Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1267-1337 Italian painter and designer. In his own time and place he had an unrivalled reputation as the best painter and as an innovator, superior to all his predecessors, and he became the first post-Classical artist whose fame extended beyond his lifetime and native city. This was partly the consequence of the rich literary culture of two of the cities where he worked, Padua and Florence. Writing on art in Florence was pioneered by gifted authors and, although not quite art criticism, it involved the comparison of local artists in terms of quality. The most famous single appreciation is found in Dante's verses (Purgatory x) of 1315 or earlier. Exemplifying the transience of fame, first with poets and manuscript illuminators, Dante then remarked that the fame of Cimabue, who had supposed himself to be the leader in painting, had now been displaced by Giotto. Ironically, this text was one factor that forestalled the similar eclipse of Giotto's fame, which was clearly implied by the poet.   Related Paintings of GIOTTO di Bondone :. | Coretto (mk14) | Legend of St Francis: Scenes Nos | Meeting at the Golden Gate | The Death of the Boy in Sessa | Last Judgment |
Related Artists:
Richard Wilson
Welsh Romantic Painter, ca.1713-1782 was a Welsh landscape painter, and one of the founder members of the Royal Academy in 1768. Wilson has been described as '...the most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country.' Wilson is considered to be the father of landscape painting in Britain. The son of a clergyman, Wilson was born in Penegoes, Montgomeryshire. The family was an old and respected one, and Wilson was first cousin to Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden. In 1729 he went to London where he began as a portrait painter, under the apprentership of an obscure artist, Thomas Wright. From 1750 to 1757 he was in Italy and adopted landscape on the advice of Francesco Zuccarelli. Painting in Italy and afterwards in England, he was the first major British painter to primarily concentrate on landscape. He composed well, but saw and rendered only the general effects of nature thereby creating a personal, ideal style influenced by Claude Lorrain and the Dutch landscape tradition. According to John Ruskin, he "paints in a manly way, and occasionally reaches exquisite tones of colour." He concentrated on painting Italianate landscapes and landscapes based upon classsical literature, but when his painting The Destruction of the Children of Niobe (c.1759-60) won high acclaim he gained many commissions from wealthy families seeking classical potrayals of their estates.
THULDEN, Theodor van
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1606-1669
Jean Alaux
(1785 - 2 March 1864) was a French history painter and Director of the French Academy in Rome from 1846-52. Alaux was born in Bordeaux, the son of a painter, and the second of four brothers who were all themselves painters. he received his first lessons in art from his father, but went on to formal training with Pierre Lacour, then Pierre-Narcisse Guerin. He was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1807. From 1808 he entered works for the Prix de Rome but his energies were diverted when his elder brother, Jean-Francois Alaux (1783-1858), asked him to help with a large "neorama" (a type of Panorama) he was working on. Jean eventually won the Prix de Rome's first prize in 1815, with a work entitled "Briseis weeping over the body of Patroclus", a scene inspired by The Iliad of Homer. He subsequently became a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome from 1816 to 1820 (later becoming its director).