Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1455-1508 Painter and illuminator, half-brother of Cristoforo de Predis. He began his career as an illuminator, working with Cristoforo. His first documented works are seven miniatures for a Book of Hours (1472; destr.) for Vitaliano Borromeo (1451-95) and a Book of Hours for Francesco Borromeo. He was paid for the latter in 1474, and the codex can probably be identified with the Horae Beatae Virginis Mariae (ex-H. P. Kraus, New York, 1987; Suida, 1959). From 1479 he artist worked in the Milanese mint, together with his brother Bernardino. For some years Giovanni Ambrogio also worked at the court of Ludovico Sforza ('il Moro'), especially as a portrait painter. This is borne out by the charcoal drawing of Bianca Maria Sforza (1492; Venice, Accad.), which dates from a period before her marriage to Emperor Maximilian I. The portrait was ordered by her future husband, through Frederick III, Duke of Saxony, to give him an idea of her appearance. It was favourably received, and later a painting of the same subject (Washington, DC, N.G.A.) was commissioned from Giovanni Ambrogio.   Related Paintings of PREDIS, Ambrogio de :. | Portrait of a Woman age | Portrat of a young man | Portrait of a Man | Portrait of a Man ate | Portrait of a Young Man sgt |
Related Artists:
Frank Vizetelly
1830-1883
MONTAGNA, Bartolomeo
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1450-1523 Painter and draughtsman. Montagna is first documented in 1459 in Vicenza as a minor and, still a minor, in 1467. In 1469 he is recorded as a resident of Venice. In 1474 he was living in Vicenza where, in 1476 and 1478, he was commissioned to paint altarpieces (now lost). He has variously been considered a pupil of Andrea Mantegna (Vasari), Giovanni Bellini, Antonello da Messina, Alvise Vivarini, Domenico Morone and Vittore Carpaccio. While none of these artists, except Carpaccio, was irrelevant to Montagna's stylistic formation, scholars agree that Giovanni Bellini was the primary influence on his art. He may have worked in Bellini's shop around 1470. Several of Montagna's paintings of the Virgin and Child in which the influence of Antonello da Messina is especially marked (e.g. two in Belluno, Mus. Civ.; London, N.G., see Davies, no. 802) are likely to be close in date to Antonello's sojourn in Venice (1475-6); they are therefore best considered Montagna's earliest extant works (Gilbert, 1967) rather than as an unexplained parenthesis around 1485 between two Bellinesque phases (Puppi, 1962). These early paintings appear to be followed by others in which the geometrically rounded forms derived from Antonello become more slender and sharper-edged. Their figures are imbued with a deeply felt, individual humanity, sometimes austere and minatory, sometimes tender. Among them are some larger-scale works, for example the Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS Nicholas and Lucy (Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.) and a Virgin and Child Enthroned with SS Ansanus, Anthony Abbot, Francis and Jerome
Charles Ricketts
1866-1931 English painter, designer, writer and collector. He trained as an illustrator at the City and Guilds Technical Art School, Lambeth, London, where he met and formed a lifelong relationship with CHARLES HAZELWOOD SHANNON. He identified with the ideals of the Aesthetic Movement, finding inspiration in Renaissance art as well as in the French artists Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. In 1888 he took over James Abbott McNeill Whistler's house, The Vale, in Chelsea and drew together an artists' colony. Inspired by the work of A. H. Mackmurdo and William Morris, he set up a small press over which he exercised complete control of design and production, producing art journals and books that included Oscar Wilde's A House of Pomegranates (1891) and The Sphinx (1894). Ricketts later designed founts, initials, borders and illustrations for the Vale Press (1896-1904), blending medieval, Renaissance and contemporary imagery.