Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1445-1510
Italian painter and draughtsman. In his lifetime he was one of the most esteemed painters in Italy, enjoying the patronage of the leading families of Florence, in particular the Medici and their banking clients. He was summoned to take part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, was highly commended by diplomatic agents to Ludovico Sforza in Milan and Isabella d Este in Mantua and also received enthusiastic praise from the famous mathematician Luca Pacioli and the humanist poet Ugolino Verino. By the time of his death, however, Botticelli s reputation was already waning. He was overshadowed first by the advent of what Vasari called the maniera devota, a new style by Perugino, Francesco Francia and the young Raphael, whose new and humanly affective sentiment, infused atmospheric effects and sweet colourism took Italy by storm; he was then eclipsed with the establishment immediately afterwards of the High Renaissance style, which Vasari called the modern manner, in the paintings of Michelangelo and the mature works of Raphael in the Vatican. From that time his name virtually disappeared until the reassessment of his reputation that gathered momentum in the 1890s Related Paintings of Sandro Botticelli :. | Our Lady of Angels and the public | Primavera-Spring | Details of Fortitude (mk36) | Trials of Moses | Portrait of a Youth with a Medal | Related Artists:
Abraham SolomonEnglish Painter, 1824-1862
Joseph Siffred DuplessisFrench Painter, 1725-1802
was a French painter, known for the clarity and immediacy of his portraits. He was born into a family with an artistic bent and received his first training from his father, a surgeon and talented amateur, then with Joseph-Gabriel Imbert (1666?C1749), who had been a pupil of Charles Le Brun. From 1744-47 or later he worked in Rome, in the atelier of Pierre Subleyras, who was also from the south of France, who died in 1749. In Italy Duplessis became fast friends with Joseph Vernet, another Occitan. He returned to Carpentras, spent a brief time in Lyon then arrived about 1752 in Paris, where he was accepted into the Academie de Saint-Luc and exhibited some portraits, which were now his specialty, in 1764, but did not achieve much notice until his exhibition of ten paintings at the Paris salon of 1769, very well received and selected for special notice by Denis Diderot; the Academie de peinture et de sculpture accepted him in the category of portraitist, considered a lesser category at the time. He continued to exhibit at the Paris salons, both finished paintings and sketches, until 1791, and once more, in 1801. His portrait of the Dauphine in 1771 and his appointment as a peintre du Roi assured his success: most of his surviving portraits date from the 1770s and 1780s. He received privileged lodgings in the Galeries du Louvre. In the Revolution, he withdrew to safe obscurity at Carpentras during the Reign of terror. Afterwards, from 1796, he served as curator at the newly-founded museum formed at Versaillles, so recently emptied of its furnishings at the Revolutionary sales. His uncompromising self-portrait at this time of his life is at Versailles. His adjusted his style to the social condition of his sitter: his portrait of Charles-Claude, comte d'Angiviller, director of the Batiments du Roi, is as distant and conventional as his state portrait of Louis XVI in coronation robes (1776), while his realistic and intimate portrait of the opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) catches the composer at the keyboard in a moment of inspiration and his penetrating portrait of the sculptor Christophe Gabriel Allegrain (Louvre Museum, illustration) shows him having just laid down his chisel: this was the morceau de reception that gained him admittance to the Academie. Duplessis' Benjamin Franklin on the U.S. hundred dollar billHis portrait of Benjamin Franklin (1778),
Simon Marmion (born c. 1425 at Amiens, France, died 24 or 25 December 1489, Valenciennes) was a French or Burgundian Early Netherlandish painter of panels and illuminated manuscripts. Marmion lived and worked in what is now France but for most of his lifetime was part of the Duchy of Burgundy in the Southern Netherlands.
Like many painters of his era, Marmion came from a family of artists, and both his father, Jean, and his brother Mille were painters. Marmion is recorded as working at Amiens between 1449 to 1454, and then at Valenciennes from 1458 until his death. He was patronized by Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy from 1454 when he was one of several artists called to Lille to work on the decorations for the Feast of the Pheasant. He was employed by several members of the ducal family, including Charles the Bold and Margaret of York. He was called "the prince of illuminators" by a near contemporary. Three years after his death his widow, Jeanne de Quaroube, married his pupil, the painter Jan Provoost, who on her death inherited the considerable Marmion estate.
Although best known for his illuminated manuscripts, Marmion also produced portraits and other paintings, altarpieces, and decorative work. A famous double-sided altarpiece with several Scenes from the life of St Bertin is in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (with two sections in the National Gallery (London). There is a Mass of Saint Gregory in Toronto, and a Lamentation of Christ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,three works in Philadelphia, and several others elsewhere. Stylistically he lies between his French and Flemish contemporaries, with a Flemish innovation in composition and landscape. His perspective is usually technically sound, but the proportions of his figures are often awkward, and their poses rather stiff.