Greek-born Spanish Mannerist Painter, 1541-1614 Greek painter, designer and engraver, active in Italy and Spain. One of the most original and interesting painters of 16th-century Europe, he transformed the Byzantine style of his early paintings into another, wholly Western manner. He was active in his native Crete, in Venice and Rome, and, during the second half of his life, in Toledo. He was renowned in his lifetime for his originality and extravagance and provides one of the most curious examples of the oscillations of taste in the evaluation of a painter,   Related Paintings of GRECO, El :. | St Andrew and St Francis | The Pentecost | St Peter in Penitence | Allegory of the Camaldolese | Altarpiece |
Related Artists:
Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo
1612-1667 Spanish Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo Gallery Mazo??s works owe credit above all to Vel??zquez, whose style he was long compelled to emulate in court portraits. However, Mazo shows in his paintings a personality of his own. His portraits exhibit startling naturalism and marvelously executed. Mazo was specially skillful in painting small figures, a cardinal element in both his hunting scenes and the landscapes he painted as in his most celebrate work View of Saragossa. Mazo??s palette was rather like that of Vel??zquez, except for a penchant often shown for stressing blue or bluish tints. .The departure from his master style was in his way of shaping people and things by highlights which flash the pictorial image towards the surface of the painting, even from the background.. As a counterbalance, an explicit, even emphatic, perspective design marks out the spatial confines of the composition, making it appear squarish.. A further departure from Velazquez is his luxurious depiction of detail or incident, which he achieved with brilliant, depthless strokes, whether on the figure of a sitter, a curtain on a wall, a floor, the surface of a river, or plain grounds. .These stylistic traits reveal Mazo??s own personality as an artist. .For centuries, Mazo??s paintings were attributed to Vel??zquez, but modern art criticism, techniques and knowledge have been able to separate their works.
Charles-Amedee-Philippe van Loo
(25 August 1719 -15 November 1795) was a French painter of allegorical scenes and portraits. He studied under his father, the painter Jean-Baptiste van Loo, at Turin and Rome, where in 1738 he won the Prix de Rome, then at Aix-en-Provence, before returning to Paris in 1745. He was invited to join the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1747, and that year he married his cousin Marie-Marguerite Lebrun, daughter of the painter Michel Lebrun (died 1753). Among his brothers were the painters François van Loo (1708-1732) and Louis-Michel van Loo (1707-1771).
SCHALCKEN, Godfried
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1643-1706 Dutch painter and etcher, active also in England. He was the second son of Cornelis Schalcken from Heusden, a clergyman in Made, and Aletta Lydius, who came from a famous clerical family in Dordrecht. In 1654 the family moved to Dordrecht, where Cornelis was appointed headmaster of the Latin school. There Godfried was apprenticed to Samuel van Hoogstraten. He completed his training in Leiden with Gerrit Dou and by 1665 had returned to Dordrecht. Schalcken's earliest known works, for example the Doctor's Visit (1669; Germany, priv. col., on loan to Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Mus.), are dominated by the influence of Dou and the Leiden 'fine painters'. Like Dou, Schalcken painted small genre pieces with a wealth of painstakingly rendered detail, and his themes and frequent use of artificial lighting are strongly reminiscent of the Leiden master. The six prints known by him, including a portrait of Gerrit Dou and a few portraits after van Hoogstraten, must also originate from this period. Possibly under the influence of Caspar Netscher and Frans van Mieris, Schalcken soon afterwards adopted a freer touch with gentler transitions and a lighter palette and applied himself to painting genre pieces with elegant figures.