1.
1490s in art
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The decade of the 1490s in art involved some significant events. The Renaissance is in full swing during the 1490s, and Leonardo da Vinci is painting in realistic, in music, many new musical styles are being created, including the motet and madrigal, replacing an emphasis on chanting with polyphony and homophony. Christopher Columbuss explorations of the New World captivates the artistic imagination of artists and the public. 1490, July 13 – John of Kastav finishes a cycle of frescoes in the Holy Trinity Church,1496 – Juan de Flandes joins the court of Isabella I of Castile. Peters Basilica, Rome, in Carrara marble c,1490, Giovanni Bellini paints two Sacred Conversations and a presumed portrait of Bartolomeo dAlviano c. 1490–1497, Leonardo da Vinci or one of his school paints La belle ferronnière c,1495, Gerard David paints Triptych of the Sedano family c. 1490–1500, Giovanni Bellini paints the Holy Allegory and Portrait of a Gentleman c,1495, Pedro Berruguete paints Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-da-fe c. 1495, Jan Provoost paints a Crucifixion c, 1495–1496, Leonardo da Vinci probably draws the Portrait of a Young Fiancée for the Sforziada c.1495 and beyond, followers of Martin Schongauer paint the colossal Buhl Altarpiece c. 1496, Juan de Flandes paints Portrait of an Infanta and Herodias Revenge c,1495, Albrecht Dürer - The Holy Family with the Dragonfly 1497, Albrecht Dürer - The Four Witches c. 1498, Albrecht Dürer Apocalypse Saint Michael Fighting the Dragon The Temptation of the Idler or The Dream of the Doctor c
2.
Florence
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Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the Metropolitan City of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants, Florence was a centre of medieval European trade and finance and one of the wealthiest cities of the time. It is considered the birthplace of the Renaissance, and has called the Athens of the Middle Ages. A turbulent political history includes periods of rule by the powerful Medici family, from 1865 to 1871 the city was the capital of the recently established Kingdom of Italy. The Historic Centre of Florence attracts 13 million tourists each year and it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1982. The city is noted for its culture, Renaissance art and architecture, the city also contains numerous museums and art galleries, such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Palazzo Pitti, and still exerts an influence in the fields of art, culture and politics. Due to Florences artistic and architectural heritage, it has been ranked by Forbes as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, in 2008, the city had the 17th highest average income in Italy. Florence originated as a Roman city, and later, after a period as a flourishing trading and banking medieval commune. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, it was politically, economically, and culturally one of the most important cities in Europe, the language spoken in the city during the 14th century was, and still is, accepted as the Italian language. Starting from the late Middle Ages, Florentine money—in the form of the gold florin—financed the development of all over Europe, from Britain to Bruges, to Lyon. Florentine bankers financed the English kings during the Hundred Years War and they similarly financed the papacy, including the construction of their provisional capital of Avignon and, after their return to Rome, the reconstruction and Renaissance embellishment of Rome. Florence was home to the Medici, one of European historys most important noble families, Lorenzo de Medici was considered a political and cultural mastermind of Italy in the late 15th century. Two members of the family were popes in the early 16th century, Leo X, catherine de Medici married king Henry II of France and, after his death in 1559, reigned as regent in France. Marie de Medici married Henry IV of France and gave birth to the future king Louis XIII, the Medici reigned as Grand Dukes of Tuscany, starting with Cosimo I de Medici in 1569 and ending with the death of Gian Gastone de Medici in 1737. The Etruscans initially formed in 200 BC the small settlement of Fiesole and it was built in the style of an army camp with the main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, intersecting at the present Piazza della Repubblica. Situated along the Via Cassia, the route between Rome and the north, and within the fertile valley of the Arno, the settlement quickly became an important commercial centre. Peace returned under Lombard rule in the 6th century, Florence was conquered by Charlemagne in 774 and became part of the Duchy of Tuscany, with Lucca as capital. The population began to again and commerce prospered
3.
Leonardo da Vinci
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He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter and tank, many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the Universal Genius or Renaissance Man, an individual of unquenchable curiosity and feverishly inventive imagination. Much of his working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded to him by Francis I of France, Leonardo was, and is, renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait, Leonardos drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings have survived, Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated power, an adding machine. Some of his inventions, however, such as an automated bobbin winder. A number of Leonardos most practical inventions are nowadays displayed as working models at the Museum of Vinci. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, geology, optics, and hydrodynamics, today, Leonardo is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 at the hour of the night in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci. He was the son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense – da Vinci simply meaning of Vinci, his birth name was Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci, meaning Leonardo. The inclusion of the title ser indicated that Leonardos father was a gentleman, little is known about Leonardos early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano in the home of his mother and his father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera Amadori, who loved Leonardo but died young in 1465 without children. When Leonardo was sixteen, his father married again to twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini, pieros legitimate heirs were born from his third wife Margherita di Guglielmo and his fourth and final wife, Lucrezia Cortigiani. Leonardo received an education in Latin, geometry and mathematics. In later life, Leonardo recorded only two childhood incidents, one, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face
4.
