English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1828-1882 Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. His incomplete picture Found was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted up from the street by a country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones. This was also true of his later poetry. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the image of idealized Botticelli's Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci. Although he won support from the John Ruskin, criticism of his clubs caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to waterhum, which could be sold privately. In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices. Both these developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix. These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst another of his mistresses Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.  Related Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti :. | Study for Venus Verticordia (mk28) | The Day Dream (mk28) | Mariana (mk28) | proserpine | Astarte Syriaca (mk19) |
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Adolph Friedrich Vollmer
(17 December 1806 - 12 February 1875) was a German landscape and marine painter and graphic artist. He and his contemporary, the painter Christian Morgenstern, were pioneers in Hamburg of early Realism in painting. As son of a bookkeeper to a Hamburg merchant, Vollmer grew up in humble circumstances.[3] Determined to become a painter against the wishes of his father,[4] he became an apprentice to the brothers Suhr who owned a graphic workshop producing panorama prints. For one and a half years Vollmer travelled throughout Germany with one of the brothers, Cornelius Suhr, as had been Morgenstern before him. In 1826 he was introduced by the Hamburg art-dealer Ernst Harzen to the wealthy aristocrat and supporter of the arts, Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, who was patron to many young Hamburg artists among them Morgenstern and Otto Speckter. Probably on Rumohr advice Vollmer completed his studies under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He then moved to Munich from where he undertook journeys to Lake Konstanz, to the Austrian and Swiss Alps, to Venice, to Le Havre and to the Netherlands. In 1839 Vollmer returned to Hamburg and settled there. One of his sons, Johannes Vollmer, became a prominent architect of protestant churches; a grand-son was the art historian and encyclopaedist Hans Vollmer who, for many years, edited the Thieme-Becker Kenstler Lexikon. Vollmer became blind in 1866.
BRUNELLESCHI, Filippo
Italian Early Renaissance Sculptor and Architect, 1377-1446 Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 ?C April 15, 1446) was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. All of his principal works are in Florence, Italy. As explained by Antonio Manetti, who knew Brunelleschi and who wrote his biography, Brunelleschi "was granted such honors as to be buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, and with a marble bust, which they say was carved from life, and placed there in perpetual memory with such a splendid epitaph." In 1401,Brunelleschi entered a competition to design a new set of bronze doors for the baptistery in Florence. Along with another young goldsmith, Lorenzo Ghiberti, he produced a gilded bronze panel, depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac. His entry made reference to a classical statue, known as the 'thorn puller', whilst Ghiberti used a naked torso for his figure of Isaac. In 1403, Ghiberti was announced the victor, largely because of his superior technical skill: his panel showed a more sophisticated knowledge of bronze-casting; it was completed in one single piece. Brunelleschi's piece, by contrast, was comprised of numerous pieces bolted to the back plate. Ghiberti went on to complete a second set of bronze doors for the baptistery, whose beauty Michelangelo extolled a hundred years later, saying "surely these must be the "Gates of Paradise."
Willem Pietersz. Buytewech
Willem Pieterszoon Buytewech (1591/1592 - September 23, 1624) was a Dutch painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Golden Age. He is often considered the "inventor" of Dutch genre painting. For his preference of irony, his contemporaries named him eGheestige Willeme (Jolly or spiritual William).