The art of Italian Jewelry - Wearable Art

Expert shopper, stylist and jewelry connoisseur Michelle Medlock Adams didn't play with Barbie dolls growing up-she styled them. That same passion for fashion and jewelry has carried her through her life, and today, as a professional journalist she writes about that love for magazines and websites including Diamond Jewelry. In this article, she explores the art of Italian jewelry.
Italy is known around the world as a place where fashion, jewelry and luxury combine for gorgeous, artistic designs fit for the royals. In fact, Italy has been called, "a powerhouse in the European jewelry industry." Current statistics show that Italy processes 500 tons of fine gold and 1,400 tons of silver every year for jewelry production. In addition, there are more than 10,000 companies in the jewelry industry in Italy, employing approximately 40,000 people. You might say jewelry is big, beautiful business in Italy.
Creativity abounds in Italy, so it's no wonder why Italian jewelry designers create some of the most amazing and unique pieces in the entire world. Using mostly yellow gold, sterling silver and Murano glass, these talented jewelry makers have taken the art of jewelry design to another level of style and excellence. Walking down the streets of Italy, you can watch Italian artisans engrave their creations, fire their glassworks, and work with natural substances such as coral and other shells. It's truly something to see.

Italian Gold
Italian gold jewelry is luxury at its finest. Mostly 18 karat gold or higher, Italy's gold creations have a buttery, warm glow that is quite distinctive. Certain sections of Italy excel in producing golden jewelry. For instance, Vicenza produces gold pieces for the medium to high-end market. There, you'll find hollow gold and molded pieces of jewelry. In Arezzo, Tuscany, gold connoisseurs know they'll find quality gold chains. In Valenza, artisans are known for creating gold jewelry with precious stones, which requires a greater knowledge of jewelry design and technical expertise. And, in Torre del Greco, you'll find charming cameos that simply scream elegance and history.

Sterling Silver
While Italian jewelry has long been made with gold, sterling silver is becoming more popular with Italian jewelry designers. The artisans are finding that sterling silver works very well as a backdrop for precious stones, which is why you'll find amazing sterling silver designs in Valenza. Plus, sterling silver designs are less expensive than golden creations, which is another benefit of working with silver.

Murano Glassworks
In the lagoon of Venice, you'll find an island named Murano that is known for its artistic glassworks and lovely pieces of glass jewelry. If you've ever watched a glass worker create a piece of jewelry, you've witnessed the beautiful baubles emerging from the fire. Truly, Italian jewelry is something to be envied and desired. Wearing a piece of jewelry from Italy is like wearing a piece of lovely art and rich history. Simply stunning...

The Suit That Stood the Test of Time: The Italian Suit

It's no surprise to anyone that Italians have always had plenty to say in men's fashion. Their designers influenced the entire World with their bold designs and cuts. But every big thing has a set of causes that triggered it. One doesn't have to dig too deep to find one of the biggest reason Italian fashion is where it is today: the suit.
The Italian suit is the exact opposite of the English suit. Italians have always wanted to stand out through the way they dress, to express their personality and joie-de-vivre.
British people, by contrast, hare rigorous, conservative and concerned about preserving old values. They see clothes as something that needs to follow certain rules and traditions, leaving little room for innovation.
Since Italians have a habit of turning every little thing into an event, their evening's ritual, called passeggiata (or the "little walk") became an excellent opportunity to show off their outfits. The Italian suit thus became like an armor, a way of showing confidence and, in essence, social status.
What makes Italian suits so special?
The Italian suit jacket is different than other suit jackets. While the British jacket is narrower at the shoulders and a little wider at the hips, the Italian suit has padded shoulders to make them wider.
There's actually a very interesting explanation to all of this. Wider shoulders and narrower hips actually increase a man's attractiveness to the opposite sex. Since Italians are known to be very good with women, could it be that suits are one of their best kept secrets?
Who are Italian suits for?
Italian suits are pretty much for everyone, but especially for the athletic type. The reason is that such a suit can emphasize their body shape better. If you're not athletic, don't get discouraged - go to a tailor and make a bespoke suit.
What are some of the big names that make Italian suits?
Brioni, Ermenegildo Zegna, Luigi Borelli, Attolini or Caraceni - you have plenty manufacturers to choose from. The best part is they pay great attention to details and most of the process (for the more expensive models) is done manually. Even if you get a less expensive model, you will still make a great choice.
The suit colors that fits you is dictated only by your personality and preference. Go for lighter colors if you're an extrovert and you want to stand out and go for darker colors if you're more conservative and you want to be taken seriously.
If you have a belly or are a little overweight, my advice is to stay away from light colors. Darker colors are known to make you thinner so go for black, navy blue or dark olive green.

The Vatican Museums in Rome A Place to Celebrate Art and History

About the Vatican Museums
Touted as some of the greatest museums in the world, the Vatican Museums in Viale Vaticano in Rome are visited by more than 4 million people each year. Visitors are able to look upon works of art that have been collected by the Roman Catholic Church over the past centuries, including some of the most historically significant Renaissance works and classical sculptures. The large Vatican Museums complex is made up of more than 24 distinct collections-any of which could be a gallery all on its own-so you'll need to plan well in order to see everything you desire.

