Contemporary of Vasari's hero, Michelangelo, and like him a sculptor as
much as a painter, Domenico Beccafumi could nonetheless hardly present a
more different artistic personality. His calligraphically curved
figures--often wispy and strangely insubstantial, and bathed in a
mysterious gloom--look away from classicism to the picturesqueness of
early Sienese painting and the most romantic elements of Mannerism. His
idiosyncratic achievement is a fascinating example of the unexpected
riches of Italian renaissance art outside the well-trodden paths of
Florence and Rome. Vasari's biography is our main source of information
for his life, and remains a fascinating description of an unmistakably
individual artist.