Background
He was born at Colbordolo in the Duchy of Urbino.
He was born at Colbordolo in the Duchy of Urbino.
He was a petty merchant for a time. He then studied under Piero della Francesca.
He was court painter to the Duke of Urbino and painted several altarpieces, two now in the Berlin Museum, a Madonna in the church of San Francesco in Urbino, one at the church of Santa Croce in Fano, one in the National Gallery at London, and another in the gallery at Urbino. An Annunciation at the Brera in Milan. A resurrected Christ in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
And a Jerome in the Lateran.
He died in Urbino.
His poetry includes an epic in honor of one of his patrons, Federico III da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, followed a discourse on painting. The event commemorates a visit to Mantua, where the Duke marveled at the skill of Andrea Mantegna, he then goes on to comment that "In this splendid and gentle art/ so many have been famous in our century/ that it make others seem destitute".
Santi then goes on to list famous names in painting, as known to him, this constitutes a remarkable concise list of 27 prominent painters of late 15th-century Italy and the Flanders, as one painter would have known. Santi"s list reproduced in no order:
Fra Angelico
Domenico Ghirlandaio
Piero and Antonio Pollaiuolo
Sandro Botticelli
Leonardo da Vinci
Filippino Lippi
Pietro Perugino
Luca Signorelli
Gentile Bellini
Giovanni Bellini
Andrea Mantegna
Andrea del Castagno
Cosimo Tura
Piero della Francesca
Ercole de" Roberti
Francesco di Pesello or Pesellino
Masaccio
Paolo Uccello
Pisanello
Domenico Veneziano
Melozzo da Forlì
Gentile da Fabriano
Antonello da Messina
January van Eyck
Rogier van der Weyden.