Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1483-1520 Italian painter and architect. As a member of Perugino's workshop, he established his mastery by 17 and began receiving important commissions. In 1504 he moved to Florence, where he executed many of his famous Madonnas; his unity of composition and suppression of inessentials is evident in The Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1506). Though influenced by Leonardo da Vinci's chiaroscuro and sfumato, his figure types were his own creation, with round, gentle faces that reveal human sentiments raised to a sublime serenity. In 1508 he was summoned to Rome to decorate a suite of papal chambers in the Vatican. The frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura are probably his greatest work; the most famous, The School of Athens (1510 C 11), is a complex and magnificently ordered allegory of secular knowledge showing Greek philosophers in an architectural setting. The Madonnas he painted in Rome show him turning away from his earlier work's serenity to emphasize movement and grandeur, partly under Michelangelo's High Renaissance influence. The Sistine Madonna (1513) shows the richness of colour and new boldness of compositional invention typical of his Roman period. He became the most important portraitist in Rome, designed 10 large tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel, designed a church and a chapel, assumed the direction of work on St. Peter's Basilica at the death of Donato Bramante,   Related Paintings of RAFFAELLO Sanzio :. | Madonna of Loreto (Madonna del Velo) at | Portrait of Jeanne d'Aragon | Shemikaier and devil | The virgin mary | The Death of Ananias |
Related Artists:
Christian Friedrich Gille
1805-1899 German painter, engraver and lithographer. Between 1825 and 1833 he studied engraving under Johann Gottfried Abraham Frenzel, lithography under Louis Z?llner and painting under Johan Christian Dahl at the Hochschule f?r Bildende K?nste, Dresden. Dahl encouraged in Gille an appreciation for the natural formations and changing conditions of light that had inspired Dahl's friend and mentor, the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Gille, however, did not adopt Friedrich's tendency to find mystical significance in these phenomena. Gille's prints are highly descriptive in style and include Saxon landscapes, genre scenes, animal studies and portraits of celebrated men. His paintings and sketches, in oils, watercolour and pen and brown ink, were mostly of landscapes, many with animal staffage.
Edward Matthew Ward
British Painter. 1816-1879 His parents encouraged his early interest in art. He was sent to a number of art schools, including that of John Cawse (1779-1862), before gaining entry to the Royal Academy Schools in 1835. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1834 with Adelphi Smith as Don Quixote (untraced). In 1836 he went abroad for further study, visiting Paris and Venice on the way to Rome, where he spent three years. His first work of any consequence was Cimabue and Giotto (untraced), which he sent back to the Royal Academy show of 1839. On the way back to England at the end of that year Ward visited Munich to learn the technique of modern fresco painting in order to take part in the competition to decorate the Palace of Westminster, but his cartoon, Boadicea (1843; untraced), was unsuccessful. However, in 1852 he was commissioned to produce eight pictures for the Palace of Westminster, on subjects drawn from the English Civil War, the best of which is the Last Sleep of Argyll (1860s) in the Commons Corridor of the Houses of Parliament
Monamy, Peter
English Painter, 1681-1749 English painter. It seems likely that his family origins and name were French. The Painter-Stainers' Company records that he was apprenticed as a house painter to William Clarke from 1696, but by 1710 he had become a marine artist, filling the gap in the market left by the death of Willem van de Velde the younger in 1707. Most of his subsequent career was devoted to careful imitations of van de Velde's style (and, in some cases, of particular pictures), by which, according to Vertue, 'he distinguished himself and came into reputation'. He maintained his links with the Painter-Stainers, of which he had been made a freeman in 1703