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 :. | The virgin mary and younger John | Madonna and Child | Academy | The virgin mary | Argue |
Related Artists:
Chigot Eugene
French history painter and marine specialist , 1860-1890
Nikolai Roerich
Russian, 1874-1947 Russian painter, stage designer and founder of cultural institutions. The son of a lawyer of Scandinavian descent, he graduated from the studio of the landscape painter Arkhip Kuindzhi at the Academy of Fine Arts (1897) and from the faculty of law at the University of St Petersburg (1898). He then studied in Paris with the history painter Fernand Cormon (1900). Roerich had wide interests and made an important contribution to Russian culture: he lectured at the Institute of Archaeology (1898); he became secretary of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts (1901) and director of its school (1906); and he was the first chairman of the World of Art (Rus. Mir Iskusstva) Society (1910). The first volume of his collected cultural writings was published in Moscow in 1914. As a painter he exhibited with the Academy from 1897, WORLD OF ART from 1902, the Vienna Secession c. 1905 and the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1906. From c. 1903 he was a leading member of the artists' colony at TALASHKINO, where he designed mosaics, friezes, murals and furniture. As a stage designer in Russia, he worked between 1907 and 1915 for such directors as Nikolay Yevreinov (1879-1953),
Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico Galleries b.c. 1400, Vicchio, Florence d.Feb. 18, 1455, Rome Fra Angelico (c. 1395 ?C February 18, 1455), born Guido di Pietro, was an Early Italian Renaissance painter, referred to in Vasari's Lives of the Artists as having "a rare and perfect talent". Known in Italy as il Beato Angelico, he was known to his contemporaries as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole (Brother John from Fiesole). In Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, written prior to 1555, he was already known as Fra Giovanni Angelico (Brother Giovanni the Angelic One). Within his lifetime or shortly thereafter he was also called Il Beato (the Blessed), in reference to his skills in painting religious subjects. In 1982 Pope John Paul II conferred beatification, thereby making this title official. Fiesole is sometimes misinterpreted as being part of his formal name, but it was merely the name of the town where he took his vows, used by contemporaries to separate him from other Fra Giovannis. He is listed in the Roman Martyrology as Beatus Ioannes Faesulanus, cognomento Angelicus??"Blessed Giovanni of Fiesole, nicknamed Angelico". Fra Angelico was working at a time when the style of painting was in a state of change. This process of change had begun a hundred years previous with the works of Giotto and several of his contemporaries, notably Giusto de' Menabuoi, both of whom had created their major works in Padua, although Giotto was trained in Florence by the great Gothic artist, Cimabue, and painted a fresco cycle of St Francis in the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce. Giotto had many enthusiastic followers, who imitated his style in fresco, some of them, notably the Lorenzetti, achieving great success.