Sandro Botticelli
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Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. Botticellis posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century, since then, among Botticellis best-known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera. Botticelli was born in the city of Florence in a house in the Via Nuova, BorgOgnissanti, Vasari reported that Botticelli was initially trained as a goldsmith by his brother Antonio. By 1462 he was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi, many of his works have been attributed to the elder master. Influenced also by the monumentality of Masaccios painting, it was from Lippi that Botticelli learned a more intimate, by 1470, Botticelli had his own workshop. The Adoration of the Magi for Santa Maria Novella, contains the portraits of Cosimo de Medici, his sons Piero and Giovanni, the quality of the scene was hailed by Vasari as one of Botticellis pinnacles. In 1481, Pope Sixtus IV summoned Botticelli and other prominent Florentine, the iconological program was the supremacy of the Papacy. Sandros contribution included the Temptations of Christ, the Punishment of the Rebels, thus Vasari characterized the first printed Dante with Botticellis decorations, he could not imagine that the new art of printing might occupy an artist. Recent scholarship suggests otherwise, the Primavera was painted for Lorenzos townhouse in Florence, by 1499, both had been installed at Castello. In these works, the influence of Gothic realism is tempered by Botticellis study of the antique, but if the painterly means may be understood, the subjects themselves remain fascinating for their ambiguity. The complex meanings of these continue to receive widespread scholarly attention, mainly focusing on the poetry. The works do not illustrate particular texts, rather, each relies upon several texts for its significance, of their beauty, characterized by Vasari as exemplifying grace and by John Ruskin as possessing linear rhythm, there can be no doubt. The pictures feature Botticellis linear style emphasized by the soft continual contours, in 1491 he served on a committee to decide upon a façade for the Cathedral of Florence. For this reason, persisting in his attachment to that party, Botticelli biographer Ernst Steinmann searched for the artists psychological development through his Madonnas. In the deepening of insight and expression in the rendering of Marys physiognomy, Botticelli was already little employed in 1502. In 1504 he was a member of the appointed to decide where Michelangelos David would be placed. After his death, his reputation was eclipsed longer and more thoroughly than that of any other major European artist and his paintings remained in the churches and villas for which they had been created and his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel were upstaged by those of Michelangelo. The English collector William Young Ottley, however, had brought Botticellis The Mystical Nativity to London with him in 1799 after buying it in Italy, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood incorporated elements of his work into their own
5.
Piero di Cosimo
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Piero di Cosimo, also known as Piero di Lorenzo, was a Florentine painter of the Italian Renaissance. Vasari has many stories of his eccentricity, and the subjects have an individual. He trained under Cosimo Roselli, whose daughter he married, and he was also influenced by Early Netherlandish painting, and busy landscapes feature in many works, often forests seen close at hand. Several of his most striking secular works are in the landscape format used for paintings inset into cassone wedding chests or spalliera headboards or panelling. He was apparently famous for designing the temporary decorations for Carnival, from him, most probably, Cosimo acquired the love of landscape and the intimate knowledge of the growth of flowers and of animal life. The manner of Hugo van der Goes is especially apparent in the Adoration of the Shepherds and he journeyed to Rome in 1482 with his master, Rosselli. Inspired to the Vitruvius account of the evolution of man, Pieros mythical compositions show the presence of hybrid forms of men and animals, or the man learning to use fire. The multitudes of nudes in these shows the influence of Luca Signorelli on Pieros art. He also resisted any cleaning of his studio, or trimming of the trees of his orchard, he lived, wrote Vasari. The death of his master Roselli may also have affected Pieros morose elder years, the Immaculate Conception with Saints, at the Uffizi, and the Holy Family, at Dresden, illustrate the religious fervour to which he was stimulated by Savonarola. With the exception of the background in Rossellis fresco of the Sermon on the Mount, in the Sistine Chapel. Piero di Cosimo exercised considerable influence upon his fellow pupils Albertinelli and Bartolomeo della Porta, Vasari gave Pieros date of death as 1521, and this date is still repeated by many sources, including the Encyclopædia Britannica. However, contemporary documents reveal that he died of plague on 12 April 1522, madonna and Child Enthroned with Sts. Peter, John the Baptist, Dominic, and Nicholas of Bari tempera and oil on panel, St. Louis Art Museum, media related to Piero di Cosimo at Wikimedia Commons Italian Paintings, Florentine School, a collection catalog containing information about di Cosimo and his works
6.
Michelangelo
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Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Considered to be the greatest living artist during his lifetime, he has since described as one of the greatest artists of all time. A number of Michelangelos works of painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence and he sculpted two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, before the age of thirty. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library, at the age of 74, he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peters Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan so that the end was finished to his design, as was the dome, with some modification. Michelangelo was unique as the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive, in his lifetime he was often called Il Divino. One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, the attempts by subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelos impassioned and highly personal style resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance. Michelangelo was born on 6 March 1475 in Caprese near Arezzo, at the time of Michelangelos birth, his father was the Judicial administrator of the small town of Caprese and local administrator of Chiusi. Michelangelos mother was Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena, the Buonarrotis claimed to descend from the Countess Mathilde of Canossa, this claim remains unproven, but Michelangelo himself believed it. Several months after Michelangelos birth, the returned to Florence. There Michelangelo gained his love for marble, as Giorgio Vasari quotes him, If there is good in me. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, as a young boy, Michelangelo was sent to Florence to study grammar under the Humanist Francesco da Urbino. The young artist, however, showed no interest in his schooling, preferring to copy paintings from churches, the city of Florence was at that time the greatest centre of the arts and learning in Italy. Art was sponsored by the Signoria, by the merchant guilds and by patrons such as the Medici. The Renaissance, a renewal of Classical scholarship and the arts, had its first flowering in Florence, the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti had laboured for fifty years to create the bronze doors of the Baptistry, which Michelangelo was to describe as The Gates of Paradise. The exterior niches of the Church of Orsanmichele contained a gallery of works by the most acclaimed sculptors of Florence – Donatello, Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Nanni di Banco. The interiors of the churches were covered with frescos, begun by Giotto. During Michelangelos childhood, a team of painters had been called from Florence to the Vatican, among them was Domenico Ghirlandaio, a master in fresco painting, perspective, figure drawing, and portraiture who had the largest workshop in Florence at that period
