Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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 Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed.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 :. | Astarte Syriaca | La Ghirlandata | Ecce Ancilla Domini! | A Vision of Fiammetta | Beata Beatrix | Related Artists: wols kompositionNoble, Thomas SatterwhiteAmerican, 1835-1907
was born in Lexington, Kentucky. He grew up on a plantation where hemp and cotton were grown. Noble saw the effects of slavery firsthand and portrayed many scenes of the Old South in his works. He attended Transylvania University in Lexington and studied art with Oliver Frazier and George P. A. Healey and moved to New York, New York in 1853 at age eighteen. He first studied painting with Samuel Woodson Price in Louisville, Kentucky in 1852, then with Thomas Couture in Paris, 1856-1859 and returned to the United States in 1859. He served in the Confederate army from 1862-1865 during the American Civil War, despite his avowed hatred for slavery. After the war, he had a studio in New York City 1866-1869. In 1869, Noble was invited to become the first head of the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati, Ohio, a post he would hold until 1904. During his tenure at the McMicken School of Design, Noble moved briefly to Munich, Germany where he studied from 1881-1883. He retired in 1904 and died in New York City, April 27, 1907. He is buried in Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. Noble's works are largely historical presentations. Modern critics have viewed them as overly romanticized, while others believe that he painted realistic scenes from actual events. One of his most famous paintings is The Modern Medea (1867) which portrays a tragic event from 1856 in which Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave mother, has murdered one of her children, rather than see it returned to slavery. Carlo Saraceni1580-1620
Italian
Carlo Saraceni Galleries
Carlo Saraceni (Venice 1579-Venice, 16 June 1620) was an Italian early-Baroque painter, whose reputation as a "first-class painter of the second rank" was improved with the publication of a modern monograph in 1968.
Though he was born in Venice, his paintings are distinctly Roman in style; he moved to Rome in 1598, joining the Accademia di San Luca in 1607. He never visited France, though he spoke fluent French and had French followers and a French wardrobe. His painting, however, was influenced at first by the densely forested, luxuriantly enveloping landscape settings for human figures of Adam Elsheimer, a German painter resident in Rome; "there are few landscapes by Saraceni which have not been attributed to Elsheimer," Malcolm Waddingham observed, and Anna Ottani Cavina has suggested the influences may have travelled both ways. and Elsheimer's small cabinet paintings on copper offered a format that Saraceni employed in six landscape panels illustrating The Flight of Icarus; in Moses and the Daughters of Jethro and Mars and Venus.
Saint Sebastian
Castle Museum, PragueWhen Caravaggio's notorious Death of the Virgin was rejected in 1606 as an altarpiece suitable for a chapel of Santa Maria della Scala, it was Saraceni who provided the acceptable substitute, which remains in situ, the only securely dated painting of his first decade in Rome. He was influenced by Caravaggio's dramatic lighting, monumental figures, naturalistic detail, and momentary action (illustration, right), so that he is numbered among the first of the "tenebrists" or "Caravaggisti". Examples of this style can be seen in the candlelit Judith and the Head of Holofernes.
Saraceni's matured rapidly between 1606 and 1610, and the next decade gave way to his fully mature works, synthesizing Caravaggio and the Venetians. In 1616?C17 he collaborated on the frescoes for the Sala Regia of the Palazzo del Quirinale. In 1618 he received payment for two paintings in the church of Santa Maria dell'Anima. The compositional details of his fresco of The Birth of the Virgin in the Chapel of the Annunciation of the church of Santa Maria in Aquiro are repeated in a panel on copper at the Louvre
In 1620 he returned to Venice, where he died in the same year. He was so influential on the style of an anonymous still life painter working in Rome, that the man is known as "Pensionante del Saraceni"
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