Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1516 (b ?1431-6; d Venice, 29 Nov 1516). Painter and draughtsman, son of (1) Jacopo Bellini. Although the professional needs of his family background may have encouraged him to specialize at an early date in devotional painting, by the 1480s he had become a leading master in all types of painting practised in 15th-century Venice. Later, towards the end of his long life, he added the new genres of mythological painting and secular allegory to his repertory of subject-matter. His increasing dominance of Venetian art led to an enormous expansion of his workshop after c. 1490; and this provided the training-ground not only for his numerous shop-hands and imitators (generically known as Belliniani) but probably also for a number of major Venetian painters of the next generation. Throughout his career, Giovanni showed an extraordinary capacity for absorbing a wide range of artistic influences, both from within Venetian tradition and from outside. He also oversaw a technical revolution in the art of painting, involving the gradual abandonment of the traditional Italian use of egg tempera in favour of the technique of oil painting pioneered in the Netherlands. It was thanks to Giovanni Bellini that the Venetian school of painting was transformed during the later 15th century from one mainly of local significance to one with an international reputation. He thus set the stage for the triumphs of Venetian painting in the 16th century and for the central contribution that Venice was to make to the history of European art.  Related Paintings of Giovanni Bellini :. | Christ's Blessing | Christ in Gethsemane | Saints Christopher Jerome and Louis of Toulouse | Four Allegories: Lust | The Doge Barbarigo, St John and Musician Angels (Detail) |
Related Artists:
Jose Mercedes Ortega
painted Dona Ines de Suarez in defending the city of Santiago in 1897
Nicolas Mignard
(1606-1668) was a French 17th Century painter. He spent most of his active life in Avignon and was the older brother of Pierre Mignard. Nicolas Mignard was born in Troyes in 1606. There, he studied painting with a local master. After traveling to Fontainebleau, Mignard came to Avignon in 1632. He then traveled to Rome with Cardinal Archbishop of Lyon. Mignard came back to Avignon in 1636, after having executed multiple series of etching in Rome. There, he mostly painted for religious institutions. Mignard spent the end of his life in Paris, where he became a successful portrait painter. Mignard left Paris after a visit of King Louis XIV and his Court in Avignon. King Louis XIV decided to bring Mignard to Paris. Mignard eventually joined the Academie Royale. Mignardes spending most of his life in Avignon made his career somewhat overshadowed by his little brother Pierre, who was installed in Paris. After his death, paintings by Nicolas Mignard mostly stayed in Avignon or in small cities around Avignon. During the French Revolution, as these paintings were taken over, most of them were attributed to Pierre Mignard. His art is now rediscovered. His style is typical of the Italianate classicizing aesthetic that dominated seventeenth-century France, and obviously was very much influenced by French classical Baroque painter Poussin. Nicolas Mignard died in 1668 in Paris.
SWEERTS, Michiel
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1618-1664 Flemish painter, active in Italy, Syria and India. He arrived in Rome in the mid-1640s, perhaps in circumstances similar to those depicted in his painting The Landing (Paris, Louvre). In 1646 he was registered as living in the Via Margutta in the parish of S Maria del Popolo, where documents indicate that he continued to reside until 1651, together with other Flemish Catholics like himself. In 1647 he attended a meeting of the Accademia di S Luca, not as an academician but simply as an associate. The following year he was visited by the Dutch poet Matthijs van de Merwede (1625-?1677), who later recalled the extremely poor welcome he received from the artist. On 1 June 1651 Sweerts was employed by the Antwerp merchant Jan Deutz to represent him at the Papal Customs to collect seven pieces of woollen cloth from Leiden. Sweerts's relationship with the Deutz family was always close: he painted portraits of Jeronimus Deutz (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) and Balthasar Deutz and a series of the Seven Acts of Mercy for the family; some scholars have identified this series with the cycle of paintings divided between the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, and two private collections