Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1483-1520 Italian painter and architect. As a member of Perugino's workshop, he established his mastery by 17 and began receiving important commissions. In 1504 he moved to Florence, where he executed many of his famous Madonnas; his unity of composition and suppression of inessentials is evident in The Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1506). Though influenced by Leonardo da Vinci's chiaroscuro and sfumato, his figure types were his own creation, with round, gentle faces that reveal human sentiments raised to a sublime serenity. In 1508 he was summoned to Rome to decorate a suite of papal chambers in the Vatican. The frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura are probably his greatest work; the most famous, The School of Athens (1510 C 11), is a complex and magnificently ordered allegory of secular knowledge showing Greek philosophers in an architectural setting. The Madonnas he painted in Rome show him turning away from his earlier work's serenity to emphasize movement and grandeur, partly under Michelangelo's High Renaissance influence. The Sistine Madonna (1513) shows the richness of colour and new boldness of compositional invention typical of his Roman period. He became the most important portraitist in Rome, designed 10 large tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel, designed a church and a chapel, assumed the direction of work on St. Peter's Basilica at the death of Donato Bramante,   Related Paintings of RAFFAELLO Sanzio :. | Portrait of Pietro Bembo | The Crowning of the Virgin (Oddi altar) | Kadanali | Decoration of the Loggetta | Together with a friend of a self-portrait |
Related Artists:
John Ruskin
English Romantic Writer and Painter, 1819-1900 English art critic. Born into a wealthy family, Ruskin was largely educated at home. He was a gifted painter, but the best of his talent went into his writing. His multivolume Modern Painters (1843 C 60), planned as a defense of painter J.M.W. Turner, expanded to become a general survey of art. In Turner he saw "truth to nature" in landscape painting, and he went on to find the same truthfulness in Gothic architecture. His other writings include The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851 C 53). He was also a defender of the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1869 he was elected Oxford's first Slade professor of fine art; he resigned in 1879 after James McNeill Whistler won a libel suit against him.
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope
English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1829-1908,English painter. The second son of Yorkshire landed gentry, he was educated at Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1850 he studied in London with G. F. Watts, through whom he entered the artistic circle at Little Holland House, where he met D. G. Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. In 1857 Rossetti invited him to paint at the Oxford Union (Sir Gawaine and the Damsels at the Fountain), and in 1858 Stanhope occupied a studio next to Rossetti's at Chatham Place, Blackfriars (London), where he painted Thoughts of the Past (London, Tate); a modern-life subject indebted to Rossetti, it shows a prostitute recalling her former life. Stanhope's close friendship with Burne-Jones proved a more decisive influence on his work that, in the 1860s, consisted of dreamlike poetic and mythological subjects often set in quaint, enclosed spaces, as in I Have Trod the Winepress Alone
Francesco de mura
Italian Painter , b. 1696, Napoli, d. 1782, Napoli was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque period, active mainly in Naples and Turin. His late work reflects the style of neoclassicism. He was a pupil of Francesco Solimena, then later with Domenico Viola, where he met his contemporary, Mattia Preti. While still in his teens he painted frescoes (1715) in San Nicola alla Carit?? in Naples. He painted ten canvases of the Virtues and an Adoration of the Magi (1728) for the church of Santa Maria Donnaromita. His other works include frescoes of the Adoration of the Magi (1732) in the apsidal dome of the church of the Nunziatella.