1.
Naples
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Naples is the capital of the Italian region Campania and the third-largest municipality in Italy, after Rome and Milan. In 2015, around 975,260 people lived within the administrative limits. The Metropolitan City of Naples had a population of 3,115,320, Naples is the 9th-most populous urban area in the European Union with a population of between 3 million and 3.7 million. About 4.4 million people live in the Naples metropolitan area, Naples is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Bronze Age Greek settlements were established in the Naples area in the second millennium BC, a larger colony – initially known as Parthenope, Παρθενόπη – developed on the Island of Megaride around the ninth century BC, at the end of the Greek Dark Ages. Naples remained influential after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, thereafter, in union with Sicily, it became the capital of the Two Sicilies until the unification of Italy in 1861. Naples was the most-bombed Italian city during World War II, much of the citys 20th-century periphery was constructed under Benito Mussolinis fascist government, and during reconstruction efforts after World War II. The city has experienced significant economic growth in recent decades, and unemployment levels in the city, however, Naples still suffers from political and economic corruption, and unemployment levels remain high. Naples has the fourth-largest urban economy in Italy, after Milan, Rome and it is the worlds 103rd-richest city by purchasing power, with an estimated 2011 GDP of US$83.6 billion. The port of Naples is one of the most important in Europe, numerous major Italian companies, such as MSC Cruises Italy S. p. A, are headquartered in Naples. The city also hosts NATOs Allied Joint Force Command Naples, the SRM Institution for Economic Research, Naples is a full member of the Eurocities network of European cities. The city was selected to become the headquarters of the European institution ACP/UE and was named a City of Literature by UNESCOs Creative Cities Network, the Villa Rosebery, one of the three official residences of the President of Italy, is located in the citys Posillipo district. Naples historic city centre is the largest in Europe, covering 1,700 hectares and enclosing 27 centuries of history, Naples has long been a major cultural centre with a global sphere of influence, particularly during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. In the immediate vicinity of Naples are numerous culturally and historically significant sites, including the Palace of Caserta, culinarily, Naples is synonymous with pizza, which originated in the city. Neapolitan music has furthermore been highly influential, credited with the invention of the romantic guitar, according to CNN, the metro stop Toledo is the most beautiful in Europe and it won also the LEAF Award 2013 as Public building of the year. Naples is the Italian city with the highest number of accredited stars from the Michelin Guide, Naples sports scene is dominated by football and Serie A club S. S. C. Napoli, two-time Italian champions and winner of European trophies, who play at the San Paolo Stadium in the south-west of the city, the Phlegraean Fields around Naples has been inhabited since the Neolithic period. The earliest Greek settlements were established in the Naples area in the second millennium BC, sailors from the Greek island of Rhodes established a small commercial port called Parthenope on the island of Megaride in the ninth century BC
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Italy
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Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a unitary parliamentary republic in Europe. Located in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea, Italy shares open land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, San Marino, Italy covers an area of 301,338 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate and Mediterranean climate. Due to its shape, it is referred to in Italy as lo Stivale. With 61 million inhabitants, it is the fourth most populous EU member state, the Italic tribe known as the Latins formed the Roman Kingdom, which eventually became a republic that conquered and assimilated other nearby civilisations. The legacy of the Roman Empire is widespread and can be observed in the distribution of civilian law, republican governments, Christianity. The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, bringing a renewed interest in humanism, science, exploration, Italian culture flourished at this time, producing famous scholars, artists and polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The weakened sovereigns soon fell victim to conquest by European powers such as France, Spain and Austria. Despite being one of the victors in World War I, Italy entered a period of economic crisis and social turmoil. The subsequent participation in World War II on the Axis side ended in defeat, economic destruction. Today, Italy has the third largest economy in the Eurozone and it has a very high level of human development and is ranked sixth in the world for life expectancy. The country plays a prominent role in regional and global economic, military, cultural and diplomatic affairs, as a reflection of its cultural wealth, Italy is home to 51 World Heritage Sites, the most in the world, and is the fifth most visited country. The assumptions on the etymology of the name Italia are very numerous, according to one of the more common explanations, the term Italia, from Latin, Italia, was borrowed through Greek from the Oscan Víteliú, meaning land of young cattle. The bull was a symbol of the southern Italic tribes and was often depicted goring the Roman wolf as a defiant symbol of free Italy during the Social War. Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus states this account together with the legend that Italy was named after Italus, mentioned also by Aristotle and Thucydides. The name Italia originally applied only to a part of what is now Southern Italy – according to Antiochus of Syracuse, but by his time Oenotria and Italy had become synonymous, and the name also applied to most of Lucania as well. The Greeks gradually came to apply the name Italia to a larger region, excavations throughout Italy revealed a Neanderthal presence dating back to the Palaeolithic period, some 200,000 years ago, modern Humans arrived about 40,000 years ago. Other ancient Italian peoples of undetermined language families but of possible origins include the Rhaetian people and Cammuni. Also the Phoenicians established colonies on the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily, the Roman legacy has deeply influenced the Western civilisation, shaping most of the modern world