Plan Your Trip
To help you make the most of your time at the Museums, there is a one-way system to prevent guests from getting distracted or off track in the myriad of rooms, corridors, stairways and courtyards. You have options within this system. For instance, you can follow one of the four color-coded itineraries/paths, and no matter which one you choose, your journey will end in the Sistine Chapel. And, no tour would be complete without a stroll through the 15 rooms of the Picture Gallery of Pinacoteca. You can contact the Vatican Museums and inquire about the guided tours. There are several offered most every day.
To get to the Vatican Museums at the Viale Vaticano, you can take the Metro, a Bus, a Tram, a Taxi or a car-exact directions are listed on the official Vatican Museums website. While in town, you'll want to spend more than one day touring the museums and the historic city, so book your room at Rome Hotels online. Budget Hotels can be booked at Cheaphotels.org

In the Beginning
It all began with one marble sculpture more than 500 years ago. According to historians, the sculpture of Laocoon was discovered in a vineyard near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome on January 14, 1506. Upon the discovery, Pope Julius II asked Vatican workers Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo Buonarroti to go and examine the sculpture. Their recommendation? Purchase the sculpture. So, that's exactly what Pope Julius II did. He then displayed the sculpture of Laocoon at the Vatican one month later. The rest, as they say, is history…

The Collections The numerous museums that comprise the Vatican complex are as diverse as they are magnificent. Each one offers guests an enjoyable experience, viewing the inspiring collections that include: The Gregorian Egyptian Museum, the Gregorian Etruscan Museum, the Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Rooms and the Pinacoteca. Each Collection includes pieces of significant historical meaning, so take your time and soak it all in.

The art of Italy

An introduction to Italian art
The Italian art developed in the Italian peninsula since prehistoric times. During the Roman Empire, Italy was the center of an artistic culture that for the first time created a universal language for the homogeneous world of Europe and the Mediterranean. In some periods of Italy was the country's most artistically advanced in Europe.

During prehistoric times some cultures flourished in Italy, among which the Valcamonica, the Villanova, that of the Piceno and that of the Samnites.
The Magna Graecia and Sicily was one of the most culturally active greek world. Among the most important evidence has come down to us are the temples of Agrigento, Selinunte and Paestum.
The Etruscan art, which counts among its masterpieces works in bronze, terracotta, Buccheri and fresco paintings, was the most important cultural expression of pre-Roman Italy. Noteworthy were the contacts with the Magna Greece and the cultural contribution to the nascent Roman art.
The Romans developed their own unique artistic culture after the Punic Wars, and thanks to the conquest of the cities of Magna Graecia and Greece itself is deeply influenced by ellenismo. The Romans did it in a sense the heirs of Hellenistic classicism, although with significant differences. In architecture, there was an extraordinary development of construction techniques that enabled the construction of a huge complex monumental painting and sculpture inspired by Greek art, but the contribution of the popular roots and Italic also allowed the emergence of new forms of art not made by the Greeks such as the historical and portrait.
But perhaps one the most influential Italian art expressions is during the Renaissance period.
The Renaissance began in Italy in the fourteenth century, from revivals of humanistic literature of Petrarch and Boccaccio. The rediscovery of Roman art, perspective, proportion, use of light in body revolutionized the world of European art. The first center involved in the new figurative art was Florence, closely followed by other courts of Italy (Mantova , Ferrara, Urbino ...), and papal Rome. The artists to start this revolution were Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti in architecture, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi and Botticelli in painting, Donatello and Lorenzo Ghiberti for the sculpture. The Venetian art discovered the aerial perspective and use of color ever experienced before (Giorgione, Titian). On the eve of the sixteenth century came to the fore three genes versatile, gifted in several disciplines (Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael Sanzio), who created some of the most famous masterpieces of world of fine art.

Biography of Raphael, Raffaello Sanzio

Raphael, the last of the three greatest painters of the Renaissance, was born Raffaello Sanzio in Urbino, in the province of Umbria. It is probable that he took his first lessons from his father, a provincial painter named Giovanni di Santi, before going to Florence, where by 1500 he was working in the studio of Perugino, an artist well known for his serene and beautifully colored works. Under the influence of Michelangelo and Leonardo, both of whom were in Florence during this time, Raphael, whose early work already surpassed his master's, soon lost any provincial tendencies as he began to adopt Michelangelo's vigorous energy and Leonardo's sfumato and spiritualism. Raphael's work became luminous in atmosphere, rich and clear in color, harmonious in movement, sculpturally three-dimensional, and perfectly balanced in composition. Throughout his short life his abilities as a consummate artist never ceased to show growth of vision and intelligence. He went to Rome in 1508, where his many talents and his gentle personality brought him friends, honor, and success. Before he died, he had painted the monumental and idealistic frescoes for Pope Julius II's private rooms in the Vatican, worked as an architect on the plans for St. Peter's , drawn cartoons for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, and been appointed superintendent of the excavation of ancient Rome. He had also painted classical frescoes for private villas, religious works, and many brilliant, realistic portraits. The center of a group of artists and intellectuals, Raphael lived an active life. Despite the fact that he had a large studio with many assistants and students, the numerous architectural and painting commissions he received caused him to overwork. He died at the age of thirty-seven, leaving behind an unfinished Transfiguration, indicative in its unusual composition of a further artistic maturation which was all too abruptly terminated.

Biography of Paolo Uccello

Paolo Uccello (born Paolo di Dono) was a Florentine painter who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. His nickname Uccello came from his fondness for painting birds. With his precise, analytical mind he tried to apply a scientific method to depict objects in three-dimensional space. The perspective in his paintings has influenced famous painters such as Piero della Francesca, Albrecht Durer and Leonardo da Vinci, to name a few. Giorgio Vasari in his book Lives of the Artist wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. He used perspective in order to create a feeling of depth in his paintings and not, as his contemporaries, to narrate different or succeeding stories. His best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San Romano (for a long time these were wrongly entitled the "Battle of Sant' Egidio of 1416"). Paolo worked in the Late Gothic tradition, and emphasized colour and pageantry rather than the Classical realism that other artists were pioneering. His style is best described as idiosyncratic, and he left no school of followers. He had some influence on twentieth century art and literary criticism.
Biography of Paolo Uccello at Wikipedia.
Artwork of Paolo Uccello at Wikimedia.

