Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1483-1520 Raphael Sanzio, usually known by his first name alone (in Italian Raffaello) (April 6 or March 28, 1483 ?C April 6, 1520), was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings and drawings. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop, and, despite his early death at thirty-seven, a large body of his work remains, especially in the Vatican, whose frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career, although unfinished at his death. After his early years in Rome, much of his work was designed by him and executed largely by the workshop from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking. After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models. His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (from 1504-1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates.  Related Paintings of Raphael :. | Still Life with Peaches | Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione | the mass of bolsena | The Woman with the Unicorn | raphael in rome- in the service of the pope |
Related Artists:
Gherardo Starnina
Italian Gothic Era Painter, ca.1360-1413 was a Florentine painter of the early Quattrocento. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, Starnina initially trained with Antonio Veneziano, then with Agnolo Gaddi. He is claimed to have participated in the painting of the frescos in the Castellani Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence. He is also said to have moved to Spain in 1380 to work under Juan I of Castile, and is attributed some painting in the San Blas chapel of the Cathedral of Toledo. Several paintings formerly attributed to the Master of the Bambino Vispo are now attributed to Gherardo Starnina,
Giorgione
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.
Domenico Zampieri
(October 21, 1581 C April 16, 1641) was an Italian Baroque painter of the Bolognese School, or Carracci School, of painters. Domenichino was born at Bologna, son of a shoemaker, and there initially studied under Denis Calvaert. After quarreling with Calvaert, he left to work in the Accademia degli Incamminati of the Carracci where, because of his small stature, he was nicknamed Domenichino, meaning "little Domenico" in Italian. He left Bologna for Rome in 1602 and became one of the most talented apprentices to emerge from Annibale Carracci's supervision. As a young artist in Rome he lived with his slightly older Bolognese colleagues Albani and Guido Reni, and worked alongside Lanfranco, who later would become a chief rival. In addition to assisting Annibale with completion of his frescoes in the Galleria Farnese, including A Virgin with a Unicorn (c. 1604-5), he painted three of his own frescoes in the Loggia del Giardino of the Palazzo Farnese c. 1603-04. With the support of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi, the maggiordomo to Cardinal Aldobrandini and later Gregory XV, and Giovanni??s brother Cardinal Girolamo Agucchi, Domenichino obtained further commissions in Rome. His most important project of the first decade was decoration of the Cappella dei Santissimi Fondatori in the medieval basilica of the Abbey of Grottaferrata (1608-10), some 20 kilometers outside Rome, where Odoardo Farnese was the titular abbot. Meanwhile he had completed frescoes c. 1604-05 in the church of Sant'Onofrio, feigned stucco decoration of 1606-07 in the Palazzo Mattei, a large scene of The Flagellation of St. Andrew at San Gregorio Magno, painted in competition with a fresco by Reni that faces it, and a ceiling with Scenes from the Life of Diana, 1609, in the Villa Odescalchi at Bassano di Sutri (today Bassano Romano). Following Annibale Carracci's death in 1609, Annibale's Bolognese pupils, foremost Domenichino, Albani, Reni and Lanfranco, became the leading painters in Rome (Caravaggio had left Rome in 1606 and his followers there did not compete successfully with the Bolognese for fresco or altarpiece commissions). One of Domenichino's masterpieces, his frescoes of Scenes of the Life of Saint Cecilia in the Polet Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi, was commissioned in 1612 and completed in 1615. Concurrently he painted his first, and most celebrated, altarpiece, The Last Communion of St. Jerome for the church of San Girolamo della Carite (signed and dated, 1614). It subsequently would be judged as being comparable to Raphael great Transfiguration and even as "the best picture in the world." By late 1616, Domenichino had designed the coffered ceiling with The Assumption of the Virgin in Santa Maria in Trastevere; and he had begun a cycle of ten frescoes depicting the Life of Apollo in a garden pavilion of the Villa Aldobrandini (Belvedere) in Frascati, where he was assisted by Giovanni Battista Viola, a Bolognese artist who, like Domenichino himself, was a pioneer in the development of classicistic landscape painting. From 1617 until 1621, Domenichino was absent from Rome, working in Bologna and at Fano, where during 1618-19 he frescoed the Nolfi chapel of the Fano Cathedral with Scenes from the Life of the Virgin. With the election of a Bolognese pope (Gregory XV) in 1621, Domenichino returned to Rome. Appointed Papal Architect (he built little but left drawings for various projects, most notably for the façade of Sant'Andrea della Valle and for the plan of Sant'Ignazio, both in Rome), he nonetheless continued to be most active as a painter, obtaining many commissions for altarpieces in Roman churches (San Lorenzo in Miranda, 1626-27, SS. Giovanni Evangelista e Petronio dei Bolognese, 1626-29, Santa Maria della Vittoria, 1629-30, and St. Peter's, 1625-30). He also executed numerous frescoes in Rome during the 1620s: a ceiling in the Palazzo Costaguti (c. 1622); the choir and pendentives in Sant'Andrea della Valle, where he worked in fierce competition with Lanfranco, who painted the dome above Domenichino's pendentives; and the pendentives of San Silvestro al Quirinale (c. 1628) and San Carlo ai Catinari (1628-30).