Italian 1476-1510 Giorgione Galleries For his home town of Castelfranco, Giorgione painted the Castelfranco Madonna, an altarpiece in sacra conversazione form ?? Madonna enthroned, with saints on either side forming an equilateral triangle. This gave the landscape background an importance which marks an innovation in Venetian art, and was quickly followed by his master Giovanni Bellini and others.Giorgione began to use the very refined chiaroscuro called sfumato ?? the delicate use of shades of color to depict light and perspective ?? around the same time as Leonardo. Whether Vasari is correct in saying he learnt it from Leonardo's works is unclear ?? he is always keen to ascribe all advances to Florentine sources. Leonardo's delicate color modulations result from the tiny disconnected spots of paint that he probably derived from manuscript illumination techniques and first brought into oil painting. These gave Giorgione's works the magical glow of light for which they are celebrated. Most entirely central and typical of all Giorgione's extant works is the Sleeping Venus now in Dresden, first recognized by Morelli, and now universally accepted, as being the same as the picture seen by Michiel and later by Ridolfi (his 17th century biographer) in the Casa Marcello at Venice. An exquisitely pure and severe rhythm of line and contour chastens the sensuous richness of the presentment: the sweep of white drapery on which the goddess lies, and of glowing landscape that fills the space behind her, most harmoniously frame her divinity. The use of an external landscape to frame a nude is innovative; but in addition, to add to her mystery, she is shrouded in sleep, spirited away from accessibility to her conscious expression. It is recorded by Michiel that Giorgione left this piece unfinished and that the landscape, with a Cupid which subsequent restoration has removed, were completed after his death by Titian. The picture is the prototype of Titian's own Venus of Urbino and of many more by other painters of the school; but none of them attained the fame of the first exemplar. The same concept of idealized beauty is evoked in a virginally pensive Judith from the Hermitage Museum, a large painting which exhibits Giorgione's special qualities of color richness and landscape romance, while demonstrating that life and death are each other's companions rather than foes. Apart from the altarpiece and the frescoes, all Giorgione's surviving works are small paintings designed for the wealthy Venetian collector to keep in his home; most are under two foot (60 cm) in either dimension. This market had been emerging over the last half of the fifteenth century in Italy, and was much better established in the Netherlands, but Giorgione was the first major Italian painter to concentrate his work on it to such an extent ?? indeed soon after his death the size of such paintings began to increase with the prosperity and palaces of the patrons.  Related Paintings of Giorgione :. | adoration of the shepherds | THe Judgment of Solomon | Warrior with Shield Bearer | The Tempest (nn03) | The Allendale Nativity Adoration of the Shepherds |
Related Artists:
Dankvart Dreyer
(13 June 1816 - 4 November 1852) was a Danish landscape painter of the Copenhagen School of painters who was educated under the guidance of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. Around 1840, he was part of the emerging National Romantic landscape painting scene in Denmark but as a result of his over-dramatic and excessively natural style, he did not fit the aestetics and the ideology of the period. After being widely criticized, he turned his back on the artistic establishment and passed into near oblivion. In 1852, when only 36 years old, he died from typhus. Posthumously, half a century after his death, his reputation was restored, prompted by the art historian Karl Madsen, and today he is considered to be one of the leading Danish landscape painters of his day, the peer of his more famous contemporaries P.C. Skovgaard and Johan Lundbye.
OOST, Jacob van, the Elder
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1601-1671
Hans von Kulmbach
(real name Hans Suess or Hans Seß) was born around 1480 in Kulmbach, Franconia and died previous to Dec. 3, 1522 in Nuremberg. Hans von Kulmbach was the artist who created the Krakew St. John's Altar. Kulmbach probably arrived in Nuremberg around 1505. He received instruction by Jacopo de' Barbari, who for a time worked in Nuremberg. Von Kulmbach then apprenticed with Albrecht Derer and after Derer retired from painting altarpieces in 1510 Kulmbach took over most of his commissions. Kulmbach had his own workshop in Nuremberg and at times worked in Krakew. He also created artworks for emperor Maximilian I and for Margrave Casimir Hohenzollern von Brandenburg-Kulmbach. His best works were stained-glass windows in churches, such as the Maximilian stained-glass, Margrave stained-glass at St. Sebald in Nuremberg, the Welser stained-glass at the Frauenkirche and the Nikolaus altar at Lorenzkirche. In 1511 he finished the St. Mary's altar at Skałka in Krakew. The Catherine and St. John's altar also in Krakew, are among his best works.