Biography of Tintoretto

Jacopo (Robusti) Tintoretto was one of the greatest painters of the Venetian school and probably the last great painter of the Italian Renaissance. In his youth he was also called Jacopo Robusti, as his father had defended the gates of Padua in a rather robust way against the imperial troops. His real name "Comin" has only recently been discovered by Miguel Falomir, the curator of the Prado, Madrid and has been made public at the occasion of the retrospective of Tintoretto at the Prado, opening on 29 January 2007. Comin translates to the spice "cumin" in the local language. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso, and his dramatic use of perspectival space and special lighting effects make him a precursor of baroque art. His father, Giovanni, was a dyer, or tintore; hence the son got the nickname of Tintoretto, little dyer, or dyer's boy, which is Anglicized as Tintoret. Tintoretto scarcely ever travelled out of Venice. He loved all the arts, played in youth the lute and various instruments, some of them of his own invention, and designed theatrical costumes and properties, was versed in mechanics and mechanical devices, and was a very agreeable companion. For the sake of his work he lived in a most retired fashion, and even when not painting was wont to remain in his working room surrounded by casts. Here he hardly admitted any, even intimate friends, and he kept his modes of work secret, save as regards his assistants. He abounded in pleasant witty sayings whether to great personages or to others, but no smile hovered on his lips.
Biography of Tintoretto at Wikipedia.
Artwork of Tintoretto at Wikimedia.

Biography of Tiepolo

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was born in Venice on March 5, 1696. His father, who was part owner of a ship, died when Tiepolo was scarcely a year old, but the family was left in comfortable circumstances. As a youth, he was apprenticed to Gregorio Lazzarini, a mediocre but fashionable painter known for his elaborately theatrical, rather grandiose compositions. Tiepolo soon evolved a more spirited style of his own. By the time he was 20, he had exhibited his work independently, and won plaudits, at an exhibition held at the church of S. Rocco. The next year he became a member of the Fraglia, or painters' guild. In 1719 he married Cecilia Guardi, whose brother Francesco was to become famous as a painter of the Venetian scene. They had nine children, among them Giovanni Domenico and Lorenzo Baldassare, who were also painters. In the 1720s Tiepolo carried out many large-scale commissions on the northern Italian mainland. Of these the most important is the cycle of Old Testament scenes done for the patriarch of Aquileia, Daniele Dolfin, in the new Archbishop's Palace at Udine. Here Tiepolo abandoned the dark hues that had characterized his early style and turned instead to the bright, sparkling colors that were to make him famous.
Biography of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo at Wikipedia.
Artwork of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo at Wikimedia.

Biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Not only a painter but also a poet, Dante Gabriel Rosetti was born in London, where his father, an exiled Italian painter and Dante scholar, served as Professor of Italian at King's College. The family was steeped in literature and art. All three of the Rosetti siblings would have important effects on late-nineteenth-century English culture: Christina Rosetti became a well-regarded poet, and William Michael Rosetti became an influential critic. Dante Gabriel Rosetti spent the earliest part of his career torn between painting and writing, but entered the prestigious Saas Drawing Academy in 1841 and was established as a professional painter by the late 1840's. (He continued to write poetry and make transplantations from Italian.) He was a leader in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an English art and culture movement which he founded with the critic Leigh Hunt and the painters Holman Hunt and Sir John Everett Millais. Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics were not perfectly unified: Hunt and Millais preferred to create a naturalistic world in which dramatic events may take place among men and women; Rosetti often drew on classical, Biblical, and literary subjects. Rosetti's Girlhood of the Virgin Mary, exhibited in 1849-and signed by the Brotherhood's collaborative initials "P.R.B."-received much enthusiastic attention. Yet Rosetti soon withdrew from the world of public exhibitions, preferring to accept commissions and sell works to private clients. After 1851 he worked mainly in watercolors and chalk, drawing themes and subjects from Shakespeare, Dante, and the Arthurian legends. His work was championed by the critic John Ruskin, in part for its very naiveté; Rosetti's income from commissions and sales was impressive. In the late 1850's the younger artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones worked with Rosetti in painting Arthurian frescoes for the Oxford Union Building Debating Hall, thus forming a second wave of Pre-Raphaelites. Rosetti became a partner in Morris's decorating firm and thus had a impact on revolutionary new ideas in design. In the 1850's and early 1860's he used Elizabeth Siddall, whom he married in 1860, as a model for many paintings; after Siddall's death in 1862, Rosetti continued to paint many pictures of beautiful women, who are often presented as dangerously seductive and melancholy. Rosetti also helped pioneer the use of Japanese images and styles in modern painting.

Biography of Amedeo Modigliani

Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy in the Livorno ghetto. His father, a ruined banker, died young and his mother, a descendant of the Dutch philosopher, Spinoza, encouraged her delicate son in his aptitude for art, sending him to study in Florence and Venice and to visit museums throughout Italy. When Modigliani arrived in Paris in 1907, he had a small inheritance from a rich uncle, but he was already seriously ill with tuberculosis. Handsome, talented, sensitive, and extremely proud of his Jewish heritage, Modigliani became one of the most notorious characters in Montmartre and was soon penniless and often homeless. He frequently slept and worked in the studios of artist friends who liked him and recognized his great talent as both a painter and a sculptor. He moved to Montparnasse in 1913 and kept body and soul together by selling drawings in cafes for infinitesimal sums. Finally, in 1917, he married Jeanne Hebuterne and the couple set up housekeeping in a miserable garret. It was too late for this more normal life to conquer the ravages of consumption. Modigliani died in a Paris hospital on a January day in 1920. His desperate widow threw herself from the roof of her parents' apartment house on the day of his funeral, leaving their daughter to be reared by her maternal grandparents. Two years later Modigliani's art was discovered by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the great art collector of Pennsylvania. Considered the leader of the School of Paris, Modigliani's subjective and expressive art reveals his basic dignity, his despair, and a feeling of haunting melancholy. His earliest paintings were slightly influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, but the bulk of his surviving works dating from 1915 to 1920 indicate his interest in African sculpture, in Cezanne, and the Cubist works of Braque and Picasso and in the simplification of form that he learned from the sculptor Brancusi. The influences of his Italian heritage also appear in his paintings: the Italian Mannerism. These combined in his elegant, sinuous, linear style to produce easily recognized portraits and nudes with long slender oval heads, sloping shoulders, and extremely subtle coloration that is less important than line and composition. Within the framework of this mannered stylization a great variety of distinct personalities, poetic in mood, with a constant swanlike grace.