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Painting
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Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, Painting is a mode of creative expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, gesture, composition, narration, or abstraction, among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive, Paintings can be naturalistic and representational, photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic, emotive, or political in nature. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by motifs and ideas. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action, the term painting is also used outside of art as a common trade among craftsmen and builders. What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity, every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between. In practice, painters can articulate shapes by juxtaposing surfaces of different intensity, thus, the basic means of painting are distinct from ideological means, such as geometrical figures, various points of view and organization, and symbols. In technical drawing, thickness of line is ideal, demarcating ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters. Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music, color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, and Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent, the word red, for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic, painters deal practically with pigments, so blue for a painter can be any of the blues, phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music is analogous to light in painting, shades to dynamics and these elements do not necessarily form a melody of themselves, rather, they can add different contexts to it. Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer, there is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required, rhythm is important in painting as it is in music
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Baroque
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The style began around 1600 in Rome and Italy, and spread to most of Europe. The aristocracy viewed the dramatic style of Baroque art and architecture as a means of impressing visitors by projecting triumph, power, Baroque palaces are built around an entrance of courts, grand staircases, and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence. However, baroque has a resonance and application that extend beyond a reduction to either a style or period. It is also yields the Italian barocco and modern Spanish barroco, German Barock, Dutch Barok, others derive it from the mnemonic term Baroco, a supposedly laboured form of syllogism in logical Scholastica. The Latin root can be found in bis-roca, in informal usage, the word baroque can simply mean that something is elaborate, with many details, without reference to the Baroque styles of the 17th and 18th centuries. The word Baroque, like most periodic or stylistic designations, was invented by later critics rather than practitioners of the arts in the 17th, the term Baroque was initially used in a derogatory sense, to underline the excesses of its emphasis. In particular, the term was used to describe its eccentric redundancy and noisy abundance of details, although it was long thought that the word as a critical term was first applied to architecture, in fact it appears earlier in reference to music. Another hypothesis says that the word comes from precursors of the style, Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola and he did not make the distinctions between Mannerism and Baroque that modern writers do, and he ignored the later phase, the academic Baroque that lasted into the 18th century. Long despised, Baroque art and architecture became fashionable between the two World Wars, and has remained in critical favour. In painting the gradual rise in popular esteem of Caravaggio has been the best barometer of modern taste, William Watson describes a late phase of Shang-dynasty Chinese ritual bronzes of the 11th century BC as baroque. The term Baroque may still be used, usually pejoratively, describing works of art, craft, the appeal of Baroque style turned consciously from the witty, intellectual qualities of 16th-century Mannerist art to a visceral appeal aimed at the senses. It employed an iconography that was direct, simple, obvious, germinal ideas of the Baroque can also be found in the work of Michelangelo. Even more generalised parallels perceived by some experts in philosophy, prose style, see the Neapolitan palace of Caserta, a Baroque palace whose construction began in 1752. In paintings Baroque gestures are broader than Mannerist gestures, less ambiguous, less arcane and mysterious, more like the stage gestures of opera, Baroque poses depend on contrapposto, the tension within the figures that move the planes of shoulders and hips in counterdirections. Baroque is a style of unity imposed upon rich, heavy detail, Baroque style featured exaggerated lighting, intense emotions, release from restraint, and even a kind of artistic sensationalism. There were highly diverse strands of Italian baroque painting, from Caravaggio to Cortona, the most prominent Spanish painter of the Baroque was Diego Velázquez. The later Baroque style gradually gave way to a more decorative Rococo, while the Baroque nature of Rembrandts art is clear, the label is less often used for Vermeer and many other Dutch artists. Flemish Baroque painting shared a part in this trend, while continuing to produce the traditional categories
5.
