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 :. | Bridgewater Madonna | Ceremony | Hl. Familie unter einer Palme, Tondo | Elisabetta Gonzaga | Virgin Mary |
Related Artists:
Richard Jack
1866-1952
Witold Pruszkowski
Polish Painter, 1846-1896 Polish painter and draughtsman. He spent his early years in Odessa and Kiev, subsequently living in France, in particular in Paris, where he studied under the Polish portrait painter Tadeusz Gorecki (1825-68), continuing (1868-71) at the Akademie der Kenste in Munich. In 1871 he moved to Krakew where he studied until 1875 under Jan Matejko at the School of Fine Arts. During ten years in Krakew he produced many striking portraits. In the portrait of Mrs Fedorowicz (1878; Krakew, N. Mus.) he achieved subtle effects of modelling by means of carefully differentiated tones and meticulously distributed light. The Realism of these portraits is subsumed into an advanced proto-Impressionist technique, on occasion using both small patches of distinct colour and broadly applied areas of impasto. Alongside such works, Pruszkowski produced paintings based on fantastic legends, fables and folk-tales. In these works one can trace influences going back to the artist's Munich period; but Pruszkowski's essentially Romantic vision translated his subjects into an entirely Polish context, as in Midsummer's Night (1875; Warsaw, N. Mus.) and Water Nymphs (1877; Krakew, N. Mus.). In 1882 Pruszkowski moved to the village of Mnikow outside Krakew, where he worked in the isolation he believed essential for creative activity. Contact with the country people, however, provided him with themes for his work; alongside his fantastic and legendary subjects he painted genre scenes of peasant life. He brought to his subjects a diversity of means of formal depiction, from the realistic to the near visionary. However, there are notable recurrent motifs, for example the image of the native willow, the symbolic haunt of spirits, as in Willow on Marshland (1892; Ledz, Mus. A.). The visionary element achieved its apogee in the pastel compositions from the last years of his life. In works such as Death of Ellenai (1892; Wroclaw, N. Mus.) the evanescent nature of forms is expressed through restrained colour schemes, generally tending towards silvery greyish azure or shades of pink.
Antonio Viladomat y Manalt
Spanish, 1678-1755,Spanish Catalan painter. He was the most significant figure in Catalan painting from the end of the 17th century to the first half of the 18th. He trained with P. B. Savall and J. B. Perram?n in Barcelona. The arrival of the Archduke Charles (later Charles VI) of Austria in Barcelona in 1703 as a pretender to the throne during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), accompanied by such Italian artists as Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, acquainted Viladomat y Manalt with artistic trends in Italy. He experienced problems with the artists' guild in Barcelona because of his refusal to participate in the traditional work system. Despite this, his workshop-academy became a centre for the training of numerous painters, sculptors and engravers. Viladomat y Manalt was principally a religious painter, and his oil paintings include Christ Appearing to St Ignatius of Loyola (c. 1711-20; Barcelona, Jesuit Convent) and St Augustine and the Holy Family (Madrid, Prado). He also painted such murals as the tempera Angels with the Sudarium (c. 1727; Matare, S Mar?a, Capilla de los Dolores), but most of the others have disappeared. He painted an extensive series of monastic and evangelical works, in which his revival of compositions characteristic of the Spanish Golden Age is apparent. Examples include the Stigmatization of St Francis (c. 1724; Barcelona, Mus. A. Catalunya), part of a cycle of paintings on the life of St Francis commissioned for the cloister of the convent of S Francisco de As?s in Barcelona. His late Baroque style is related to the severe and realistic trend in Spanish painting in the early 17th century. Some interesting profane allegories by the artist are extant, notably the series Four Seasons (c. 1720-30; Barcelona, Mus. A. Catalunya), which consists of landscapes with genre scenes. Several of the still-lifes by Viladomat y Manalt such as the realistic Still-life with Dead Turkey (Barcelona, Mus. A. Catalunya), which has strong contrasts of light, bear an affinity with Neapolitan painting of the last decades of the 17th century.