Italian 1267-1337 Giotto Galleries Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267 ?C January 8, 1337), better known simply as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence. He is generally considered the first in a line of great artists who contributed to the Italian Renaissance. Giotto's contemporary Giovanni Villani wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature. And he was given a salary by the commune [of Florence] in virtue of his talent and excellence." The later 16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari says of him "...He made a decisive break with the ...Byzantine style, and brought to life the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years." Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, commonly called the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305. This fresco cycle depicts the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance. That Giotto painted the Arena Chapel and that he was chosen by the commune of Florence in 1334 to design the new campanile (bell tower) of the Florence Cathedral are among the few certainties of his biography. Almost every other aspect of it is subject to controversy: his birthdate, his birthplace, his appearance, his apprenticeship, the order in which he created his works, whether or not he painted the famous frescoes at Assisi, and where he was eventually buried after his death.  Related Paintings of Giotto :. | The Ascension | Meeting at the Golden Gate | Apparition to Fra Agostino and to Bishop Guido of Arezzo | Madonna in Maesta | St Lawrence |
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Andre Derain Prints
French 1880-1954 French painter and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse. Biography The Turning Road, L Estaque (1906), The Museum of Fine Arts, HoustonAndre Derain was born in 1880 in Chatou, Yvelines, Lle-de-France, just outside Paris. In 1898, while studying to be an engineer at the Acad??mie Camillo, he attended painting classes under Eugene Carriere, and there met Matisse. In 1900, he met and shared a studio with Maurice de Vlaminck and began to paint his first landscapes. His studies were interrupted from 1901 to 1904 when he was conscripted into the French army. Following his release from service, Matisse persuaded Derain parents to allow him to abandon his engineering career and devote himself solely to painting; subsequently Derain attended the Acad??mie Julian. Derain and Matisse worked together through the summer of 1905 in the Mediterranean village of Collioure and later that year displayed their highly innovative paintings at the Salon d Automne. The vivid, unnatural colors led the critic Louis Vauxcelles to derisively dub their works as les Fauves, or the wild beasts, marking the start of the Fauvist movement. In March 1906, the noted art dealer Ambroise Vollard sent Derain to London to compose a series of paintings with the city as subject. In 30 paintings, Derain put forth a portrait of London that was radically different from anything done by previous painters of the city such as Whistler or Monet. With bold colors and compositions, Derain painted multiple pictures of the Thames and Tower Bridge. These London paintings remain among his most popular work.
HUBER, Wolf
German Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1490-1553
Henry Bacon
1839-1922 Henry Bacon Gallery Henry Bacon was born in Watseka, Illinois to father civil engineer Henry Bacon and mother Elizabeth Kelton Bacon, both of Massachusetts. Bacon was largely raised in Wilmington, N.C., where his father settled down and served as a government engineer in charge of the Cape Fear River improvements. At age 15, Henry Bacon was sent north to Boston's Chauncey Hall School. In 1884 he matriculated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but left within a year to launch an architectural career in the office of Chamberlin & Whidden in Boston as a draftsman. Bacon was soon hired into the office of famed McKim, Mead & White in New York City, the best-known American architectural firm of its time. While at McKim, Mead & White (MMW), Bacon won, in 1889, the Rotch Traveling Scholarship for architectural students, which gave him two years of study and travel in Europe, learning and drawing details of Roman and Greek architecture as far afield as Turkey, where he met his future wife, Laura Florence Calvert, daughter of a British Consul. He traveled with another fellowship student, Albert Kahn who would become a leading industrial architect. Returning to the U.S. he spent a few more years with his mentor, McKim, working on projects like the Rhode Island State House in Providence, Rhode Island, and serving as McKim's personal representative in Chicago during the World's Fair in Chicago, where MMW was at work designing certain buildings for the World's Fair. In 1897, Bacon left the office of McKim, Mead & White (MMW) to found, with a younger MMW architect James Brite, a new partnership Brite and Bacon Architects, where Brite was in charge of financial, administrative, and contracting aspects of the partnership, while Henry Bacon was in charge of the architectural design and construction. The partnership immediately won the competition for the Jersey City Public Library, the Hall of History for the American University at Washington, DC, and thereafter built a good number of public buildings and a small number of private residences. The partnership was selected to build two private residences in 1897, the "La Fetra Mansion" in Summit, New Jersey, and a three-story Georgian mansion "Laurel Hill" in Columbia, NC. The "La Fetra Mansion" was completed by the partnership sometime during 1899 to 1900, and published in the September 1901 issue of The Architecture, the pre-eminent architectural professional journal of its time. The LeFetra Mansion fully exhibits Bacon's Greek and Roman architectural predilections, his simple, austere, elegant lines, and his skill in dimensions and proportions that give rise to a feeling of the presence of divine spirituality, peaceful tranquility, and a sense of divine protection. While the La Fetra Mansion in Summit, NJ bears Bacon's signature style, the Georgian Mansion "Laurel Hill" was most probably designed by Brite.