Biography of Masaccio

Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone, known as Masaccio, was not only the greatest Florentine painter of the early fifteenth century, but remains one of the most important figures in the history of Western art. In only a few brief years, he created the early Renaissance style of painting. Masaccio was born in the Val de'Arno, and the sixteenth-century biographer Vasari tells us that he received his affectionately applied nickname, which means "Slovenly Tom" in Italian, because he was indifferent to this personal appearance, careless with his possessions, and uninterested in worldly gains. He was a pupil of Masolino di Panicale with whom he worked on the celebrated "Brancacci Chapel" frescoes in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. He was registered in the two Florentine painters' guilds in 1422 and 1424, went to Pisa in 1426, and seems to have gone to Rome twice. On his second trip to the Holy City he died mysteriously, possibly from poisoning, at the age of about twenty-seven. The sculptor Donatello and the architect Brunelleschi, friends of the painter, had already established the Early Renaissance style in their respective fields when Masaccio began to paint, and helped to influence his thinking. Masaccio added striking new elements to Giotto's concepts of space and form, used scientific perspective with a fixed vanishing point and a fixed point of view for the spectator, controlled light coming from one source to cast shadows and create atmosphere, emphasized movement of the human body, and eliminated useless detail. Masaccio's view of the world was almost classically impersonal but possessed a deep underlying feeling. It therefore seems probable that he had studied the sculpture of classical antiquity. Masaccio's influence extended in his time to Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Filippo Lippi, and Benozzo. High Renaissance masters such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael paid him tribute, and his influence continues into the present.

Biography of Marino Marini

Marino Marini was born in Pistoia, Italy. He began his fine arts career in Florence, where he studied painting, graphic techniques and sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti. Between 1929 and 1940, Marini taught at the art school in Monza. He was made Professor of Sculpture at the Brera Academy in Milan in 1940, for although he had begun his career primarily as a painter, by 1931 he had turned to sculpture, the medium for which he is now best known. However, Marini prepared for his sculptured pieces by making numerous sketches in many media-pen drawings, lithographs, gouaches, and oil paintings. His three-dimensional sculptures are done in plaster, wood, or bronze, and occasionally in stone.

By using a great variety of different media, Marini expresses emotions through color, form, and with a plasticity that in its polychromatic range and its archaic simplicity of shape goes back through the centuries to very early Chinese figurines and Etruscan or Greco-Roman sculpture. His colors are bright: dark wine-reds, purples, and mottled whites, or deep blues, grays, and browns. His themes are few: portrait heads, female figures, and the horse or horse and rider. Marini's works are noble, rhythmic, and strikingly dynamic. Since 1955 he has become more and more dramatic, roughening the surfaces of his sculptured pieces, distorting their masses, and creating etchings and lithographs as well as paintings with a style, a purity of line that is extremely moving.

Biography of Bernardino Luini

Bernardino Luini was a North Italian painter from Leonardo's circle, a conservative painter who took "as much from Leonardo as his native roots enabled him to comprehend". Consequently many of his works were attributed to Leonardo. Both Luini and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio were said to have worked with Leonardo directly. Luini is said to have been a pupil of Ambrogio Bergognone. Born in Dumenza, he was a prominent Lombard painter of the early sixteenth century. Details of his life are scant. He worked in Milan, where he painted several frescoes in palaces and churches in and around the city. The best known of these are the frescoes for Villa Pelucca in Sesto San Giovanni (now in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan). In circa 1525, he completed a secreis of frescos on the life of the Virgin and Christ for the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Saronno. He was known especially for his graceful female figures with slightly squinted eyes, called Luinesque by Vladimir Nabokov. He died in Milan.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Biography of Fra Filippo Lippi

Fra Filippo Lippi has entered legend as a Renaissance prototype of the rebellious romantic artist. His work was widely respected in his time, and he is known today as an innovative and accomplished painter of the Florentine Renaissance. Lippi was raised in a Carmelite friary and took vows as a friar in 1421. He soon had a love affair with Lucrezia Buti, a nun; both parties were released from their vows, and they married soon afterward. (Lippi continued to sign his paintings "Frater Phillipus.")

Like that of other young Florentine artists, his early work was strongly influenced by the revolutionary Florentine painter Masaccio, who introduced increasingly coherent perspectives to Italian painting while rejecting the elegance of Gothic tradition. Masaccio had decorated the friary in which Lippi took orders: Lippi may have had direct contact with the great painter, who died suddenly in 1428. Lippi's "Barbadori Altarpiece" of the late 1430's is an early example of a new form, that of "sacra conversazione", in which a Madonna, saints, and angels are gathered on a single panel instead of being relegated to individual landscapes-an innovation associated to both Fra Lippi and Fra Angelico. After 1440, Lippi began to develop a distinctive individual style with which he emphasized the decorative elements of his figures, treating the weave and drape of fabrics with close attention to the realism of their detail. He was also expert in depicting delicate shadings of light and color, and he was an innovator of the form called "tondo," round paintings, a form in which he often set images of the Virgin and Child that were among his specialties. Lippi was also a strong fresco painter.

