Spanish 1618-1682 Bartolome Esteban Murillo Galleries Murillo began his art studies under Juan del Castillo in Seville. Murillo became familiar with Flemish painting; the great commercial importance of Seville at the time ensured that he was also subject to influences from other regions. His first works were influenced by Zurbaran, Jusepe de Ribera and Alonso Cano, and he shared their strongly realist approach. As his painting developed, his more important works evolved towards the polished style that suited the bourgeois and aristocratic tastes of the time, demonstrated especially in his Roman Catholic religious works. In 1642, at the age of 26 he moved to Madrid, where he most likely became familiar with the work of Velazquez, and would have seen the work of Venetian and Flemish masters in the royal collections; the rich colors and softly modeled forms of his subsequent work suggest these influences. He returned to Seville in 1645. In that year, he painted thirteen canvases for the monastery of St. Francisco el Grande in Seville which gave his reputation a well-deserved boost. Following the completion of a pair of pictures for the Seville Cathedral, he began to specialise in the themes that brought him his greatest successes, the Virgin and Child, and the Immaculate Conception. After another period in Madrid, from 1658 to 1660, he returned to Seville. Here he was one of the founders of the Academia de Bellas Artes (Academy of Art), sharing its direction, in 1660, with the architect, Francisco Herrera the Younger. This was his period of greatest activity, and he received numerous important commissions, among them the altarpieces for the Augustinian monastery, the paintings for Santa Mar??a la Blanca (completed in 1665), and others.  Related Paintings of Bartolome Esteban Murillo :. | Francis Xavier | Trinity | Angels- Kitchen | The Immaculate one of Aranjuez | Brith of the Virgin |
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William Holbrook Beard
1824-1900 William Holbrook Beard Gallery
Giovanni Bellini
Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1516 (b ?1431-6; d Venice, 29 Nov 1516). Painter and draughtsman, son of (1) Jacopo Bellini. Although the professional needs of his family background may have encouraged him to specialize at an early date in devotional painting, by the 1480s he had become a leading master in all types of painting practised in 15th-century Venice. Later, towards the end of his long life, he added the new genres of mythological painting and secular allegory to his repertory of subject-matter. His increasing dominance of Venetian art led to an enormous expansion of his workshop after c. 1490; and this provided the training-ground not only for his numerous shop-hands and imitators (generically known as Belliniani) but probably also for a number of major Venetian painters of the next generation. Throughout his career, Giovanni showed an extraordinary capacity for absorbing a wide range of artistic influences, both from within Venetian tradition and from outside. He also oversaw a technical revolution in the art of painting, involving the gradual abandonment of the traditional Italian use of egg tempera in favour of the technique of oil painting pioneered in the Netherlands. It was thanks to Giovanni Bellini that the Venetian school of painting was transformed during the later 15th century from one mainly of local significance to one with an international reputation. He thus set the stage for the triumphs of Venetian painting in the 16th century and for the central contribution that Venice was to make to the history of European art.
Pagani, Gregorio
Italian, 1558-1605 Italian painter. He trained in the studio of the Late Mannerist Maso da San Friano, but then studied with the more progressive Santi di Tito. There he became friends with Ludovico Cigoli: the two artists, who desired to renew the art of painting, studied from nature and developed an interest in Venetian and Emilian art. Pagani was deeply influenced by Correggio. His earliest surviving works include the frescoes of the Confirmation of the Rule of St Dominic (c. 1580; Florence, S Maria Novella, Chiostro Grande) and the Meeting between SS Dominic and Francis (Florence, Convento dei Cappuccini di Monturghi). In 1592 he painted the Virgin and Saints (St Petersburg, Hermitage), a work that already reveals his interest in Correggio. In the same year he painted a Finding of the True Cross (untraced), a daring composition that is preserved in preparatory drawings. A number of works from the 1590s survive and show Pagani's interest in Emilian art; the Crucifixion and Saints (1595; Florence, S Bartolomeo in Pozzo) and the Virgin and Child with SS Michael the Archangel and Benedict (1595; Florence, S Michele Arcangelo Le Ville). At the turn of the century Pagani was increasingly associated with those Florentine artists who wished to develop a new narrative clarity and directness. His pictures (e.g. Pyramus and Thisbe; Florence, Uffizi) show figures carefully posed with varied expressions and gestures. In the early 17th century Pagani became yet more attracted by naturalism, as in the St Lawrence (1600) in the basilica of the Madonna delle Grazie at San Giovanni, Valdarno. Through his friendship with Bartolomeo Carducho he was influenced by Spanish art, as is evident in the Adoration of the Magi