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 :. | St George and the Dragon st | Portrait of Dona Isabel de Requesens, Vice-Queen of Naples | Portrait of Jeanne d'Aragon | Psychic and angel | Virgin Mary | Related Artists:
Peder AlsPeder Als, a Danish historical and portrait painter, born at Copenhagen in 1725, studied for some time under C. G. Pile. After gaining the first great prize given by the academy at Copenhagen in 1755, he went to Rome and entered the school of Mengs. He occupied himself chiefly in copying the pictures of Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, which it is said that he did with great accuracy. He also copied Correggio and Titian. On his return to his own country he painted some good portraits; but his colouring was too sombre to give a pleasing effect to his pictures of females, and his work was frequently so laboured as to be deprived of all animation. Copies of the works of the old masters by Als are to be seen in Denmark. He died in 1775.
Francis Quarles1592-1644,was born at Romford, London Borough of Havering, and baptized there on May 8 1592. Francis traced his ancestry to a family settled in England before the Norman Conquest with a long history in royal service. His great-grandfather, George Quarles, was Auditor to Henry VIII, and his father, James Quarles, held several places under Elizabeth I and James I, for which he was rewarded with an estate called Stewards in Romford. His mother, Joan Dalton, was the daughter and heiress of Eldred Dalton of Mores Place, Hadham. There were eight children in the family; the eldest, Sir Robert Quarles, was knighted by James I in 1608. Francis was entered at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1608, and subsequently at Lincoln's Inn. He was made cupbearer to the Princess Elizabeth, in 1613, remaining abroad for some years; and before 1629 he was appointed secretary to Ussher, the primate of Ireland. About 1633 he returned to England, and spent the next two years in the preparation of his Emblems. In 1639 he was made city chronologer, a post in which Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton had preceded him. At the outbreak of the Civil War he took the Royalist side, drawing up three pamphlets in 1644 in support of the king's cause. It is said that his house was searched and his papers destroyed by the Parliamentarians in consequence of these publications. Quarles married in 1618 Ursula Woodgate, by whom he had eighteen children. His son, John Quarles (1624-1665), was exiled to Flanders for his Royalist sympathies and was the author of Fons Lachrymarum (1648) and other poems. The work by which Quarles is best known, the Emblems, was originally published in 1635, with grotesque illustrations engraved by William Marshall and others. The forty-five prints in the last three books are borrowed from the Pia Desideria (Antwerp, 1624) of Herman Hugo. Each "emblem" consists of a paraphrase from a passage of Scripture, expressed in ornate and metaphorical language, followed by passages from the Christian Fathers, and concluding with an epigram of four lines. The Emblems was immensely popular with the common people, but the critics of the 17th and 18th centuries had no mercy on Quarles. Sir John Suckling in his Sessions of the Poets disrespectfully alluded to him as he "that makes God speak so big in's poetry." Pope in the Dunciad spoke of the Emblems, "Where the pictures for the page atone And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own."
Karl HagemeisterGerman, 1848-1933,German painter. He studied from 1871 at the Kunstschule in Weimar under Friedrich Preller, who introduced him to the principles of classical landscape painting. In 1873 he began to develop a more modern approach when he met Carl Schuch at the Hintersee, near Berchtesgaden; he immediately became his pupil and later wrote Schuch's biography. Schuch introduced Hagemeister to the Leibl circle (see LEIBL, WILHELM). He travelled to the Netherlands and Belgium (1873-4), Italy (1876) and France (1884-5), often accompanying Schuch and, in the early journeys, Wilhelm Trebner. His approach to landscape changed from classical Naturalism to 'pure painting', a more formalist approach in which purely pictorial qualities were given priority over naturalistic representation, as in Lake Shore (c. 1900; Schweinfurt, Samml. Schefer). His brushwork became broader, his depiction of objects became increasingly summary, and his colours lighter and cooler. Absorbing the influence of Japanese art through the interpretations of the French Impressionists, and following trends in international Art Nouveau, Hagemeister developed an individual variant of Jugendstil. His pictures were composed in accordance with decorative rather than naturalistic principles and became primarily ornamental, as in White Poppy