b Pontormo, nr Empoli, 26 May 1494; d Florence, 31 Dec 1556). Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the leading painter in mid-16th-century Florence and one of the most original and extraordinary of Mannerist artists. His eccentric personality, solitary and slow working habits and capricious attitude towards his patrons are described by Vasari; his own diary, which covers the years 1554-6, further reveals a character with neurotic and secretive aspects. Pontormo enjoyed the protection of the Medici family throughout his career but, unlike Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari, did not become court painter. His subjective portrait style did not lend itself to the state portrait. He produced few mythological works and after 1540 devoted himself almost exclusively to religious subjects. His drawings, mainly figure studies in red and black chalk, are among the highest expressions of the great Florentine tradition of draughtsmanship; close to 400 survive, forming arguably the most important body of drawings by a Mannerist painter. His highly personal style was much influenced by Michelangelo  Related Paintings of Pontormo, Jacopo :. | Leda and the Swan | St Luke | Hermaphrodite Figure | Two Nudes Compared | Adam and Eve at Work |
Related Artists:
NOVELLI, Pietro
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1603-1647 Italian painter. He trained with his father, Pietro Antonio Novelli (1568-1625), a painter and mosaicist, then in 1618 in Palermo with Vito Carrera (1555-1623). He also studied perspective with the mathematician Carlo Maria Ventimiglia. Paolini (1980) suggested that in his early years Novelli may have contributed, with Domenico Fiasella and Nicolas Tournier, to a cycle of paintings in the oratory of S Stefano in Palermo and that he made a first journey to Rome between 1622 and 1625. His first dated work is from 1626: St Anthony Abbot (Palermo, S Antonio Abate). The development of his style owed much to Anthony van Dyck, who visited Sicily in 1624 and whose altarpiece, the Madonna of the Rosary (Palermo, oratory of S Maria del Rosario), was of fundamental importance to Novelli. Van Dyck's influence, which remained with Novelli throughout his career, is most apparent in the Death of the Just Man (Palermo, Gal. Reg. Sicilia), the Apparition of the Virgin to St Andrea Corsini (1630; Palermo, Chiesa del Carmine) and the Coronation of the Virgin
BROEDERLAM, Melchior
Netherlandish Gothic Era Painter, ca.1355-1411 South Netherlandish painter. Broederlam's family, long-established in Ypres, provided three aldermen for the city and sided with the French Counts of Flanders against the Flemish populace. After a training that may have included contact with Jan Boudolf in Bruges before 1368 or Paris after 1370 and an extended visit to Italy, the artist became, by 1381, an official painter of the reigning count, Louis de M?le (reg. 1346-84), painting leather chairs, pennons and banners. On 13 May 1384, directly after Louis's death, he was appointed a valet de chambre to the count's heir, Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.
Edward Burne Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet (28 August 1833 - 17 June 1898) was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company. Burne-Jones was closely involved in the rejuvenation of the tradition of stained glass art in England; his stained glass works include the windows of St. Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham, Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, Chelsea, St Martin's Church in Brampton, St Michael's Church in Brighton, Cumbria, the church designed by Philip Webb, All Saints, Jesus Lane, Cambridge and in Christ Church, Oxford. Burne-Jones's early paintings show the heavy inspiration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but by the 1860s Burne-Jones was discovering his own artistic "voice". In 1877, he was persuaded to show eight oil paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery (a new rival to the Royal Academy). These included The Beguiling of Merlin. The timing was right, and he was taken up as a herald and star of the new Aesthetic Movement. In addition to painting and stained glass, Burne-Jones worked in a variety of crafts; including designing ceramic tiles, jewellery, tapestries, mosaics and book illustration, most famously designing woodcuts for the Kelmscott Press's Chaucer in 1896. Edward Coley Burne Jones (the hyphen came later) was born in Birmingham, the son of a Welshman, Edward Richard Jones, a frame-maker at Bennetts Hill, where a blue plaque commemorates the painter's childhood. His mother Elizabeth Coley Jones died within six days of his birth, and he was raised by his grieving father and the family housekeeper, Ann Sampson, an obsessively affectionate but humorless and unintellectual local girl. He attended Birmingham's King Edward VI grammar school from 1844 and the Birmingham School of Art from 1848 to 1852, before studying theology at Exeter College, Oxford. At Oxford he became a friend of William Morris as a consequence of a mutual interest in poetry. The two Exeter undergraduates, together with a small group of Jones' friends from Birmingham known as the Birmingham Set, speedily formed a very close and intimate society, which they called "The Brotherhood". The members of the Brotherhood read John Ruskin and Tennyson, visited churches, and worshipped the Middle Ages. At this time Burne-Jones discovered Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur which was to be so influential in his life. At that time neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Rossetti personally, but both were much influenced by his works, and met him by recruiting him as a contributor to their Oxford and Cambridge Magazine which Morris founded in 1856 to promote their ideas.[