His success in his own time can be seen in the steady patronage he received from the Medici; he was at work on a major series of frescoes in the Spoleto Cathedral when he died. He influenced Botticelli, who may have studied with him, and his influence has extended as least as far as the Pre-Raphaelites of the 19th century.

Biography of Giotto di Bondone

Giotto di Bondone, the father of modern painting and one of the greatest figures in the history of Western art, was born in a small hamlet in the valley of the Mugello, twenty miles north of Florence. We know very little about him and his exact birthplace has been disputed. He was almost certainly, apprenticed to Cimabue and was in Florence by about 1280. According to legend Cimabue discovered the boy's genius accidentally on a road where he saw Giotto drawing with a sharp stone on a flat rock. By 1312 Giotto belonged to the Florentine Guild of doctors and apothecaries to which painters belonged. Between 1329 and 1332, he worked for the King of Naples and in 1334 he was appointed chief architect for the Cathedral of Florence, which he helped design and for which he created several statues. We know that he worked at various times in Rome, Milan, Padua, Assisi, Ravenna, Rimini, and other cities in Italy and in France. He died in Florence in January, 1337 and was buried in the cathedral with great civic honors and at the expense of the city.

Giotto signed his name to only three of his paintings. His most famous attributed works are the Arena Chapel frescoes (1305-10) in Padua, the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapel frescoes in Santa Croce in Florence, and the magnificent Ognissanti Madonna for the Church of All Saints. The twenty-eight frescoes based on the life of St. Francis and located in the Upper Church of the Franciscans in Assisi are accepted as Giotto's by some art historians and denied him by others. The controversy, which has now raged for a century and a half, fills volumes and has yet to be resolved.

Giotto was concerned with the problem of presenting human figures and their actions realistically on a flat surface that was to represent three-dimensional space. Before Giotto, artists had followed the flat forms of the Byzantine tradition, imitated each other, and disregarded what they saw around them. Giotto studied both nature and the human body which he saw as invested with great dignity, deep emotions, and humanity, and he placed his human figures in free, albeit shallow, space. It is to the credit of his contemporaries, artists and laymen alike, that his genius was recognized and accepted immediately. The old forms of art gradually vanished, first from Florence and then from other Italian art centers, to be replaced by new art forms from which there could be no turning back. Giotto's immediate successors were his pupils, Taddeo and Bernardo Daddi. It was not until seventy-five years later that Masaccio took the next step forward, experimenting with scientific perspective that permits infinite spatial representation on the flat plane. Giotto's form, content, and freedom of expression had a profound influence on the subsequent development of European painting.

Biography of Giorgio Giorgione

Giorgio Giorgione was born Giorgio Barbarelli in Castelfranco. Very little is known about this master who died of the plague at the age of 34, but who changed the entire course of sixteenth-century Venetian painting. Only sixteen of his works have been definitely identified. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that Titian and Giorgione had both studied with Giovanni Bellini and had worked together during Giorgione's lifetime and that Titian finished some of the works left unfinished at Giorgione's death. Others of Giorgione's works were destroyed by time and accidents of weather, as is the case with the exterior frescoes of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. A few faded fragments remain of this work described by Vasari as "in the whole, well composed, well designed, and colored with great animation." Giorgione showed, in his work, a Raphaelesque ideal of beauty and the strong sculptural forms of Michelangelo. These characteristics were combined in delicately drawn, harmonious, monumental paintings that are warm in color and rich in shadows and reflections, with light filtering through a transparent glaze. The result is a mysterious, spiritual concept of nature as the symbol of an emotion or a state of mind. Although Giorgione died at an early age his works are characterized by a depth of understanding that is indicative of a degree of early maturity. His creative genius influenced many artists who were to follow, including Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo.

Biography of Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti, the Surrealist sculptor known for his nervous, elongated forms, was born in Stampa, Switzerland. Giacometti started drawing at the age of nine, painting at twelve and created his first sculpture at fourteen. His father was a well-known Impressionist painter and Giacometti's first teacher. In 1919, Giacometti began studying sculpture in Geneva and then, for three years, with Bourdelle in Paris. When he began to work on his own, Giacometti found that he had difficulty working from the figure which seemed to disintegrate as he worked. He tried working instead from his imagination and continued to do so for ten years. At this time Cubism, African art and the sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz, influenced his work. His style gradually changed to become first thin and tablet-like and then solid and compact, in structures like "The Couple", and "Spoon Woman". These last were bizarre, amusing monoliths, monumentally concave, combining a powerful physical confrontation with erotic content.

In 1928 Giacometti felt the need to open his forms, creating grill-like works and then a series of cages-skeletal structures that create three-dimensional environments, equivalent to Surrealist paintings. These culminated in the precise and fantastic "Palace at 4 A.M.", a construction of wood, wire, glass and string. In 1935, Giacometti returned to working from the live model, focusing on the tiny variations of each profile of the body. By sensitively exaggerating or reducing each detail the projections, however tiny, reach out and make the surrounding space visible and part of the work. These tactile elongated sculptures, for which Giacometti is best known, tend to disintegrate at close range. But viewed at some distance they express a universal sense of a living organism. Giacometti's isolated single figures or groups which pass each other without communication convey an anxious search arising from their loneliness, or stand straight and detached like trees in an Alpine forest.

