Greek-born Spanish Mannerist Painter, 1541-1614 Considered a representative of late Renaissance Spanish art, El Greco was actually born in Greece, on the island of Crete. After studying in Venice under Titian, El Greco settled in Toledo, Spain in 1577. At the time he was wildly popular, his emotionally religious paintings being just the ticket for the hometown of the Spanish Inquisition. After his death his work was largely ignored until the beginning of the 20th century; now he considered one of the inspired geniuses of Western art. His distinctive style features bold shapes and colors, with elongated and slightly distorted figures. In Toledo El Greco was in constant demand and liked living large: he maintained a private orchestra to accompany his meals.  Related Paintings of El Greco :. | The Purification of the Temple | The Coronation ofthe Virgin | christ on the mount of olives | Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata | the saviour |
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Elisabeth Louise Viegg-Le Brun
Paris 1755-1842
Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini
(29 April 1675 -- November 1741) was a widely-travelled Rococo decorative painter from Venice, where he was born and died. He is considered to be one of the most important Venetian painters of the early 18th century, melding the Renaissance style of Paolo Veronese with the Baroque of Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano,and is considered an important predecessor of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. One of his pupils was Antonio Visentini. Pellegrini's father, also Antonio, was a shoemaker from Padua. Pellegrini first studied under Girolamo Genga, but was later a pupil of Paolo Pagani and of Sebastiano Ricci. He married Angela Carriera, the sister of Rosalba Carriera, in c.1704. Pellegrini decorated the dome above the staircase at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in 1709. He is mainly known for his work in England, which he visited from 1708 to 1713 at the invitation of the Earl of Manchester, and where he had considerable success. He painted murals in a number of English country houses, including Castle Howard (mostly destroyed in 1940) and Kimbolton Castle, Narford Hall, and in London, 31 St James's Square for the Duke of Portland, where George Vertue noted in his notebooks "the hall and Staircase and one or two of the great rooms". He became a director of Sir Godfrey Kneller's Academy in London in 1711. He submitted designs for the decorating the interior dome of the new St Paul's Cathedral, and is said to have been Christopher Wren's favourite painter, but did not win the commission, losing out to Sir James Thornhill.
Vasilii Dmitrievich Polenov
1844-1927