Printmaking
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Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. Printmaking normally covers only the process of creating prints that have an element of originality, except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable of producing multiples of the same piece, which is called a print. Each print produced is not considered a copy but rather is considered an original, a print may be known as an impression. Printmaking is not chosen only for its ability to multiple impressions. Prints are created by transferring ink from a matrix or through a screen to a sheet of paper or other material. Screens made of silk or synthetic fabrics are used for the screenprinting process, other types of matrix substrates and related processes are discussed below. Multiple impressions printed from the matrix form an edition. Prints may also be printed in book form, such as illustrated books or artists books, Printmaking techniques are generally divided into the following basic categories, Relief, where ink is applied to the original surface of the matrix. Relief techniques include woodcut or woodblock as the Asian forms are known, wood engraving. Intaglio, where ink is applied beneath the surface of the matrix. Intaglio techniques include engraving, etching, mezzotint, aquatint, planographic, where the matrix retains its original surface, but is specially prepared and/or inked to allow for the transfer of the image. Planographic techniques include lithography, monotyping, and digital techniques, stencil, where ink or paint is pressed through a prepared screen, including screenprinting and pochoir. Other types of printmaking techniques outside these groups include collagraphy and viscosity printing, collagraphy is a printmaking technique in which textured material is adhered to the printing matrix. This texture is transferred to the paper during the printing process, Contemporary printmaking may include digital printing, photographic mediums, or a combination of digital, photographic, and traditional processes. Many of these techniques can also be combined, especially within the same family, for example, Rembrandts prints are usually referred to as etchings for convenience, but very often include work in engraving and drypoint as well, and sometimes have no etching at all. Woodcut, a type of print, is the earliest printmaking technique. It was probably first developed as a means of printing patterns on cloth, woodcuts of images on paper developed around 1400 in Japan, and slightly later in Europe. These are the two areas where woodcut has been most extensively used purely as a process for making images without text, the artist draws a design on a plank of wood, or on paper which is transferred to the wood
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Etching
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Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal. In modern manufacturing, other chemicals may be used on other types of material, as a method of printmaking, it is, along with engraving, the most important technique for old master prints, and remains in wide use today. In a number of variants such as microfabrication etching and photochemical milling it is a crucial technique in much modern technology. In traditional pure etching, a plate is covered with a waxy ground which is resistant to acid. The artist then scratches off the ground with an etching needle where he or she wants a line to appear in the finished piece. The échoppe, a tool with an oval section, is also used for swelling lines. The plate is dipped in a bath of acid, technically called the mordant or etchant. The acid bites into the metal where it is exposed, leaving behind lines sunk into the plate, the remaining ground is then cleaned off the plate. The plate is inked all over, and then the ink wiped off the surface, the plate is then put through a high-pressure printing press together with a sheet of paper. The paper picks up the ink from the lines, making a print. The process can be repeated many times, typically several hundred impressions could be printed before the shows much sign of wear. The work on the plate can also be added to by repeating the whole process, Etching has often been combined with other intaglio techniques such as engraving or aquatint. The process as applied to printmaking is believed to have been invented by Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg, Hopfer was a craftsman who decorated armour in this way, and applied the method to printmaking, using iron plates. Apart from his prints, there are two examples of his work on armour, a shield from 1536 now in the Real Armeria of Madrid. The switch to copper plates was made in Italy. On the other hand, the handling of the ground and acid need skill and experience, prior to 1100 AD, the New World Hohokam independently utilized the technique of acid etching in marine shell designs. Jacques Callot from Nancy in Lorraine made important technical advances in etching technique and he developed the échoppe, a type of etching-needle with a slanting oval section at the end, which enabled etchers to create a swelling line, as engravers were able to do. Callot also appears to have responsible for an improved, harder, recipe for the etching ground
7.
Kunsthalle Hamburg
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The Hamburg Kunsthalle is the art museum of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, Germany. It is one of the largest museums in the country, the name Kunsthalle indicates the museums history as an art hall when founded in 1850. Today, the Kunsthalle houses one of the few art collections in Germany that covers seven centuries of European art, the Kunsthalle consists of three connected buildings, dating from 1869,1921 and 1997, located in the Altstadt district, between the Hauptbahnhof and the two Alster lakes. The Kunsthalle has its origins in 1849, when established and opened a year later as Städtische Gallerie by the Hamburg Kunstverein, the collection grew quickly, and it soon became necessary to provide a building. The original red brick Kunsthalle was built from 1863 to 1869, designed by architects Georg Theodor Schirrmacher and Hermann von der Hude, the first director became the art historian and educator Alfred Lichtwark. In 1994, one painting of the Kunsthalle was involved in the so-called Frankfurt art theft, while on loan to the Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt, the painting Nebelschwaden by Caspar David Friedrich was stolen. After negotiations with the thieves, a lawyer bought back the painting, the cubic building sits on a monolithic base at a prominent location in close proximity to the Binnenalster. Since 2014, the Kunsthalle is under a euro 22 million renovation, in which the old entrance is being re-activated as sole entrance for the entire complex. The Kunsthalle is divided into four different sections, the Gallery of Old Masters, the Gallery of 19th-century Art, the Gallery of Classical Modernism and the Gallery of Contemporary Art. The Kunsthalle Museum is also known for its contemporary art collections and exhibitions. The Hamburg Kunsthalle continuisly carries out temporary exhibitions on contemporary and historic art, yearly there are on average 20 special exhibitions. The Dawn of Romanticism 2011–2012, Max Liebermann, pioneer of Modern Art 2012–2013, Giacometti
8.
