Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1267-1337 Italian painter and designer. In his own time and place he had an unrivalled reputation as the best painter and as an innovator, superior to all his predecessors, and he became the first post-Classical artist whose fame extended beyond his lifetime and native city. This was partly the consequence of the rich literary culture of two of the cities where he worked, Padua and Florence. Writing on art in Florence was pioneered by gifted authors and, although not quite art criticism, it involved the comparison of local artists in terms of quality. The most famous single appreciation is found in Dante's verses (Purgatory x) of 1315 or earlier. Exemplifying the transience of fame, first with poets and manuscript illuminators, Dante then remarked that the fame of Cimabue, who had supposed himself to be the leader in painting, had now been displaced by Giotto. Ironically, this text was one factor that forestalled the similar eclipse of Giotto's fame, which was clearly implied by the poet.   Related Paintings of GIOTTO di Bondone :. | No. 13 God Sends Gabriel to the Virgin | Raising of the Boy in Sessa | Martyrdom of Peter | Washing of Feet | The Suitors Praying |
Related Artists:
Bernardino Mei
(1612/15 - 1676) worked in a Baroque manner in his native Siena and in Rome, finding patronage above all in the Chigi family. Briefly a pupil of the Sienese draughtsman and cartographer Giuliano Periccioli, where he learned the art of engraving, Bernardino passed to the studio of the painter Rutilio Manetti and probably also served in the workshop of Francesco Rustici. He painted in and around Siena, where his work came to the attention of Cardinal Fabio Chigi, who, once elected pope as Alexander VII (1655), called Bernardino Mei to Rome in 1657. There Bernardino came under the influences of Mattia Preti, Andrea Sacchi and Pier Francesco Mola, and of Guercino, to the extent that until the 20th century Bernardino's fresco of Aurora in Palazzo Bianchi Bandinelli was attributed to Guercino himself. Through the fast friendship that bonded him to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose studio he frequented, he applied that sculptor's sense of theatrical action to his own mythological and allegorical subjects. He died in Rome in 1676.
Jules Guerin
Mural painter and Illustrator. American 1866-1946 American muralist, painter and illustrator. Guerin was born in St Louis, Missouri on November 18, 1866 and moved to Chicago to study art in 1880. Later he was to follow a parade of other American artists and architects of his day to Paris, where he studied with Benjamin-Constant and Jean Paul Laurens. Returning to America after his European sojourn, he began his career as an artist illustrating books, often travel books about exotic places. It is likely that these designs are based on his own travels through North Africa and Palestine. The designs that he did then as well as his ability to romantically depict exotic peoples and places stood him well later when he began painting murals. His mural work typically featured large areas of gold with vermilion, salmon and rose hues and blue and green accents. As with many of the artists of his time Guerin took an active part in the international expositions of his day, showing at the Paris Expo 1900, where he received an honorable mention, the Pan American Expo in Buffalo, New York, 1901, the Louisiana Purchase Expo held in St Louis in 1904 at which he won a silver medal, and the Lewis & Clark Expo in Portland, Oregon in 1905. In 1915, Guerin was asked to serve as color co-ordinator of the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. It is likely that connections that he made there led to his one man show at the University of California, Berkeley two years later, followed by several large murals in the Federal reserve Bank in San Francisco. Daniel Burnham, one of Chicago's most influential architects, and his colleague Edward H. Bennett were commissioned to create the Chicago Plan in 1907, a major milestone in the international City Beautiful movement. In pursuit of this effort, Burnham invited Guerin paint a series of renderings of Burnham and Bennett's proposed cityscape to complement the numerous maps and plans that gave more technical information. The majority of these original renderings--by Guerin and other artists--are in the collection of the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, while others are currently owned by the Chicago Historical Society. In 1903, he travelled to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and painted "Pittsburgh as Hell with the Lid Off" for Lincoln Steffens, a renouned Muckraker. Lincoln Steffens mentions this in his autobiography. In 1912, when architect Henry Bacon began working on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., he hired Guerin to create renderings of his proposed designs. After he received the commission, Bacon retained Guerin to paint the two large murals, Reunion and Emancipation, that decorate the interior of the memorial, allegorical figures that today serve primarily as the backdrop to Daniel Chester Frenches Seated Lincoln statue.
VIVIEN, Joseph
French painter (b. 1657, Lyon, d. 1734, Bonn) French painter and pastellist, active in Germany. He trained in Paris in 1672 with the painter Fran?ois Bonnemers (1638-89), also attending the Acad?mie Royale, where his oil painting the Punishment of Adam and Eve (untraced) won a second prize in 1678. Only in 1698 was he received (re?u) at the Acad?mie, as a pastellist, on presentation of portraits of the sculptor Fran?ois Girardon and of the architect Robert de Cotte (both Paris, Louvre; see PASTEL, fig. 1). Having been commissioned to execute a pastel Self-portrait (Florence, Uffizi) by Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, in 1699, the following year he was appointed the Elector's principal court painter (see WITTELSBACH). He henceforth divided his time between Paris, the Elector's courts at Brussels and Munich,