Italian Rococo Era Painter, ca.1721-1780 Bernardo Bellotto (30 January 1720 ?C 17 October 1780) was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedutes of European cities (Dresden, Vienna, Turin and Warsaw). He was the pupil and nephew of Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto ?? fraudulently, according to some. Especially in Germany, paintings attributed to Canaletto may actually be by Bellotto rather than by his uncle; in Poland, they are by Bellotto, who is known there as "Canaletto". Bellotto's style was characterized by elaborate representation of architectural and natural vistas, and by the specific quality of each place's lighting. It is plausible that Bellotto, and other Venetian masters of vedute, may have used the camera obscura in order to achieve superior precision of urban views.  Related Paintings of BELLOTTO, Bernardo :. | Dresden, the Frauenkirche and the Rampische Gasse | The Ruins of the Old Kreuzkirche in Dresden gfh | View of the Villa Cagnola at Gazzada near Varese | View of Dresden from the Right Bank of the Elbe with the Augustus Bridge | View of Vienna from the Belvedere hjhk |
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Theophanes the Cretan
active 1527-1559,was a leading icon painter of the Cretan school in the first half of the sixteenth century, and in particular the most important figure in Greek wall-painting of the period. He was born in Heraklion (date unknown), and no doubt trained there, but all his known work was done in mainland Greece. Frescoes bearing his signature survive in the Greek monasteries of Mt. Athos, especially Stavronikita monastery and Lavra, and Meteora which has his earliest dated work, from 1527. He also did many panel icons, either for iconostases or small portable works. Theophanes was active from about 1527-48, and trained his sons and several pupils, often themselves Cretan. By 1535 both he and his two sons had become monks in the Lavra monastery of Mount Athos, where many of his best works remain. Theophanes returned to Crete before his death in 1559. Two detached wallpaintings attributed to Theophanes are in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Like most Cretan painters of this date, his work shows some influence from Western painting, but less in his case than with many artists. Some faces are personalised or looking out to the viewer, and his figures are modelled to convey volume. His work is more conscious of visual perspective than older Byzantine artists, but he does not use the geometrical perspective schemes by then standard in the West. He uses traditional Byzantine compositions, in a rather austere and powerful manner. He should not be confused with Theophanes the Greek (Feofan Grek), an icon painter who worked in Muscovite Russia in the late fourteenth century.
ZIMMERMANN, Dominikus
German sculptor, Bavarian school (b. 1685, Wessobrunn, d. 1766, Wies)..Architect, stuccoist and painter, brother of (1) Johann Baptist Zimmermann. For the first two decades of his creative life, from about 1705, he worked mainly as a builder of altars and as a marbler. His most important commission came from the Benedictine abbey of Fischingen (Thurgau), for which he made six artificial marble altars with scagliola inlays (1708-9). Similar altars, mainly in Swabia, are attributed to him or known to be his work; their construction shows the influence of Johann Jakob Herkommer, with whose work Dominikus became familiar while living in F?ssen (1708-16). Between 1709 and 1713 he worked with (1) Johann Baptist Zimmermann at the Buxheim Charterhouse (see above), producing artificial marble altars and stuccowork that is characterized by the botanical accuracy of the plant motifs.
Augustus Egg
(2 May 1816 - 26 March 1863) was a Victorian artist best known for his modern triptych Past and Present (1858), which depicts the breakup of a middle-class Victorian family. Augustus Egg was born in London on 2 May 1816 to Joseph and Ann Egg, and baptised in St James's Church, Piccadilly on 30 May 1816. He had an elder brother, George Hine Egg. His father Joseph Egg was a wealthy gunsmith from the distinguished gun making family, who immigrated to London from Huningue, Alsace. Egg was educated in the schools of the Royal Academy, beginning in 1836. Egg was a member of The Clique, a group of artists founded by Richard Dadd and others in the late 1830s (c. 1837). Egg sought to combine popularity with moral and social activism, in line with the literary work of his friend Charles Dickens. With Dickens he set up the "Guild of Literature and Art", a philanthropic organisation intended to provide welfare payments to struggling artists and writers. He acted the lead role in a play written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton to raise funds for the organisation. His self-portrait in the role is in Hospitalfield House in Arbroath. Egg's early paintings were generally illustrations of literary subjects. Like other members of The Clique, he saw himself as a follower of Hogarth. His interest in Hogarthian moral themes is evidenced in his paired paintings The Life and Death of Buckingham, depicting the dissolute life and sordid death of the Restoration rake. Yet his paintings often took a humorous look at their subjects, as in his Queen Elizabeth Discovers she is no longer Young (1848). Unlike most other members of The Clique, Egg also admired the Pre-Raphaelites; he bought work from the young William Holman Hunt and shared ideas on color theory with him. His own triptych, known as Past and Present, was influenced by Hunt's work. The triptych depicted three separate scenes, one portraying a prosperous middle-class family and the other two depicting poor and isolated figures e two young girls in a bedsit and a homeless woman with a baby. The viewer was expected to read a series of visual clues that linked together these three scenes, to reveal that the prosperous family in the central scene is in the process of disintegrating because of the mother's adultery. The two outer scenes depict the separated mother and children a few years later, now living in poverty. The painting's use of flashback e the central scene is occurring in the past e has been seen as a precursor of cinema. Egg was also an active organiser of exhibitions, being admired by fellow-artists for his dedication and fair mindedness. He was one of the organisers of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1860. Always in poor health, Egg spent his later years in the warmer climate of continental Europe, where he painted Travelling Companions, an ambiguous image of two near-identical young women that has sometimes been interpreted as an attempt to represent two sides of the same person. A member of the circle of friends that included Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Egg features in their surviving correspondence. He participated, as actor and costume designer, in their amateur theatricals, which were often conducted for charitable purposes as noted above. In January 1857 he took a part in Collins's play The Frozen Deep, which starred Dickens and was performed at his home, Tavistock House (Egg played John Want, the ship's cook.) The production was also acted before Queen Victoria and then performed for charity. Dickens described Egg as a "dear gentle little fellow," "always sweet-tempered, humorous, conscientious, thoroughly good, and thoroughly beloved." He died in Algiers, Algeria in 1863.