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 :. | Burial of St Martin | Window | Bebadelsen | Petrach Virgil | Orsini Diptych |
Related Artists:
Jean-Laurent Mosnier
French portrait Painter , b. ca. 1743, Paris, d. 1808, St. Petersburg
Barend van Orley
Brussels ca 1488-1541
William Etty
1787-1849 English William Etty Location English painter. Born into a Methodist family, he was the seventh child of a miller and baker in Feasegate, York, and in 1798 he was apprenticed as a printer to Robert Peck, publisher of the Hull Packet. Financial support from his uncle, a banker, allowed him to go to London in 1805, where he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1806. For a year, in 1807-8, he was a pupil of Thomas Lawrence, who greatly influenced him. Following the death of his uncle in 1809 he became financially secure. From 1811 he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the British Institution and in 1816 worked in the studio of Jean-Baptiste Regnault in Paris.