Fra Angelico Galleries b.c. 1400, Vicchio, Florence d.Feb. 18, 1455, Rome Fra Angelico (c. 1395 ?C February 18, 1455), born Guido di Pietro, was an Early Italian Renaissance painter, referred to in Vasari's Lives of the Artists as having "a rare and perfect talent". Known in Italy as il Beato Angelico, he was known to his contemporaries as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole (Brother John from Fiesole). In Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, written prior to 1555, he was already known as Fra Giovanni Angelico (Brother Giovanni the Angelic One). Within his lifetime or shortly thereafter he was also called Il Beato (the Blessed), in reference to his skills in painting religious subjects. In 1982 Pope John Paul II conferred beatification, thereby making this title official. Fiesole is sometimes misinterpreted as being part of his formal name, but it was merely the name of the town where he took his vows, used by contemporaries to separate him from other Fra Giovannis. He is listed in the Roman Martyrology as Beatus Ioannes Faesulanus, cognomento Angelicus??"Blessed Giovanni of Fiesole, nicknamed Angelico". Fra Angelico was working at a time when the style of painting was in a state of change. This process of change had begun a hundred years previous with the works of Giotto and several of his contemporaries, notably Giusto de' Menabuoi, both of whom had created their major works in Padua, although Giotto was trained in Florence by the great Gothic artist, Cimabue, and painted a fresco cycle of St Francis in the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce. Giotto had many enthusiastic followers, who imitated his style in fresco, some of them, notably the Lorenzetti, achieving great success.  Related Paintings of Fra Angelico :. | The Naming of the Baptist | Madonna and Child with Angles | Entombment | Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven | St Lawrence Receiving the Church Treasures |
Related Artists:
Medardo Rosso
1858 Turin-1928 Milan,was an Italian sculptor. He is thought to have developed the Post Impressionism style in sculpture along with Auguste Rodin. Medardo Rosso was born in Turin, Italy, in 1858, the son of the city stationmaster. Later his family mover to Milano (Milan). As a child Rosso played hooky from school to visit a monument mason who taught him to handle a chisel and hammer. This distressed and angered his parents. At the age of 23, after a period of military service as unsatisfactory as his home life, he enrolled at the Berea Academy in Milano, where he learned to draw classical statues and copy them in gesso. But academic art appeared to him entirely artificial, unrelated to the world around him. Before long he helped to organize the Berea students into demanding life models for the drawing classes. As a result of his revolutionary behavior he was expelled from the school. He moved to Rome, where he lived in great poverty, sleeping among the ruins of the Colosseum. To the end of his life Rosso battled unremittingly against the academicians. What absorbed, even obsessed, him was the problem of interpreting life itself. In 1882, some time before he saw any Impressionist paintings, he produced his fully impressionistic sculptures, The Street Singer and Lovers under the Lamplight. In 1884 some friends arranged an exhibition for him in Paris, where he lived for a time in a cheap boarding-house.
Ramsay Richard Reinagle
British Painter, 1775-1862 was an English portrait, landscape, and animal painter, and son of Philip Reinagle. Ramsay Richard Reinagle was a pupil of his father, whose style he followed, and he exhibited at the Royal Academy as early as 1788. He afterwards went to Italy, and was studying in Rome in 1796. Subsequently he visited Holland in order to study from the Dutch masters. After his return home he painted for a time at Robert Barker's panorama in Leicester Square, and then entered into partnership with Thomas Edward Barker, Robert's eldest son, who was not himself an artist, in order to erect a rival building in the Strand. They produced panoramas of Rome, the Bay of Naples, Florence, Gibraltar, Algeciras Bay, and Paris, but in 1816 disposed of their exhibition to Henry Aston Barker and John Burford. In 1805 Reinagle was elected an associate of the Society of Painters in Watercolours, and in 1806 a member. He became its treasurer in 1807, and was president from 1808 to 1812 Between 1806 and 1812 he sent to its exhibitions sixty-seven drawings, mostly Italian landscapes and scenery of the English lakes. During the same period he exhibited portraits and landscapes in oil at the Royal Academy, of which he became an associate in 1814, and an academician in 1823. He was a clever copyist of the old masters, and is said to have been much employed by a picture-dealer in restoring and 'improving ' their works.In 1848 he sent to the Royal Academy exhibition as his own work a small picture of 'Shipping a Breeze and Rainy Weather off Hurst Castle' painted by a young artist named J. W. Yarnold, which he had purchased at a broker's shop, and in which he had made some slight alterations. Attention was called to the imposition, and a full inquiry made by the academy resulted in his being called upon to resign his diploma as a royal academician. In 1850 he published in the 'Literary Gazzette' two letters in which he unsuccessfully endeavoured to exculpate himself.He continued to exhibit at the academy until 1857,
Henri Levy
French 1840-1904