Italian 1476-1510 Giorgione Galleries For his home town of Castelfranco, Giorgione painted the Castelfranco Madonna, an altarpiece in sacra conversazione form ?? Madonna enthroned, with saints on either side forming an equilateral triangle. This gave the landscape background an importance which marks an innovation in Venetian art, and was quickly followed by his master Giovanni Bellini and others.Giorgione began to use the very refined chiaroscuro called sfumato ?? the delicate use of shades of color to depict light and perspective ?? around the same time as Leonardo. Whether Vasari is correct in saying he learnt it from Leonardo's works is unclear ?? he is always keen to ascribe all advances to Florentine sources. Leonardo's delicate color modulations result from the tiny disconnected spots of paint that he probably derived from manuscript illumination techniques and first brought into oil painting. These gave Giorgione's works the magical glow of light for which they are celebrated. Most entirely central and typical of all Giorgione's extant works is the Sleeping Venus now in Dresden, first recognized by Morelli, and now universally accepted, as being the same as the picture seen by Michiel and later by Ridolfi (his 17th century biographer) in the Casa Marcello at Venice. An exquisitely pure and severe rhythm of line and contour chastens the sensuous richness of the presentment: the sweep of white drapery on which the goddess lies, and of glowing landscape that fills the space behind her, most harmoniously frame her divinity. The use of an external landscape to frame a nude is innovative; but in addition, to add to her mystery, she is shrouded in sleep, spirited away from accessibility to her conscious expression. It is recorded by Michiel that Giorgione left this piece unfinished and that the landscape, with a Cupid which subsequent restoration has removed, were completed after his death by Titian. The picture is the prototype of Titian's own Venus of Urbino and of many more by other painters of the school; but none of them attained the fame of the first exemplar. The same concept of idealized beauty is evoked in a virginally pensive Judith from the Hermitage Museum, a large painting which exhibits Giorgione's special qualities of color richness and landscape romance, while demonstrating that life and death are each other's companions rather than foes. Apart from the altarpiece and the frescoes, all Giorgione's surviving works are small paintings designed for the wealthy Venetian collector to keep in his home; most are under two foot (60 cm) in either dimension. This market had been emerging over the last half of the fifteenth century in Italy, and was much better established in the Netherlands, but Giorgione was the first major Italian painter to concentrate his work on it to such an extent ?? indeed soon after his death the size of such paintings began to increase with the prosperity and palaces of the patrons.  Related Paintings of Giorgione :. | Portrait of a Man in Armor with His Page | The Three philosophers | Virgin and Child with SS Francis and Liberalis (mk08) | Moses Undergoing Trial by Fire | Pastoral ensemble |
Related Artists:
Carl Rottmann
German,1797-1850 was a German landscape painter and the most famous member of the Rottmann family of painters. Rottmann belonged to the circle of artists around the Ludwig I of Bavaria, who commissioned large landscape paintings exclusively from him. He is best known for mythical and heroising landscapes. The landscape painter Karl Lindemann-Frommel belonged to his school. Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann was born in Handschuhsheim (today a part of Heidelberg) on January 11, 1797. There he received his first drawing lessons from his father, Friedrich Rottmann, who taught drawing at the university in Heidelberg. In his first artistic period he painted atmospheric phenomena. In 1821 he moved to Munich, where his second period began, and in 1824 he married Friedericke, the daughter of his uncle, Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, who served as an attendant at court. This connection cleared the way for an acquaintance with King Ludwig, who in 1826-27 sponsored his travels in Italy in order to widen his repertoire, which up to that point consisted solely of domestic, German, landscapes. Upon his return he received from King Ludwig I a commission for a monumental cycle of Italian landscapes in the arcade of the Munich Hofgarten. The cycle, completed in 1833 in fresco, gave visual expression to Ludwiges alliance with Italy, and raised the genre of landscape painting to the height of history painting, the preferred mode of the Kinges other great commissions for monumental painting.
COELLO, Claudio
Spanish Baroque Era Painter, 1642-1693 Spanish painter and draughtsman. Together with the court painters Francisco Rizi, Juan Carre?o de Miranda and Francisco de Herrera, he was one of the foremost exponents of a style of Spanish painting that developed between c. 1660 and 1700 and was characterized by theatrical compositions and rich colours. The sources of this late Baroque style, which was distinct from that of the previous generation of Spanish Baroque artists, most of whom painted sober, realistic depictions of religious and secular life, lie in the influence exerted by Venetian Renaissance painting and by Italian and Flemish art of the period,
Solon H. Borglum
American Sculptor, 1868-1922,was an American sculptor. Born in Ogden, Utah, he was the younger brother of Gutzon Borglum and uncle of Lincoln Borglum of Mount Rushmore fame. The son of Danish immigrants who settled on the great plains, Solon Borglum spent his early years as a rancher in western Nebraska. Though he later lived in Paris and New York and achieved a reputation as one of America's best sculptors, it was his depiction of frontier life, and especially his experience with cowboys and native American peoples, on which his reputation was founded. Borglum studied under Louis Rebisso in Cleveland and in Paris. He specialized in depicting people and scenes of the American West. He moved to the Silvermine neighborhood of New Canaan, Connecticut, where he helped found the "Knockers Club" of artists. His brother, Gutzon, lived in nearby Stamford,