Greek-born Spanish Mannerist Painter, 1541-1614 Greek painter, designer and engraver, active in Italy and Spain. One of the most original and interesting painters of 16th-century Europe, he transformed the Byzantine style of his early paintings into another, wholly Western manner. He was active in his native Crete, in Venice and Rome, and, during the second half of his life, in Toledo. He was renowned in his lifetime for his originality and extravagance and provides one of the most curious examples of the oscillations of taste in the evaluation of a painter,   Related Paintings of GRECO, El :. | Adoration of the Shepherds | St. Martin and the Beggar | Christ on the Cross | Portrait of a Gentleman from the Casa de Leiva | Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata |
Related Artists:
SALZILLO, Francisco
Spanish sculptor (b. 1707, Murcia, d. 1783, Murcia). Spanish sculptor of Italian descent. He was trained by his father, Nicol Salzillo (1672-1727), a Neapolitan sculptor who had settled in Murcia, whose first documented work is dated 1700. Francisco also studied with the Jesuits and was taught drawing and sculpture by the cleric and painter Manuel Senchez ( fl 1731-9). He entered the Dominican Order in Murcia as a novice but left to take charge of his father's studio at the latter's death in 1727. Francisco was assisted by his brothers, Juan Antonio Salzillo and Patricio Salzillo, a priest, and by his sister, Ines Salzillo, who specialized in painting carved religious statues. In 1746 Francisco married Juana Vallejo Martenez, and in 1755 he was appointed escultor y modelista by the municipal government (ayuntamiento) and Inspector to the Inquisition for painting and sculpture in Murcia. In 1763 he established an academy
Otto Mueller
German Painter, 1874-1930 Otto Mueller was born on October 16, 1874, in Liebau, German Silesia. His mother had been adopted as a young girl, giving rise to the story that he was the son of a gypsy - a story he never denied. He was a cousin to the famous German writers and dramatists Gerhart and Carl Hauptmann (the latter's novel "Einhart der Lächler" is an imaginary portrait of the painter). After four years of apprenticeship with a lithographer, Mueller entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden in 1894. He was dissatisfied with the conservative instructions and left after two years. The next several years he lived close to his influential cousins, and for a short while he went to Munich to study with the famous painter Franz von Stuck. Information about his life and work until 1908 - when he settled in Berlin - is sketchy, especially since the artist destroyed many of his earlier works. In Berlin Mueller met the expressionist sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck, whose concept of the human form had a decisive influence on his own perception. When in 1910 his entries to the exhibition of the Berlin Secession were rejected he joined the members of the artist group "Die Brecke" (The Bridge) and exhibited with the New Secession and thus met Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Ernst Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. He became their lifelong friend, and, while only slightly influenced by their woodcut techniques, he contributed in return his experience in lithography and especially his techniques of distemper painting (colors bound by glue or size). This technique permits the quick coverage of large areas of the very rough canvas (burlap) which he preferred and adds a subdued luminosity. Since overpainting in distemper is not possible, the artist has to have a clear conception of his work before he begins. The technical devices strengthened the Brecke painters' desire to "flatten" the image on the canvas - following the examples of Paul Gauguin and even Edvard Munch and rejecting the academic preference for an emphasis on three-dimensionality of the subject. In his graphic works Mueller experimented with mixtures of woodcut and lithography, the rubbing of the printer's ink, frequently adding color in the form of watercolor or colored chalk, until he had the technical means of the Breslau Academy available to make true color lithographs. His "Gypsy-Portfolio" (nine color lithographs in a portfolio of 1927), which used as many as five stones, is one of his great achievements as a graphic artist. From 1916 to 1918 he served as a soldier in World War I, an experience which left no impact on his work. Shortly after his return he was appointed professor at the Breslau Academy of Art, where he taught until his death. Mueller's work shows only three motifs: landscapes, gypsies, and primarily nudes in landscapes. The last motif dominated his work. The earthen color of his mostly young, subtle but angular nude girls forms with the subdued and delicate greens of the landscape backgrounds a vision of a lost past. There is a frequently melancholic nostalgia in his works, presenting a harmony between nature and the human form which is not only opposite to the academic approach but also to that of the other Expressionists.
Vecchietta
Italian Early Renaissance Painter and Sculptor, ca.1410-1480 Italian painter, sculptor, goldsmith and architect. He was formerly believed to have been born c. 1412 in the Tuscan town of Castiglione d'Orcia, but del Bravo has identified him with the Lorenzo di Pietro di Giovanni who was baptized in Siena in 1410. His name appears in a list of the members of the Siena painters' guild in 1428. From the evidence of later works he is generally supposed to have been apprenticed to Sassetta, but his early work has not been identified. Between c. 1435 and 1439 he executed for Cardinal Branda Castiglione (1350-1443) a series of frescoes at Castiglione Olona, near Varese in Lombardy. He has been considered an assistant of MASOLINO DA PANICALE in this enterprise, but the scenes of the martyrdoms of SS Lawrence and Stephen in the apse of the Collegiata, below Masolino's vault frescoes, show that Vecchietta's closely packed compositional style was already fully formed. He also painted the frescoes (partially published by Bertelli) in the chapel of the Cardinal's palace in the town, depicting the Evangelists (vault) and friezes of male and female saints (side walls). Although abraded and fragmentary, they nevertheless indicate the naturalistic effects of atmospheric lighting and foreshortening that, more than any other Sienese painter of his day, he had learnt from Masolino and the Florentine painters.