Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1483-1520 Raphael Sanzio, usually known by his first name alone (in Italian Raffaello) (April 6 or March 28, 1483 ?C April 6, 1520), was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings and drawings. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop, and, despite his early death at thirty-seven, a large body of his work remains, especially in the Vatican, whose frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career, although unfinished at his death. After his early years in Rome, much of his work was designed by him and executed largely by the workshop from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking. After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models. His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (from 1504-1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates.  Related Paintings of Raphael :. | Tea in the Orchard | Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Guillo de Medici and Luigi de Rossi | George Washington | Madonna of the Cloth | Baldassare Castiglione (mk05) |
Related Artists:
Hubert Vos
(1855-1935) was a Dutch painter who was born in Maastricht on February 15, 1855. He studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and with Fernand Cormon (1845-1924) in Paris. He exhibited widely in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dresden and Munich. From 1885 to 1892, he worked in England, where he exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1888 and 1891. He was a member of the Royal Society of British Artists. In 1898, he visited Hawaii, where he painted the local people. In that same year, Vos traveled to Korea, where he completed at least three paintings in duplicate. In each case, he left one copy in Korea and kept one copy. The paintings are a life-sized portrait of Emperor Gojong, a portrait of Min Sang-ho (1870-1933) and a landscape of Seoul. The copies left in Korea hung in the Deoksugung Palace until all except the landscape of Seoul, were destroyed by fire in 1904. In 1905, on his second and last trip around the world.
Simone Pignoni
Simone Pignoni (April 17, 1611 - December 16, 1698) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. He apprenticed with Fabrizio Boschi, then with the more academic and puritanical Domenico Passignano, and finally with Francesco Furini. He is best known for painting in a style reminiscent of the morbidly sensual Furini. Reflective of this obsession is his self-portrait, c. 1650, in which he depicts himself building up a plump naked female from a skeleton. The biographer Baldinucci, in what little he notes of the painter, recalls him as the scandalous imitator of (Furini's) licentious inventions. A more complete biography was recorded by his pupil Giovanni Camillo Sagrestani. Described as endowed with a bizarre and amenable intelligence, Pignoni apparently had a late-life conversion to more pious painting. There is one episode recalled that during a serious illness because in his life he had focused on studying about female forms, and (now) having resigned himself to the impending infinity, his spiritual father urged him to purge those errors with the flame, and once guided by a good disposition, he suddenly was cured by the Lord. It must be noted that Baldinucci's biography of Furini, also recorded a similar, near-death renunciation of his art of the naked figure. Among his more conventional works are a St. Agatha cured by St. Peter (attributed) in the Museo Civico di Trieste. A St. Louis providing a banquet for the poor (c. 1682) now in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence, commissioned by Conte Luigi Gucciardini. A Madonna and child in glory with archangels Saints Michael and Raphael in battle armor and San Antonio of Padua (1671) for the Cappella di San Michele in Santissima Annunziata. He painted an Allegory of Peace in Palazzo Vecchio. A Penitent Magdalen has been attributed to Pignoni is found in the Pitti Palace. In San Bartolomeo in Monteoliveto, he painted a Madonna appearing to Blessed Bernardo Tolomeo.
CASTIGLIONE, Giovanni Benedetto
Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1609-1664 Painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Most of his works are scenes of the journeys of the patriarchs (e.g. Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), drawn from the book of Genesis and filled with animals and still-life detail. His oeuvre also, however, includes many spectacular mythological and religious compositions set in expansive landscapes, and for these he found inspiration in Classical mythology, ancient history, Aesop's Fables, 16th-century Italian literature and the lives of the saints. Early biographers claim that he was also a prolific portrait painter, but few examples, save the so-called portrait of Gianlorenzo Bernini (c. 1648-50; Genoa, Pal. Bianco), have been conclusively identified. His surviving subjects reveal his interest in magic and metamorphosis and in philosophical questions such as the frailty of human life, the inevitability of death and the search for truth.