An interesting episode from the early history of copyright is connected with these frescoes of the Montauto Chapel, or Chapel of San Girolamo, painted in the 1560s by the young artist Alessandro Allori

An interesting episode from the early history of copyright is connected with these frescoes of the Montauto Chapel, or Chapel of San Girolamo, painted in the 1560s by the young artist Alessandro Allori. Having completed the decoration, Allori confessed that he had borrowed the images for it from Michelangelo, who in his turn had granted him the rights to them.

Indeed, the influence of the monumental painting of Michelangelo and Raphael is plain to see in Allori's frescoes. The 25-year-old Allori had only just returned from Rome, where he had studied ancient art and evidently learned his painting from the works of Michelangelo. Yet despite the charges of being secondary and derivative, Allori became, in the end, one of the brightest figures of Florentine Mannerism.