Biography of Orazio & Artemisia Gentileschi Orazio Gentileschi

Orazio Gentileschi (Orazio Lomi) was born in Pisa, where he first studied with his brother Aurelio, a pupil of Il Bronzino. Gentileschi went to Rome at the age of seventeen and worked for Popes Sixtus V, Clement VIII, and Paul V. Most important for Gentileschi's formation as an artist was the presence in Rome of Caravaggio, who received his first commission in the Holy City in 1590. Although Gentileschi was older than his close friend Caravaggio, it seems that the younger man exerted the stronger influence. Gentileschi's realistic paintings have the lyricism, the broad treatment of religious subjects, and the humanistic approach found in Caravaggio, as well as a clean and elegant line, a basic simplicity, and a warm satisfying color.
Gentileschi was in Ancona from 1610 until 1620 and was influenced by the German landscape artist Elsheimer. From Ancona Gentileschi went to Genoa where he met van Dyck and worked for the Duke of Savoy. Maria de'Medici called him to France in 1625 and in 1626 he went to become court painter to King Charles I, remaining in that country until his death in London at an indeterminate date. His influence extended not only to his daughter Artemisia, who in turn influenced Neapolitan artists with her brilliant color and dramatic style, but also to European genre painting of the later seventeenth century.

Artemisia Gentileschi

Birth Year : 1593
Death Year : 1653
Country : Italy

Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome, on July 8, 1593, the first child of the painter Orazio Gentileschi, one of the greatest representatives of the school of Caravaggio. Artemisia was introduced to painting in her father's workshop, showing much more talent than her brothers, who worked alongside her. She learned drawing, how to mix color and how to paint. Since her father's style took inspiration from Caravaggio during that period, her style was just as heavily influenced in turn. But her approach to subject matter was different from her father's.
In 1612, despite her early talent, Artemisia was denied access to the all-male professional academies for art. At the time, her father was working with Agostino Tassi to decorate the "volte" of Casino della Rose inside the Pallavicini Rospigliosi Palace in Rome, so Orazio hired the Tuscan painter to tutor his daughter privately. During this tutelage, Tassi raped Artemisia. Even though Tassi initially promised to marry Artemisia in order to restore her reputation, he later reneged on his promise and Orazio reported Tassi to the authorities.
In the ensuing 7-month trial, it was discovered that Tassi had planned to murder his wife, had committed incest with his sister-in-law and planned to steal some of Orazio's paintings. During the trial Artemisia was given a gynecological examination and was tortured using a device made of thongs wrapped around the fingers and tightened by degrees - a particularly cruel torture to a painter. Both procedures were used to corroborate the truth of her allegation, the torture device used due to the belief that if a person can tell the same story under torture as without it, the story must be true. At the end of the trial Tassi was imprisoned for one year. The trial has subsequently influenced the feminist view of Artemisia Gentileschi during the late 20th century.
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Biography of Giorgio De Chirico

Giorgio de Chirico was born in Greece, to Italian parents. Although he was the son of a railroad worker, Chirico quickly developed an interest in art. He studied in Athens, Munich and Italy, and settled in Paris in 1912, where he stayed until the outbreak of the First World War. Until his return to Paris in 1925, where he would live until 1940, Chirico lived in Germany, and was influenced by the surrealism of Alfred Bocklin and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus, in 1917, along with Carlo Carra, he founded the "Scuola Metafisica," a loosely formed group dedicated to the exploration of the mystery and fantasy underlying the surface reality.

A well-regarded pre-Symbolist, Chirico was one of the first artists to evoke a sense of mystery and poetry through the juxtaposition of seemingly unlikely objects. He applied highly individualized, even autobiographical motifs to his art works. His enigmatic groupings somehow suggest subtle and elusive meanings that could be derived if only one had the keys to unlock them.

Biography of Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci, the epitome of the Renaissance man, was born in Vinci, a village near Florence and was brought up by his grandfather. In 1467 Leonardo entered Verrocchio's studio, and in the same year became a member of the Painter's Guild. He worked with Verrocchio for several years, collaborating with him on paintings and working on individual commissions of his own. In 1478 he became an independent artist under the protection of Lorenzo the Magnificent. In 1482 Leonardo left Florence for Milan, where he was to stay for nearly twenty years. He was attached to the court of Lodovico Sforza and applied his talent to music, decorating, pageantry, portrait painting, and engineering projects, particularly of weapons for war and bridge construction. From 1500 Florence was his home, but he traveled widely particularly in 1502-03, when he inspected and constructed rural fortifications for Cesare Borgia. During this period he painted the Mona Lisa and worked on dissection of corpses at the hospital and on theoretical mathematical problems. Leonardo returned to Milan in 1506 and was welcomed by the French governor, Charles d'Amboise. He was sixty-one in 1513 when he entered the service of Giuliano de'Medici, brother of Pope Leo X. Leonardo applied his talents to architectural and engineering projects and continued his notes for his famous Treatise on Painting. François I of France invited him to Amboise in 1517, and Leonardo lived in the small chäteau of Cloux, enjoying great honor and the esteem of the kind and the court. He died there in 1519 and was buried in the Church of St. Florentin, which was destroyed during the French Revolution. Leonardo's knowledge extended to such widely separated fields as philosophy, natural history, anatomy, biology, medicine, optics, acoustics, astronomy, botany, geology, flight science, mathematics, hydraulics, warfare, and the arts. His heavily illustrated notebooks are among the most fascinating documents in the world, not only for his experimental ideas and inventions, but also for his accurate anticipation of a world that would exist long after his death. For Leonardo, painting was but one of many media for communicating ideas, but it was the supreme one for expressing spiritual values. His color was warm and the landscapes behind his portrait heads or religious scenes are enveloped in a fine mist. This sfumato, a delicate gradation of light imparting an atmospheric effect, gives a three-dimensional quality to the foreground figures. The most difficult and highest aim of painting, Leonardo wrote in his notebooks, is to depict "the intention of man's soul."

