Nuno Gonçalves was a Portuguese artist whose work initiated the Portuguese Renaissance in painting. He was court painter for Afonso V of Portugal from 1450 to 1471, and in 1471 he was appointed the official painter for the city of Lisbon. His surviving masterpiece is the polyptych known as the Saint Vincent Panels.

A court painter was an artist who painted for the members of a royal or princely family, sometimes on a fixed salary and on an exclusive basis where the artist was not supposed to undertake other work. Painters were the most common, but the court artist might also be a court sculptor. In Western Europe, the role began to emerge in the mid-13th century. By the Renaissance, portraits, mainly of the family, made up an increasingly large part of their commissions, and in the early modern period one person might be appointed solely to do portraits, and another for other work, such as decorating new buildings.