1696-1770 Italian painter, master of Venetian school. Tiepolo was famous in his own lifetime as a superb painter in fresco and a brilliant draftsman. A highly inventive artist, he could create spectacular effects in difficult sites, from the narrow gallery at the patriarchal palace at Udine in the mid-1720s to the vast staircase ceiling in the Residenz at Werzburg in the early 1750s. Contemporaries recognized his spirited, dynamic approach to subject matter and his frankly sensuous manner of painting. Tiepolo is comparable in his restless energy and imaginative power to Peter Paul Rubens, and essentially he worked with a similar baroque language of myth, allegory, and history, which he infused with a sense of freshness and modernity. His approach to religious art is characterized by candor and naturalism, while he was responsive to the different concerns of patrons and viewers at a time when the church was faced with new kinds of devotion and criticism. With the advent of neoclassicism, Tiepolo's art fell from favor: In an age that prized archaeological correctness, rationality, and ideals of improvement, his witty, Veronese-inspired conception of historical or classical subjects seemed frivolous, while his visually seductive qualities were seen as inimical to the serious intellectual aims of the new art. Nevertheless, his drawings and oil sketches continued to appeal to collectors, including Antonio Canova. The son of a Venetian shipping merchant, Tiepolo was apprenticed in 1710 to Gregorio Lazzarini (1655C1730), an artist of international reputation patronized by prominent Venetian families. Before becoming an independent master, he worked in the household of Doge Giovanni Corner; members of the Corner family were to be his most steadfast and liberal patrons. Lazzarini encouraged his pupils to study Venetian sixteenth-century art, and Tiepolo made drawings of some famous works for publication in Domenico Lovisa's Gran Teatro di Venezia of 1717. His early involvement with the thriving Venetian engraving and publishing world was renewed in 1724 when he made drawings of antique sculpture as illustrations for Scipione Maffei's Verona Illustrata, an experience that gave Tiepolo an imaginative empathy with fragmentary antique remains, which recur in his drawings, etchings, and paintings. As well as studying the art of the past, Tiepolo looked to the tenebrism of Federico Bencovich (1677C1753) and the realism and monumentality of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta (1682C1754). In 1719 Tiepolo married Cecilia Guardi, with whom he was to have nine children. By then, the artist was working for a network of mercantile and noble patrons on religious and secular subjects.  Related Paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo :. | Details of The Death of Hyacinthus | Allegory of the Planets and Continents | Recreation by our Gallery | Details from The Triumph of Marius | Details of The Death of Hyacinthus |
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Joseph Heintz the Elder
the Elder (Basle, 11 June 1564 - near Prague, Bohemia, October 1609) was a Swiss painter, draftsman and architect. He appears to have been a pupil of Hans Bock, and to have educated himself by diligent practice in copying the works of Hans Holbein the younger. Between 1585 and 1587 he lived in Rome, registering himself a pupil; to Hans von Aachen. He next settled in Bohemia in 1591, and was at once appointed court painter to Rudolf II, but he remained in Prague for two years only, as in 1593 he was commissioned to make some copies from the antique for the emperor, and for that purpose went to Rome, where he spent some years. In 1604 we hear of him in Augsburg, and from the time we know little of his history, until his decease is recorded in a village outside of Prague. Heintz's paintings included religious images, portraits, and, following the emperor's taste, erotic mythological themes. They were at one time in high demand, but later on suffered an eclipse. Among them are a family portrait in Berne and that of Rudolf II in Vienna. He was constantly investigating subtle questions of light, and almost all of his landscapes show the interest he took in this technical matter. A notable work by him is the Rape of Proserpine, which hangs in the Dresden Gallery, and was engraved by Lukas Kilian; in the same gallery are two other works, Lot and His Daughters and Ecce Homo. Finally there is his portrait of Constance of Austria. He had a son, who bore the same name, and who painted a few religious pictures; several of these works hitherto attributed to the son are now believed to be late productions by the father.
TRAVERSI, Gaspare
Italian Painter, ca.1722-1770 Italian painter. He was apprenticed to the elderly Francesco Solimena, whose late style, a reinterpretation of the Baroque art of Mattia Preti, influenced his earliest works. At the same time he studied the naturalist painters of the 17th century: Preti himself, Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, Jusepe de Ribera, Filippo Vitale and Francesco Fracanzano. Classical art also attracted him, and in the 1740s he began to make journeys to Rome to study the influential works of Bolognese and Roman classicism: paintings by Guido Reni, Guercino and the Carracci family, and by Carlo Maratti. During one of these visits he copied two pictures by Maratti, then in S Isidoro, Rome: the Flagellation and a Crucifixion . In the following year he was in Naples; three canvases of scenes from the Life of the Virgin (Naples, S Maria dell'Aiuto), one of which is signed and dated 1749
Jose Clemente Orozco
Mexican 1883-1949 Jose Clemente Orozco Gallery Jose Clemente Orozco (November 23, 1883 ?C September 7, 1949) was a Mexican social realist painter, who specialized in bold murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and others. Orozco was the most complex of the Mexican muralists, fond of the theme of human suffering, but less realistic and more fascinated by machines than Rivera. Mostly influenced by Symbolism, he was also a genre painter and lithographer. Between 1922 and 1948, Orozco painted murals in Mexico City, Orizaba, Claremont, California, New York City, Hanover, New Hampshire, Guadalajara, Jalisco, and Jiquilpan, Michoac??n. His drawings and paintings are exhibited by the Carrillo Gil Museum in Mexico City, and the Orozco Workshop-Museum in Guadalajara. Jos?? Clemente Orozco was born in Zapotl??n el Grande (now Ciudad Guzm??n), Jalisco to Rosa de Flores Orozco. He married Margarita Valladares, and had three children. In a childhood accident, Orozco lost his left hand while playing with gunpowder. Jos?? Guadalupe Posada, a satirical illustrator whose engravings about Mexican culture and politics challenged Mexicans to think differently about post-revolutionary Mexico, worked in full view of the public in shop windows located on the way Orozco went to school. In his autobiography, Orozco confesses, "I would stop [on my way to and from school] and spend a few enchanted minutes in watching [Posada]?? This was the push that first set my imagination in motion and impelled me to cover paper with my earliest little figures; this was my awakening to the existence of the art of painting." (Orozco, 1962) He goes to say that watching Posado's engraving decorated gave him his introduction to the use of color. After attending school for Agriculture and Architecture, Orozco studied art at the San Carlos Academy. With Diego Rivera, he was a leader of the artist movement known as Mexican Muralism. An important distinction he had from Rivera was his critical view of the Mexican Revolution. While Diego was a bold, optimistic figure, touting the glory of the revolution, Orozco was less comfortable with the bloody toll the social movement was taking. Orozco is known as one of the "Big Three" muralists along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. All three artists, as well as the painter Rufino Tamayo, experimented with fresco on large walls, and elevated the art of the mural.