English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1828-1882 Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. His incomplete picture Found was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted up from the street by a country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones. This was also true of his later poetry. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the image of idealized Botticelli's Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci. Although he won support from the John Ruskin, criticism of his clubs caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to waterhum, which could be sold privately. In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices. Both these developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix. These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst another of his mistresses Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.  Related Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti :. | Dante's Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice | The Girlhood of Mary Virgin | Aurea Catena | The Day Dream | La Bella Mano |
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Louis Caravaque
Louis Caravaque, a French portrait painter, was a native of Gascony. He went to Russia, and in 1716 painted at Astrakhan the portrait of Peter the Great, which has been engraved by Massard and by Langlois. He again painted the Czar in 1723, and subsequently the Empresses Anne and Elizabeth. He died in Russia in 1752.
PALMA GIOVANE
Italian Mannerist Painter, ca.1548-1628 Son of Antonio Palma. A greater artist than his father, his vast oeuvre represents the impact of central Italian Mannerism but principally of Jacopo Tintoretto on Venetian painting in the generation after Titian, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese. He died in his late seventies and was occasionally referred to as 'il vecchio', but since the 17th century he has been known as 'il giovane' to distinguish him from his great uncle. He was virtually self-taught, apart from a presumed acquaintance with his father's workshop. In 1567 he came to the attention of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who was to support him for four years. A possible knowledge of Federico Barocci's art at the court of Urbino left little trace on his surviving early works. The Duke sent him to Rome for study, where he spent a few months apprenticed to an unknown artist. There his sympathy was with Taddeo Zuccaro and Federico Zuccaro, who influenced the graphic style of the drawing of Matteo da Lecce (1568; New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib.), his first dated work. His Roman sojourn, which lasted until c. 1573-4, made a direct impact on some of his Venetian works and indirectly made him receptive to Tintoretto's style. A tendency in Rome in the 1560s to retreat from the most artificial and decorative aspects of Mannerism in favour of naturalism was also to affect Palma's attitude to style in his mature works
Jacob Van Velsen
delft before 1625-Amsterdam 1656