1283-1344 Italian Simone Martini Locations He was a major figure in the development of early Italian painting and greatly influenced the development of the International Gothic style. It is thought that Martini was a pupil of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the leading Sienese painter of his time. His brother-in-law was the artist Lippo Memmi. Very little documentation survives regarding Simone's life, and many attributions are debated by art historians. Simone Martini died while in the service of the Papal court at Avignon in 1344. Simone was doubtlessly apprenticed from an early age, as would have been the normal practice. Among his first documented works is the Maest?? of 1315 in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. A copy of the work, executed shortly thereafter by Lippo Memmi in San Gimignano, testifies to the enduring influence Simone's prototypes would have on other artists throughout the fourteenth century. Perpetuating the Sienese tradition, Simone's style contrasted with the sobriety and monumentality of Florentine art, and is noted for its soft, stylized, decorative features, sinuosity of line, and unsurpassed courtly elegance. Simone's art owes much to French manuscript illumination and ivory carving: examples of such art were brought to Siena in the fourteenth century by means of the Via Francigena, a main pilgrimage and trade route from Northern Europe to Rome. Simone's major works include the Maest?? (1315) in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, St Louis of Toulouse Crowning the King at the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples (1317), the S. Caterina Polyptych in Pisa (1319) and the Annunciation and two Saints at the Uffizi in Florence (1333), as well as frescoes in the Chapel of St. Martin in the lower church of the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. Francis Petrarch became friend with Simone while in Avignon, and two of his sonnets make reference to a portrait of Laura de Noves he supposedly painted for the poet.   Related Paintings of Simone Martini :. | Consecration of the Chapel (Detail) | Division of the Cloak | Sienese School | Maesta | Madonna and Child aaa |
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Thomas Uwins
English Painter, 1782-1857 English painter and illustrator. He was apprenticed to the line-engraver Benjamin Smith (d 1833) in 1797, but his greater interest in portrait painting led him to take life classes at the Royal Academy, London; he exhibited portraits there from 1799. Versatile and industrious, he painted miniature likenesses, taught drawing, designed and engraved illustrations for books in French, Portuguese and English, and wrote for and illustrated Rudolph Ackermann's Repository. His half-a-crown watercolours, known as 'pretty faces', were particularly popular, and he found employment as an assiduous copyist. In 1809 he was elected to the Society of Painters in Water-Colours and for the next nine years exhibited careful and colourful images of the countryside that provided views of the year's harvest. In 1817 Uwins travelled to France to record the Burgundian grape harvest, identifying the labour force more obviously as peasants than their English counterparts. In debt, he moved in 1820 to Edinburgh, where he illustrated books by Walter Scott and painted portraits. In 1824, his debt paid, he left for Italy, where he spent seven years; he sent highly valued copies of Italian works back to England (to Thomas Lawrence among others) and made studies of life in and around Rome and Naples, from which his later successes at the Royal Academy derived. An immodest Protestant, Uwins deplored but revelled in the 'polluted streams' of Catholic Italy, and provided London with oils renowned for their clarity and colour. A Neapolitan Saint Manufactory (exh. RA 1832; Leicester, Mus. & A.G.) shows monks haggling, women gazing and children playing amid carved and painted icons.
Joseph E.Southall
1861-1944
MANFREDI, Bartolomeo
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1582-1622 Italian painter. In the 17th century he was known throughout Italy and beyond as Caravaggio's closest follower and his works were highly prized and widely collected. More than simply aping Caravaggio's style, Manfredi reinterpreted his subjects and rendered new ones, drawing upon Caravaggio's naturalism and dramatic use of chiaroscuro. His paintings were often praised by his contemporaries as equal to Caravaggio's and he was subsequently emulated and imitated by other Roman Caravaggisti during the 1610s and 1620s. Yet by the 18th century his works were forgotten or confused with those of Caravaggio himself,