Biography of Michelangelo Caravaggio

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, revolutionary naturalist painter, was born in Caravaggio near Milan, the son of a mason. He showed his talent early and at the age of sixteen, after a brief apprenticeship in Milan, he was studying with d'Arpino in Rome. During the period 1592-98 Caravaggio's work was precise in contour, brightly colored, and sculpturesque in form, like the Mannerists, but with an added social and moral consciousness. By 1600 when he had completed his first public commission the St. Matthew paintings for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, he had established himself as an opponent of both classicism and intellectual Mannerism. Caravaggio chose his models from the common people and set them in ordinary surroundings, yet managed to lose neither poetry nor deep spiritual feeling. His use of chiaroscuro - the contrast of light and dark to create atmosphere, drama, and emotion - was revolutionary. His light is unreal, comes from outside the painting, and creates deep relief and dark shadow. The resulting paintings are as exciting in their effect upon the senses as on the intellect.

Caravaggio's art, strangely enough, was not popular with ordinary people who saw in it a lack of reverence. It was highly appreciated by artists of his time and has become recognized through the centuries for its profoundly religious nature as well as for the new techniques that has changed the art of painting. Though Caravaggio received many commissions for religious paintings during his short life, he led a wild and bohemian existence. In 1606, after killing a man in a fight, he fled to Naples. Unfortunately, he was soon in trouble again, and so was forced to flee to Malta where, finally, after a series of precipitous adventures, died of malaria at the age of thirty-six. His influence, which was first seen in early seventeenth-century Italian art, eventually spread to France, England, Spain and the Netherlands.

Biography of Canaletto

Giovanni Antonio Canale, known as Canaletto, was born in Venice where his father was a painter of theatrical scenery. The young Canaletto studied first in his father's workshop then probably under the Dutch painter van Wittel. He next went to Rome, where he learned perspective from Panini, the famous architectural artist. Immediately upon his return to Venice, in 1720, Canaletto became successful as a painter and engraver of city scenes. Among his early and enthusiastic patrons was the British consul Joseph Smith who urged him to go to Britain. Before doing so, Canaletto returned to Rome for a two-year stay (1740-41) making his first trip to England in 1745. Except for two trips to Venice, he remained there until 1755. He painted many familiar English scenes and decorated many of the Palladian villas in the southern countries. He was elected to membership in the Venetian Academy in 1763. Canaletto had a large studio in Venice and turned out quantities of those paintings and etchings that have made his name synonymous with eighteenth-century Venice. These are observations painted by a man who knew the city intimately, was saturated with its atmosphere, and was familiar with both its festival gaiety and its everyday scenes. Canaletto recorded his observations with clarity and delight in the color and constantly changing atmosphere that to him was Venice.

Biography of Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelagniolo di Lodovico di Lionardo di Buonarroti Simone was born in Caprese in Tuscany. The son of a civil servant, he attended Latin School and then studied painting in the workshop of the Ghirlandaio brothers and sculpture with Bertoldo, a formal pupil of Donatello. Michelangelo's early training derived from the great Florentine masters of the Low Renaissance: Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and Signorelli. A true Renaissance man, he was gifted as a painter, a sculptor, an architect, an engineer, and a poet, but his preference was for sculpture with its plastic possibilities for the revelation and exaltation of the human body. By the time he was fifteen, Michelangelo had attracted the attention of Lorenzo de'Medici and was invited to join the scholars, writers and artists who frequented the Medici palace. This early experience and exposure to Neoplatonic thought influenced his ideal and concepts throughout his life. Michelangelo began as a sculptor and made his first statues between 1496 and 1501 in Rome. His first and possibly his only easel painting was painted in about 1503, a tondo of The Holy Family in a closely knit triangular composition. Michelangelo's life coincided with a period of enormous papal power, and from 1505, when he signed the contract for the tomb of Pope Julius, he was subject to political pressures, wars, papal orders and counter orders. His greatest painting, the decoration of the Sistine Chapel was painted single-handedly between 1508 and 1512. The awe-inspiring work represents scenes of the Creation and the Old Testament through the story of Noah, and begins with Adam receiving the spark of divine life from God. The symbolic themes, divided architictonically, present a complicated vision, miraculous in its variety and complete unification. In 1537, Michelangelo began his Last Judgment, the fresco on the far wall of the chapel. Here sculptural and architectural vision is replaced by swirling; space and more pictorial representation of tortured humans corresponding to the artist's own unhappiness, frustrations, and increasing religious doubts. In this and in his last paintings (1541-50), for the Paolino Chapel, he was no longer the exponent of classicism but the forerunner of the Mannerist School. Michelangelo's genius influenced Raphael, whose work sums up the best of the classical Renaissance, and then Correggio, Tintoretto, and countless other painters who have succeeded him through the centuries.

Biography of Il Bronzino

Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano, called Il Bronzino, was born in Monticello, outside Florence. He was first a student of, and then assistant to, Jacopo Pontormo, one of the founders of Florentine Mannerism. Pontormo, after studies with Andrea del Sarto, was influenced by Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Durer, and passed on these influences to Il Bronzino, one of the few artists able to get along with the melancholy, difficult old man. In 1523, when an outbreak of plague struck Florence, Pontormo took Bronzino with him to Certosa where they worked together on a series of frescoes, now badly damaged. During this period, Il Bronzino's own reputation was established and by 1530 he was working for the Duke of Urbino. In 1532 he returned to Florence where he painted portraits and completed a fresco of his own before again working briefly with Pontormo at Careggi and Castello. In 1540 Duke Cosmic I, de'Medici appointed Il Bronzino his court painter and in 1545 the artist began the task (not completed until 1565) of decorating the private chapel of the Duke's wife, Eleanor of Toledo.

