1599-1660,Spanish painter. He was apprenticed to Francisco Herrera the Elder before being trained by Francisco Pacheco. His early works were mostly religious or genre scenes. After arriving in Madrid in 1623, he painted a portrait of Philip IV that won him immediate success and an appointment as court painter. His position gave him access to the royal collections, including works by Titian, who exerted the greatest influence on his style. In his portraits from this period, only the faces and hands of the figures are accentuated, and the dark figures stand out against a light background. A visit to Italy (1629 ?C 31) further developed his style, and on his return to Madrid he entered his most productive period. Velazquez created a new type of informal royal portrait for Philip hunting lodge, and his portraits of court dwarfs display the same discerning eye as those of his royal subjects. On a second visit to Rome (1649 ?C 51) he painted a portrait of Pope Innocent X. The powerful head, brilliant combinations of crimson of the curtain, chair, and cope are painted with fluent technique and almost imperceptible brushstrokes that go far beyond the late manner of Titian and announce the last stage in Velazquez development. This portrait was copied innumerable times and won him immediate and lasting renown in Italy. In his last years he created his masterpiece, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour, 1656). In this casual scene, the artist is shown painting the king and queen in the presence of the infanta Margarita and her attendants; the nearly life size figures are painted in more or less detail according to their relation to the central figure of the infanta and to the source of light, creating a remarkable illusion of reality never surpassed by Velazquez or any other artist of his age. He is universally acknowledged as one of the giants of Western art.   Related Paintings of Velasquez :. | Aesop | Princess Margaret | Perrone Prince | Bishop Maximilian | Assumption |
Related Artists:
Giovanni Michele Graneri
painted The Teatro Regio in Turin in 1752
Bartholomeus Breenbergh
(before 13 November 1598 - after 3 October 1657) was a Dutch painter born in Deventer. Breenbergh established himself in Amsterdam and then in 1619 went to Rome. There he lived and worked with the Flemish painter Frans van de Kasteele and was heavily influenced by another Fleming, the landscape painter Paul Bril. From 1623, however, he came completely under the spell of Italian landscapes by the somewhat older Cornelis van Poelenburgheindeed, the works of Breenbergh and van Poelenburgh are sometimes very difficult of tell apart. Breenbergh in his turn influenced the French painter Claude Lorrain. Breenbergh was one of the founders of the Bentvueghels, where he was nicknamed "het fret". In 1633 Breenbergh returned to Amsterdam, where he remained until his death, and where he made paintings and etchings of Italian buildings. There he was influenced by the pre-Rembrandtists such as Pieter Lastman and Nicolaes Moeyaert, but he placed their Biblical and mythological scenes in Italian landscapes.
CAROTO, Giovanni Francesco
Italian Painter, 1480-1555 was an Italian painter of the Renaissance, active mainly in his native city of Verona. He initially apprenticed under Liberale da Verona (1445-1526/1529), a conservative painter infused with the style of Mantegna. Caroto after a stay in Milan, began responding to the other influences from Francesco Bonsignori, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Giulio Romano; but he never lost a certain individuality and his rich Veronese color. He is perhaps best known for having trained, along with the younger Antonio Badile, the prominent Mannerist painter, Paolo Veronese, who was active mainly in Venice. Good examples of his art are in the Castello, Milan, the Chiesa de Carite, Mantua, in the Uffizi and Pitti, Florence, and in the museums of Dresden, Budapest, etc.