Lorenzo de' Medici's famous sculpture garden near the convent of San Marco. It was probably there that Bugiardini met the young Michelangelo, with whom he'd remain friends throughout his career. In the early 1490s, both artists joined the workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio, where they were trained in the art of painting. Bugiardini was an independent artist by 1503, the year in which the joined the Florentine painters' confraternity the Compagnia di San Luca and formed a business partnership with Mariotto Albertinelli. The partnership was dissolved in 1509, when Albertinelli rejoined forces with his previous partner, Fra Bartolomeo. Most of these works are signed. By 1530 Bugiardini was back in Florence. His activity seems to have dwindled in the following decades, and in 1555 he died in his native Florence.

Bugiardini has long been criticized as a mediocre talent incapable of understanding the formal principles of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and Fra Bartolomeo, all major influences on his work. Other scholars have commended Bugiardini's color and light and the stark simplicity in many of his works. The Virgin and Child with Saints Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist (circa 1523) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, widely regarded as one of Bugiardini's most successful creations, is so refined that it was once considered to be by Fra Bartolomeo.

Most of the drawings once given to Bugiardini are now attributed to others.