Born 1606, Died 1669.One of the great Dutch painters and printmakers of the 17th century, Rembrandt van Rijn is best known for his expressive use of light and shadow (also called chiaroscuro) in his many portraits. Raised in Leiden, he studied with Pieter Lastman (1583-1633) in Amsterdam, then returned to Leiden around 1625 and set up shop as a teacher and portrait artist. Sometime between 1630 and 1632 Rembrandt relocated to Amsterdam, where he spent the rest of his career. Though he had his detractors (some of whom considered him coarse and "low born"), Rembrandt was successful and famous during his lifetime, though he fell on financial hard times in his later years. He was a master printer and produced hundreds of group portraits and historical paintings, including The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632), The Military Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq (1642) and Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1653). His portraits -- including a lifelong trail of intriguing and rather frank self-portraits -- reveal his interest in psychological study and continue to be admired as landmarks in Western art. The Military Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq is also known as "The Night Watch" because it was thought the painting depicted a nighttime scene. When the painting was cleaned in the 1940s it became obvious that it depicted a daytime scene... He married Saskia van Ulenburgh (also Uylenburgh) in 1634.   Related Paintings of REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van Rijn :. | Portrait of an Old man | The Raising of Lazarus | Titus in a Monk-s Habit | Portrait of the Preacher Eleazar Swalmius | Portrait of Rembrandt-s Mother |
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Basilius Besler
1561-1629,was a respected Nuremberg apothecary and botanist, best known for his monumental Hortus Eystettensis. He was curator of the garden of Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, prince bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria. The bishop was an enthusiastic botanist who derived great pleasure from his garden, which was the only important European botanical garden outside Italy. The gardens surrounded the bishop's palace, Willibaldsburg, which was built on a hill overlooking the town. These gardens had been started in 1596 and designed by Besler's colleague, Joachim Camerarius, the Younger (1534-1598), a physician and botanist. Upon Camerarius' death in 1598, Besler had the remainder of Camerarius' plants moved to Eichstätt and carried on the work of planting and supervision. The bishop commissioned Besler to compile a codex of the plants growing in his garden, a task which Besler took sixteen years to complete, the bishop dying shortly before the work was published. Besler had the assistance of his brother and a group of skilled German draughtsmen and engravers, including Sebastian Schedel, an accomplished painter, and Wolfgang Kilian, a skilled engraver from Augsburg. Kilian and his team engraved the initial copper plates, but after the bishop??s death, the operations moved to N??rnberg and a new team of engravers, among whom were Johannes Leypold, Georg Gärtner, Levin and Friedrich van Hulsen, Peter Isselburg, Heinrich Ulrich, Dominicus Custos and Servatius Raeven. Camerarius' nephew, Ludwig Jungermann (1572-1653), was a botanist and wrote the lion's share of the descriptive text. The work was named Hortus Eystettensis (Garden at Eichstätt). The emphasis in botanicals of previous centuries had been on medicinal and culinary herbs, and these had usually been depicted in a crude manner. The images were often inadequate for identification, and had little claim to being aesthetic. The Hortus Eystettensis changed botanical art overnight. The plates were of garden flowers, herbs and vegetables, exotic plants such as castor-oil and arum lilies.
Giuseppe Bonito
Giuseppe Bonito (11 January 1707 - 9 May 1789) was a Neapolitan painter of the Rococo period. Giuseppe Bonito is known for genre depictions on canvas. Many of Gaspare Traversi's paintings had previously been attributed to Bonito. Bonito was born at Castellammare di Stabia, and, like Traversi, was a student at the large studio of Francesco Solimena. Bonito represented urban scenes with folklore details and figures of commedia dell'arte. Between the 1736 and 1742 Bonito it worked for the family Borboni in the royal palace of Portici. He also painted portraits including one of Maria Amalia di Sassonia, wife of the Charles VII, king of Naples.
Angelico Fra
Italian painter, illuminator and Dominican friar. He rose from obscure beginnings as a journeyman illuminator to the renown of an artist whose last major commissions were monumental fresco cycles in St Peter and the Vatican Palace, Rome. He reached maturity in the early 1430s, a watershed in the history of Florentine art. None of the masters who had broken new ground with naturalistic painting in the 1420s was still in Florence by the end of that decade. The way was open for a new generation of painters, and Fra Angelico was the dominant figure among several who became prominent at that time, including Paolo Uccello, Fra Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Castagno. By the early 1430s Fra Angelico was operating the largest and most prestigious workshop in Florence. His paintings offered alternatives to the traditional polyptych altarpiece type and projected the new naturalism of panel painting on to a monumental scale. In fresco projects of the 1440s and 1450s, both for S Marco in Florence and for S Peter's and the Vatican Palace in Rome, Fra Angelico softened the typically astringent and declamatory style of Tuscan mural decoration with the colouristic and luminescent nuances that characterize his panel paintings. His legacy passed directly to the second half of the 15th century through the work of his close follower Benozzo Gozzoli and indirectly through the production of Domenico Veneziano and Piero della Francesca. Fra Angelico was undoubtedly the leading master in Rome at mid-century, and had the survival rate of 15th-century Roman painting been greater, his significance for such later artists as Melozzo da Forli and Antoniazzo Romano might be clearer than it is.