Fra Angelico Galleries b.c. 1400, Vicchio, Florence d.Feb. 18, 1455, Rome Fra Angelico (c. 1395 ?C February 18, 1455), born Guido di Pietro, was an Early Italian Renaissance painter, referred to in Vasari's Lives of the Artists as having "a rare and perfect talent". Known in Italy as il Beato Angelico, he was known to his contemporaries as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole (Brother John from Fiesole). In Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, written prior to 1555, he was already known as Fra Giovanni Angelico (Brother Giovanni the Angelic One). Within his lifetime or shortly thereafter he was also called Il Beato (the Blessed), in reference to his skills in painting religious subjects. In 1982 Pope John Paul II conferred beatification, thereby making this title official. Fiesole is sometimes misinterpreted as being part of his formal name, but it was merely the name of the town where he took his vows, used by contemporaries to separate him from other Fra Giovannis. He is listed in the Roman Martyrology as Beatus Ioannes Faesulanus, cognomento Angelicus??"Blessed Giovanni of Fiesole, nicknamed Angelico". Fra Angelico was working at a time when the style of painting was in a state of change. This process of change had begun a hundred years previous with the works of Giotto and several of his contemporaries, notably Giusto de' Menabuoi, both of whom had created their major works in Padua, although Giotto was trained in Florence by the great Gothic artist, Cimabue, and painted a fresco cycle of St Francis in the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce. Giotto had many enthusiastic followers, who imitated his style in fresco, some of them, notably the Lorenzetti, achieving great success.  Related Paintings of Fra Angelico :. | St Lawrence Receiving the Church Treasures (mk08) | Noli Me Tangere | Entombment | St Cosmas och S: t Damianus halshugges | Madonna of the Star |
Related Artists:
tacuinum sanitatis
1673 late sixteenth century
Martin Johnson Heade
American Hudson River School Painter, 1819-1904 Martin Johnson Heade (August 11, 1819-September 4, 1904) was a prolific American painter known for his salt marsh landscapes, seascapes, portraits of tropical birds, and still lifes. His painting style and subject matter, while derived from the romanticism of the time, is regarded by art historians as a significant departure from that of his peers. Art historians have come to disagree with the common view that Heade is a Hudson River School painter, a view given wide currency by Heade's inclusion in a landmark exhibition of Hudson River School landscapes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1987. The leading Heade scholar and author of Heade's catalogue raisonn??, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., wrote some years after the 1987 Hudson River School exhibition that "...other scholars??myself included??have increasingly come to doubt that Heade is most usefully seen as standing within that school." According to the Heade catalogue raisonn??, only around 40 percent of his paintings were landscapes. The remaining majority were still lifes, paintings of birds, and portraits, subjects unrelated to the Hudson River School. Of Heade's landscapes, perhaps only 25 percent were painted of traditional Hudson River School subject matter. Heade had less interest in topographically accurate views than the Hudson River painters, and instead focused on mood and the effects of light. Stebbins writes, "If the paintings of the shore as well as the more conventional compositions...might lead one to think of Heade as a Hudson River School painter, the [marsh scenes] make it clear that he was not."
Giovanni Ghisolfi
Italian Painter , ca.1623-1683 He first trained with his uncle, Antonio Volpino. In 1650, together with his friend Antonio Busca, he travelled to Rome, where he studied the great compositions of Pietro da Cortona and for some time frequented the studio of Salvator Rosa. In 1661 he returned to Lombardy and worked at the Certosa di Pavia, decorating a whole chapel with frescoes showing Legends of St Benedict (in situ), and later providing a canvas of St Bruno, which is now in the Certosa library. In the background of this picture Ghisolfi painted a sloping landscape in a style very close to that of Pietro da Cortona. In the following years he evidently established a reputation for landscape paintings with architecture and ancient ruins. In 1664 he was called to Vicenza to execute, in the Palazzo Trissino Baston and the Palazzo Giustiniani Baggio, an extensive series of decorative landscape frescoes (partially destr.; known through photographs). Numerous preparatory drawings for these exist (Haarlem, Teylers Mus.; Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Col.). In the same period Ghisolfi collaborated with Antonio Busca on a series of decorative frescoes in the gallery of Palazzo Borromeo Arese at Cesano Maderno, near Milan, and later, with Federico Bianchi, in the Villa Litta Modigliani (1680) at Varese. Both these works have been gravely damaged by decay and later repaintings.