1283-1344 Italian Simone Martini Locations He was a major figure in the development of early Italian painting and greatly influenced the development of the International Gothic style. It is thought that Martini was a pupil of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the leading Sienese painter of his time. His brother-in-law was the artist Lippo Memmi. Very little documentation survives regarding Simone's life, and many attributions are debated by art historians. Simone Martini died while in the service of the Papal court at Avignon in 1344. Simone was doubtlessly apprenticed from an early age, as would have been the normal practice. Among his first documented works is the Maest?? of 1315 in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. A copy of the work, executed shortly thereafter by Lippo Memmi in San Gimignano, testifies to the enduring influence Simone's prototypes would have on other artists throughout the fourteenth century. Perpetuating the Sienese tradition, Simone's style contrasted with the sobriety and monumentality of Florentine art, and is noted for its soft, stylized, decorative features, sinuosity of line, and unsurpassed courtly elegance. Simone's art owes much to French manuscript illumination and ivory carving: examples of such art were brought to Siena in the fourteenth century by means of the Via Francigena, a main pilgrimage and trade route from Northern Europe to Rome. Simone's major works include the Maest?? (1315) in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, St Louis of Toulouse Crowning the King at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples (1317), the S. Caterina Polyptych in Pisa (1319) and the Annunciation and two Saints at the Uffizi in Florence (1333), as well as frescoes in the Chapel of St. Martin in the lower church of the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. Francis Petrarch became friend with Simone while in Avignon, and two of his sonnets make reference to a portrait of Laura de Noves he supposedly painted for the poet.   Related Paintings of Simone Martini :. | St Catherine and St Lucy | Christ Returning to his Parents | Christ on the Cross | and Madonna of Humility | The Death of St. Martin |
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Johann Gottfried Schadow
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LIGOZZI, Jacopo
Italian painter, Florentine school (b. 1547, Verona, d. 1627, Firenze) Italian painter, draughtsman, miniaturist and printmaker. He was one of the most productive artists in 17th-century Florence, although in the context of the Florentine Baroque, with its pageantry and decorative form, Ligozzi remained as much a foreigner in terms of his precise drawing, veristic figures and expressive content, as he was by birth. He was the son of the painter Giovanni Ermanno Ligozzi ( fl 1572-88; d before 1605) and came from a Veronese family of painters and designers of armour, tapestries and embroidery on silk. Other members of the family who were painters (Fumagalli in 1986 exh. cat.) were Jacopo's brother Francesco (d before 1635), whose career seems to have been in Verona, his cousin Francesco di Mercurio, who worked for the Medici in Florence in 1590-91