Il Bronzino is most famous for his portraits, delicately formal in style, coldly clear, and with an enamel-like surface. He also painted decorative, allegorical scenes and a great many altarpieces for various Florentine churches. All of these were equally formalistic and elegant, as strict and austere as the atmosphere created by Eleanor, who imported to the Medici court a Spanish love of ritual ceremoniousness. More classical in feeling and character than his master Pontormo, Il Bronzino brought to Mannerism an almost marble-like purity of form that was not be to be equaled until the nineteenth century by Ingres. Active as an artist all his life, Il Bronzino aided Vasari and other artists in the realization of the founding of the Florence Academy of Fine Arts in 1563. Il Bronzino died in 1572, in San Lorenzo, where, since 1569, he had been working on a large fresco, which was completed by his pupil Alessandro Allori.

Biography of Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli was born in Florence. The most humanistic of the Renaissance painters, he was at first apprenticed to a goldsmith. He became, in 1465, a pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi's, and remained with him for about two years. It is believed that he later worked with Verrocchio and with the Pollaiuolo brothers, from whom he learned precise drawing. Some time around 1474, Botticelli became the favored painter of the Medici and their intellectual circle. Like them, the artist subscribed to Neoplatonism: an esoteric philosophical and literary theory blending paganism into Christianity and professing a spiritual union with God. It was for the Medici that Botticelli painted fresco panels (now lost), many portraits, and his two most famous works, "Spring" and "The Birth of Venus". His paintings are sensitively beautiful in soft tender colors, graceful, harmonious, and glowing in line. They are expressive of an intellectual and moral questioning, a humanistic spirit and a melancholy personal poetry.

In Botticelli's next period, which began in the mid-1480's, he painted his section of the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. The composition here is more solid and monumental. Lorenzo de'Medici died in 1492, and his successors were forced to leave Florence when the fanatical preacher Savonarola, who was eventually burned at the stake, attacked the "pagan" cult of the Medici. As a result, Botticelli, who became one of Savonarola's followers, is said to have destroyed several of his own works. He continued to paint austere works indicative of intensive emotions and concerned with religious rather than secular subjects, but with little change in his style. After Savonarola's death in 1498, Botticelli, poor and ill, painted very little. He died in 1510.

Biography of Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni, Futurist theoretician, painter, and sculptor, was born in Reggio Calabria and was a graduate of the Technical Institute of Catania when he began to study art in Rome. His earliest work was romantic and strongly influenced by the floral arabesques of Art Nouveau. In 1901, Boccioni and his friend Gino Severini studied Divisionism with Balla, but Boccioni did not begin to apply its principles until about 1908, when he moved to Milan and met F. T. Martinetti, the leader of the literary Futurist movement. Martinetti advocated the overthrow of old traditions and institutions and the exaltation of speed, dynamism, and the crueler aspects of modern life. He launched his movement in a Manifesto published in Paris in 1909, horrifying the middle classes and exciting intellectuals.

By 1912, Futurism had spread the field of art, first with a second Manifesto, written principally by Boccioni and signed by Severini, Balla, Carra, and Russolo, then with an astonishing exhibition in Paris. Futurism breaks down form by eliminating horizontals and verticals for which it substitutes whirling lines, forcing a reaction of forms, movement, and color to light and shade. The viewer is drawn into the painting as if into the vortex, and the stimulus is ecstatic rather than static as in Cubist disintegration. Although at first quite figurative, Boccioni's painting moved closer and closer to abstraction, combining lines and planes to suggest both the recognizable object and its movement through space. Futurism exalted war as a phase of modern, violent life. In 1915, Boccioni joined the Italian Army as a volunteer cyclist. Released after a few months, he returned to his easel to paint in a more restrained manner much closer to that of Cezanne. His career was unfortunately cut short when he was recalled to duty, and died of a fall from a horse. War killed not only Futurism's most gifted artist, but also the movement itself, although its revolutionary approach to the problems of the artist in modern society has influenced every succeeding art movement.

Biography of Beato (Fra Giovanni da Fiesole) Angelico

Fra Giovanni da Fiesole (Fra Angelico), a Dominican friar, was perhaps the most important painter of Renaissance Florence.
He was born Guido di Pietro in Mugello, Italy, and began the significant part of his career at the Dominican monastery at Fiesole.
While his early panels of triptych altarpieces are indebted to traditional Sienese practice, he was already highly aware of the innovations of Florentine art.
His "Annunciation" of about 1432-not to be confused with the later fresco-shows the development of an individual style, mixing an assertively Florentine sense of perspective with graceful proportion and restraint.
Living largely in a state of withdrawal from the world, Angelico presided over a busy workshop in the Dominican Observant house at Fiesole.
His worldly fame and reputation meanwhile grew rapidly, partly because-in contrast perhaps to his devotional modesty-his works were strenuously adventurous and advanced, with daring degrees of compositional freedom.
In the late 1430's, after the shop had moved to the S. Marco monastery in Florence, Angelico made great strides in the use of color, form, and perspective.
Instead of showing saints, angels, and a Madonna on separate panels, the central panel of a 1438 altarpiece-commissioned by Cosimo del Medici-surrounds the Madonna with angels and saints, an approach that entered the vocabulary of Renaissance composition as "sacra conversazione".
In works of the early 1440's, a realistic and exciting sense of panoramic space pervades Angelico's pictures, as do delicate and subtle uses of color to express distance and variation in light.
His best known and perhaps most thoroughly timeless work is from the series of frescoes he painted in S. Marco monastery, mainly in the early 1440's.
Some of those frescoes-the "Annunciation", for example-were painted in the public spaces, as aids to group devotion; others were painted in private cells.
In 1447, having been called to Rome, Angelico and his workshop assistants made a richer and even more ambitious set of frescoes for walls and ceilings in the private chapel of Pope Nicholas V. Having served as Prior of S. Domenico in Fiesole, Angelico returned to Rome, where he died.
Biography of Fra Angelico at Wikipedia.
Artwork of Fra Angelico at Wikimedia.