Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1577-1640 Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 ?C May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp which produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, king of Spain, and Charles I, king of England. Rubens was a prolific artist. His commissioned works were mostly religious subjects, "history" paintings, which included mythological subjects, and hunt scenes. He painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house. He also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the Joyous Entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not detailed; he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. He was one of the last major artists to make consistent use of wooden panels as a support medium, even for very large works, but he used canvas as well, especially when the work needed to be sent a long distance. For altarpieces he sometimes painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms 'Rubensian' or 'Rubenesque' for plus-sized women. The term 'Rubensiaans' is also commonly used in Dutch to denote such women.  Related Paintings of Peter Paul Rubens :. | cimone och efigenia | The Fligbt into Egypt (mk01) | Haymaking or Fuly (mk01) | Portrait of Younger Rubens | Recreation by our Gallery |
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Giorgione
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.
Antonin Hudecek
Czechoslovakian, 1872-1941
Mihaly Zichy
(Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈmihaːj ˈzitʃi]; German: Michael von Zichy; October 15, 1827, Zala, Hungary - February 28, 1906, St. Petersburg, Russia) was a Hungarian painter and graphic artist. Mihely Zichy was a significant representative of Hungarian romantic painting. During his law studies in Pest from 1842, he attended Jakab Marastoni's school as well. In Vienna he was Waldmeller's pupil in 1844. "Life Boat", his first major work, comes from this time. On Waldmeller's recommendation, he became an art teacher in St. Petersburg. He swore allegiance to freedom by painting the portrait of Lajos Batthyeny, the first Hungarian prime minister, in 1849. From 1850 onwards, he worked as a retoucher, but he also did pencil drawings, water colours and portraits in oil. The series on the Gatchina hunting ordered by the Russian tsar raised him to a court artist. He founded a society to support painters in need. "Autodafe" on the horrors of Spanish inquisition was painted in 1868. He travelled around Europe in 1871, and settled down in Paris in 1874. He painted "Queen Elisabeth is Laying Flowers by the Coffin of Ferenc Deek" on Treffort's order. "Drinking Bout of Henry III", his next large scale picture came from 1875. "The Victory of the Genius of Destruction" painted for the Paris Exhibition was banned by French authorities because of its daring antimilitarist message. He left Paris in 1881 and returned to St. Petersburg after short stays in Nizza, Vienna and Zala (village). From this time onwards, he was mostly engaged in illustrations ("The Tragedy of Man" by Made - h, 1887, and twenty-four ballads of Jenos Arany, 1894 - 98).