Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1577-1640 Peter Paul Rubens (June 28, 1577 ?C May 30, 1640) was a prolific seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized movement, color, and sensuality. He is well-known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp which produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically-educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, king of Spain, and Charles I, king of England. Rubens was a prolific artist. His commissioned works were mostly religious subjects, "history" paintings, which included mythological subjects, and hunt scenes. He painted portraits, especially of friends, and self-portraits, and in later life painted several landscapes. Rubens designed tapestries and prints, as well as his own house. He also oversaw the ephemeral decorations of the Joyous Entry into Antwerp by the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635. His drawings are mostly extremely forceful but not detailed; he also made great use of oil sketches as preparatory studies. He was one of the last major artists to make consistent use of wooden panels as a support medium, even for very large works, but he used canvas as well, especially when the work needed to be sent a long distance. For altarpieces he sometimes painted on slate to reduce reflection problems. His fondness of painting full-figured women gave rise to the terms 'Rubensian' or 'Rubenesque' for plus-sized women. The term 'Rubensiaans' is also commonly used in Dutch to denote such women.  Related Paintings of Peter Paul Rubens :. | Portrait of Younger Rubens | Venus and Adonis | Portraits of (MK01) | Garden of Love | Self-Portrait with his Wife,Isabella Brant |
Related Artists:
Carlo Pittara
Italian, 1836-1890
Tranquillo Cremona
Italian Painter , 1837-1878 Italian painter. The son of an Austrian government official, Cremona began his artistic education in 1849 at the art school in Pavia, where he encountered three Lombard artists who were an important influence on his early studies: Giacomo Tr?court (1812-82), head of the school; Giovanni Carnevali, Tr?court's friend and a frequent visitor to Pavia; and Federico Faruffini, also a student at Pavia. All three were interpreters of the curiously soft and subtle form of Romanticism, derived from Andrea Appiani, that was to be found in this specific form only in Italy. In 1852 Cremona moved to Venice, where he enrolled at the Accademia. His teachers, who included Ludovico Lipparini (1800-56), Michelangelo Grigoletti (1801-70) and Antonio Zona (1814-92), were well versed in the more academic form of Romanticism expressed by Francesco Hayez, although in Zona the rather rigid, academic linearity was attenuated by a softer sense of form and colour. The Venetian Old Masters were a greater influence on Cremona's ultimate use of colour than was his academy training. In 1859, to avoid military service with the Austrian Army, Cremona moved to Piedmont.
Cristofano Allori
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1577-1621 was an Italian portrait painter of the late Florentine Mannerist school. Allori was born at Florence and received his first lessons in painting from his father, Alessandro Allori, but becoming dissatisfied with the hard anatomical drawing and cold coloring of the latter, he entered the studio of Gregorio Pagani (1558-1605) who was one of the leaders of the late Florentine school, which sought to unite the rich coloring of the Venetians with the Florentine attention to drawing. Allori also appears to have worked under Cigoli. His pictures are distinguished by their close adherence to nature and the delicacy and technical perfection of their execution. His technical skill is shown by the fact that several copies he made of Correggio's works were thought to be duplicates by Correggio himself. His extreme fastidiousness limited the number of his works. Several specimens are to be seen at Florence and elsewhere. The finest of his works is his Judith with the Head of Holofernes. It exists in two copies in the Pitti Palace in Florence and in the Queen's Gallery in London.