A pupil of Fra Angelico, Gozzoli is best known for a series of murals in the Magi Chapel of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, depicting festive, vibrant processions with fine attention to detail and a pronounced International Gothic influence.

According to the 16th century Italian biographer Giorgio Vasari, Gozzoli was a pupil and assistant of Fra Angelico in the early part of his career.

On 23 May 1447, Benozzo was with Fra Angelico in Rome, to where they were called by Pope Eugene IV to carry out fresco decorations in a chapel in the Vatican Palace.

Due to political complications in the city, they completed only two of the four vault webs and were again summoned to the Vatican, where the pair worked for Nicholas V in the Niccoline Chapel until June 1448.

Furthermore, the attribution of a 1449 Madonna and Child Giving Blessings in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva is disputed between Gozzoli and Fra Angelico.

From Ghiberti he learned precision in depicting the finest details and how to illustrate a story vividly, while from Fra Angelico, he took his bright color palette, transferring it to the art of fresco painting.

There, he filled the choir chapel with three registers of episodes from the life of St Francis of Assisi and various accessories, including portrait heads of Dante, Petrarch and Giotto.

There, in his Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem and Angels in Adoration, he mastered a combination of complexity and subtlety, portraying a wealthy scene that encompasses realistic depictions of nature and vivid human portraits.

Most prominent of these is his seventeen-panel fresco cycle on The Life of St Augustine, covering the entire apsidal chapel in the church of Sant'Agostino.

By January 1470 he had executed the fresco of Noah and his Family, followed by the Curse of Ham, the Building of the Tower of Babel (which contains portraits of Cosimo de' Medici, the young Lorenzo, Angelo Poliziano and others), the Destruction of Sodom, the Victory of Abraham, the Marriages of Rebecca and of Rachel, the Life of Moses, etc.

All this enormous mass of work, in which Benozzo was probably assisted by Zanobi Machiavelli, was performed, in addition to several other pictures during his stay in Pisa (including the Glory of St. Thomas Aquinas, now in the Louvre), in sixteen years, lasting up to 1485.