Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1422-1492 Italian painter and theorist. His work is the embodiment of rational, calm, monumental painting in the Italian Early Renaissance, an age in which art and science were indissolubly linked through the writings of Leon Battista Alberti. Born two generations before Leonardo da Vinci, Piero was similarly interested in the scientific application of the recently discovered rules of perspective to narrative or devotional painting, especially in fresco, of which he was an imaginative master; and although he was less universally creative than Leonardo and worked in an earlier idiom, he was equally keen to experiment with painting technique. Piero was as adept at resolving problems in Euclid, whose modern rediscovery is largely due to him, as he was at creating serene, memorable figures, whose gestures are as telling and spare as those in the frescoes of Giotto or Masaccio. His tactile, gravely convincing figures are also indebted to the sculpture of Donatello, an equally attentive observer of Classical antiquity. In his best works, such as the frescoes in the Bacci Chapel in S Francesco, Arezzo, there is an ideal balance between his serene, classical compositions and the figures that inhabit them, the whole depicted in a distinctive and economical language. In his autograph works Piero was a perfectionist, creating precise, logical and light-filled images (although analysis of their perspective schemes shows that these were always subordinated to narrative effect). However, he often delegated important passages of works (e.g. the Arezzo frescoes) to an ordinary, even incompetent, assistant.   Related Paintings of Piero della Francesca :. | The Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes | st francis, polyptych of the misericordia | the montefeltro altarpiece | Madonna del parto | portrait of federico da montefeltro |
Related Artists:
Herbert menzies marshall,r.w.s
1841-1913
Abanindranath Tagore
Indian, 1871-1951,Painter and writer, brother of Gaganendranath Tagore. Intermittently taught by two undistinguished European academicians, Olinto Ghilardy and Charles Palmer, in 1897 he came under the influence of Ernest Binfield Havell (see HAVELL,), art scholar and catalyst of indigenism. Impressed by Mughal and Persian miniatures and the work of the Japanese artists Taikan Yokoyama and Shunso Hishida, who visited India in 1903, Abanindranath discarded Western realism for the stylized naturalism of Japanese art, which suited his poetic temperament, and the general John Ruskin-William Morris thought axis of such early indigenist theorists as Havell and Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. His work until the Omar Khayyam illustrations (1906-10; Santiniketan, Nandan Mus.), with their revivalist nationalism and fin-de-siecle affectations, greatly influenced the Neo-Bengal art movement formed chiefly by his pupils at the Calcutta Art School, where he was Vice-principal from 1905 to 1915. His own later work developed an imagist focus. The Arabian Nights series (1930; Calcutta, Babindra-Bharati Soc.), his magnum opus, in which literary and visual antecedents give the image a cultural ambience without intruding on its independence, marks the beginning of modern Indian narrative painting. His aesthetic theories, formulated in lectures he gave as the Vageswari Professor of Art at Calcutta University (1921-9), stressed the role of individual sensibility and imagination in creativity. Induced by his uncle Rabindranath,
Floris Arntzenius
(9 June 1864 - 16 February 1925) was a Dutch painter, water-colourist, illustrator and printmaker. He is considered a representative of the younger generation of the Hague School. Arntzenius was born in Surabaya on the island of Java where his father served in the Royal Dutch East Indies Army. In 1875, at the age of 11, he was sent to the Netherlands to Amsterdam to live with his aunt and uncle in order to complete his education. In 1882 he became a student of Frederik Nachtweh, under Nachtweh's supervision he gained admission to the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten. During his time at the Rijksacademie, from 1883 to 1888, his teachers included August Allebe and Barend Wijnveld, and amongst his fellow students were Isaac Israëls, George Breitner, Willem Witsen and Jan Veth. After his studies in Amsterdam he spent another two years at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, studying under Charles Verlat. Back in Amsterdam, Arntzenuis became a member of the artist's societies Arte et Amicitiae (1890) and St. Lucas (1891), and he had a studio at the Sarphatistraat. In 1892 his mother became widowed and moved to The Hague and Arntzenuis also moved there to keep her company. Around the same time his former fellow students Isaac Israëls and George Breitner left The Hague for Amsterdam to be a part of the capital's more vibrant artistic climate. At The Hague the established painters of the first generation of the Hague School dominated artistic life. Spuistraat, 1919, Haags Historisch MuseumArntzenius became a member of the artist's society Pulchri Studio in The Hague in 1892. From 1893 to 1895 he shared Bernard Blommers' former studio with Cornelis Antonie van Waning. He also contributed illustrations to Elsevier Geïllustreerd Maandschrift from 1892 to 1894. In 1896 he was admitted to the Hollandsche Teeken Maatschappij, a society that promoted the medium of watercolours among its members. He got married in 1900, to Lide Doorman, a talented painter of floral still lives, who lived in the house opposite of Arntzenius' mother, together they had four daughters, who he frequently painted.