Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1483-1520 Italian painter and architect. As a member of Perugino's workshop, he established his mastery by 17 and began receiving important commissions. In 1504 he moved to Florence, where he executed many of his famous Madonnas; his unity of composition and suppression of inessentials is evident in The Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1506). Though influenced by Leonardo da Vinci's chiaroscuro and sfumato, his figure types were his own creation, with round, gentle faces that reveal human sentiments raised to a sublime serenity. In 1508 he was summoned to Rome to decorate a suite of papal chambers in the Vatican. The frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura are probably his greatest work; the most famous, The School of Athens (1510 C 11), is a complex and magnificently ordered allegory of secular knowledge showing Greek philosophers in an architectural setting. The Madonnas he painted in Rome show him turning away from his earlier work's serenity to emphasize movement and grandeur, partly under Michelangelo's High Renaissance influence. The Sistine Madonna (1513) shows the richness of colour and new boldness of compositional invention typical of his Roman period. He became the most important portraitist in Rome, designed 10 large tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel, designed a church and a chapel, assumed the direction of work on St. Peter's Basilica at the death of Donato Bramante,   Related Paintings of RAFFAELLO Sanzio :. | The Battle at Pons Milvius | The Miraculous Draught of Fishes | Diotalevi Madonna | Study for the Disputa | The Mass at Bolsena |
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Orest Kiprensky
1782-1836 Russian Orest Kiprensky Galleries Orest was born in the village of Koporye near Saint Petersburg on 24 March [O.S. 13 March] 1782. He was an illegitimate son of a landowner Alexey Dyakonov, hence his name, derived from Kypris, one of the Greek names for the goddess of love. He was raised in the family of Adam Shvalber, a serf. Although Kiprensky was born a serf, he was released from the serfdom upon his birth and later his father helped him to enter a boarding school at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1788 (when Orest was only six years old). He studied at the boarding school and the Academy itself until 1803. He lived at the Academy for three more years as a pensioner to fulfill requirements necessary to win the Major Gold medal. Winning the first prize for his work Prince Dmitri Donskoi after the Battle of Kulikovo (1805) enabled the young artist to go abroad to study art in Europe. A year before his graduation, in 1804, he painted the portrait of Adam Shvalber, his foster father (1804), which was a great success. The portrait so impressed his contemporaries, that later members of the Naples Academy of Arts took it for the painting by some Old Master - Rubens or van Dyck. Kiprensky had to ask the members of the Imperial Academy of Arts for letters supporting his authorship. Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Orest Kiprensky After that, Kiprensky lived in Moscow (1809), Tver 1811, Saint Petersburg 1812, in 1816-1822 he lived in Rome and Napoli. In Italy he met a local girl Anne Maria Falcucci (Mariucci), to whom he became attached. He bought her from her dissolute family and employed as his ward. On leaving Italy, he sent her to a Roman Catholic convent. In 1828, Kiprensky came back to Italy, as he got a letter from his friend Samuel Halberg, informing him that they had lost track of Mariucci. Kiprensky found Mariucci, who had been transferred to another convent. In 1836 he eventually married her. He had to convert into Roman Catholicism for this marriage to happen. He died by pneumonia in Rome later that year.
Phillips, Ammi
American Folk Artist, 1788-1865 American painter. Apparently self-taught, he began his prolific and successful career as a portrait painter c. 1811. During his lifetime, he moved several times across the borders of New York, western Connecticut and Massachusetts in search of commissions. Like many of the itinerant artists of the 19th century, he struggled to achieve pictorial solutions and a distinctive style, yet he developed so dramatically that historians originally classified his paintings as the work of two different artists: 'The Border Limner' and 'The Kent Limner'. The earliest works, from his 'Border' period (c. 1812-19), are marked by simple forms, shaded outlines and soft, pastel colours. They include ambitious full-length portraits as well as three-quarter and bust-length examples (Dr Russell Dorr, c. 1814-15; Williamsburg, VA, Rockefeller Flk A. Col.). In the 1820s he experimented with techniques and formats, developing an attention to detail and naturalism that suggests the influence of Albany portrait painter Ezra Ames. By the 1830s, the decade of his 'Kent' portraits, his compositions present his sitters as large, stylized shapes that nearly fill the canvas, while his use of rich, saturated colours creates striking contrasts of light and dark. Typically in this decade, his female sitters are shown leaning forward while male sitters sit upright with one hand draped over a chairback. Among his most appealing and successful works are portraits of children from this period. Blond Boy with Primer,
Constantin Meunier
(12 April 1831 - 4 April 1905), Belgian painter and sculptor, was born in Etterbeek, Brussels. His first exhibit was a plaster sketch, "The Garland," shown at the Brussels Salon in 1851. Soon afterwards, on the advice of the painter Charles de Groux, he abandoned the chisel for the brush. His first important painting, "The Salle St Roch" (1857), was followed by a series of paintings including "A Trappist Funeral" (1860), "Trappists Ploughing" (1863), in collaboration with Alfred Verwee, "Divine Service at the Monastery of La Trappe" (1871) and episodes of the German Peasants' War (1878). About 1880 he was commissioned to illustrate those parts of Camille Lemonnier's description of Belgium in Le Tour du monde which referred to miners and factory-workers, and produced "In the Factory," "Smithery at Cockerill's," "Melting Steel at the Factory at Seraing" (1882), "Returning from the Pit," and "The Broken Crucible" (1884). In 1882 he was employed by the government to copy Pedro de Campaña's "Descent from the Cross" at Seville, and in Spain he painted such characteristic pictures as "The Cafe Concert," "Procession on Good Friday," and "The Tobacco Factory at Seville" (Brussels Gallery). On his return to Belgium he was appointed professor at the Louvain Academy of Fine Arts. In 1885 he returned to statuary and produced " The Puddler," "The Hammerer" (1886), "Firedamp" (1889, Brussels Gallery), "Ecce Homo" (1891), "The Old Mine-Horse" (1891), "The Mower" (1892), "The Glebe" (1892), the monument to Father Damien at Louvain (1893), "Puddler at the Furnace" (1893), the scheme of decoration for the Botanical Garden of Brussels in collaboration with the sculptor Charles van der Stappen (1893), "The Horse at the Pond," in the square in the north-east quarter of Brussels, and two unfinished works, the "Monument to Labour" and the Zola monument, in collaboration with the French sculptor Alexandre Charpentier. The "Monument to Labour," which was acquired by the State for the Brussels Gallery, comprises four stone bas-reliefs, "Industry," "The Mine," "Harvest," and the "Harbour"; four bronze statues, "The Sower" "The Smith" "The Miner," and the "Ancestor"; and a bronze group, "Maternity". Meunier died at Brussels on 4 April 1905. Constantin Meunier was a freemason, and a member of the lodge Les Amis Philanthropes of the Grand Orient of Belgium in Brussels. He was one of the cofounders of the Societe Libre des Beaux-Arts of Brussels. In 1939, a museum dedicated to him was opened in the last house in which Meunier lived and worked, in Ixelles. Today about 150 of his works are displayed there.