Jusepe de Ribera
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Jusepe de Ribera was a Spanish Tenebrist painter and printmaker, also known as José de Ribera and Josep de Ribera. He also was called Lo Spagnoletto by his contemporaries and early writers, Ribera was a leading painter of the Spanish school, although his mature work was all done in Italy. Ribera was born at Xàtiva, near Valencia, Spain and he was baptized on February 17,1591. His father was a shoemaker, perhaps on a large scale, longing to study art in Italy, he made his way to Rome via Parma, where he is recorded in 1611. According to one source, a cardinal noticed him drawing from the frescoes on a Roman palace facade, Roman artists gave him the nickname Lo Spagnoletto. His early biographers generally rank him among the followers of Caravaggio, very little documentation survives from his early years, with scholars speculating as to the precise time and route by which he came to Italy. Ribera was living in Rome no later than 1612, and is documented as having joined the Academy of Saint Luke by 1613, in 1616, Ribera moved to Naples, in order to avoid his creditors. The Kingdom of Naples was then part of the Spanish Empire, Ribera moved to Naples permanently in the middle of 1616. Ribera began to sign his work as Jusepe de Ribera, español, the period after Osuna was recalled in 1620 seems to have been difficult. Few paintings survive from 1620 to 1626, but this was the period in which most of his best prints were produced and these were at least partly an attempt to attract attention from a wider audience than Naples. His career picked up in the late 1620s, and he was accepted as the painter in Naples thereafter. His influence can be seen in Velázquez, Murillo, and most other Spanish painters of the period, all of them were invited to work in Naples, but found the place inhospitable. The cabal ended at the time of Domenichinos death in 1641, according to the RKD he is listed as a pupil of Ribalta and in turn his own pupils were Enrico Fiammingo, Francesco Fracanzano, Luca Giordano, and Bartolomeo Passante. He was followed by Giuseppe Marullo and he influenced the painters Agostino Beltrano, Hendrick van Someren, Paolo Domenico Finoglio, Giovanni Ricca, about 1644, his daughter married a Spanish nobleman in the administration, who died soon after. From 1644, Ribera seems to have suffered serious ill-health, which reduced his ability to work. In 1647–1648, during the Masaniello rising against Spanish rule, he felt forced for some months to take his family with him into refuge in the palace of the Viceroy. In 1651 he sold the house he had owned for many years. In his earlier style, founded sometimes on Caravaggio and sometimes on the wholly diverse method of Correggio, along with his massive and predominating shadows, he retained from first to last a great strength in local coloring
9.
Paolo Veronese
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Known as a supreme colorist, and after an early period with Mannerism, Paolo Veronese developed a naturalist style of painting, influenced by Titian. His most famous works are elaborate narrative cycles, executed in a dramatic and colorful style, full of architectural settings. Nonetheless, many of the greatest artists, may be counted among his admirers, including Rubens, Watteau, Tiepolo, Delacroix and Renoir. Veronese took his name from his birthplace of Verona, then the largest possession of Venice on the mainland. The census in Verona attests that Veronese was born sometime in 1528 to a stonecutter, or spezapreda, named Gabriele and it was common for surnames to be taken from a fathers profession, and thus Veronese was known as Paolo Spezapreda. He later changed his name to Paolo Caliari, because his mother was the daughter of a nobleman called Antonio Caliari. He was often called Paolo Veronese before the last century to him from another painter from Verona, Alessandro Veronese. By 1541, Veronese was apprenticed with Antonio Badile, who was later to become his father-in-law, although trained in the culture of Mannerism then popular in Parma, he soon developed his own preference for a more radiant palette. In 1552 Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, great-uncle of the ruling Guglielmo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, commissioned an altarpiece for Mantua Cathedral and his panel of Jupiter Expelling the Vices for the former is now in the Louvre. He then painted a History of Esther in the ceiling for the church of San Sebastiano and it was these ceiling paintings and those of 1557 in the Marciana Library that established him as a master among his Venetian contemporaries. Already these works indicate Veroneses mastery in reflecting both the subtle foreshortening of the figures of Correggio and the heroism of those by Michelangelo. By 1556 Veronese was commissioned to paint the first of his monumental banquet scenes, the Feast in the House of Simon, owing to its scattered composition and lack of focus, however, it was not his most successful refectory mural. In the late 1550s, during a break in his work for San Sebastiano, Veronese decorated the Villa Barbaro in Maser, Veroneses decorations employed complex perspective and trompe loeil, and resulted in a luminescent and inspired visual poetry. The encounter between architect and artist was a triumph, the Wedding at Cana, painted in 1562–1563, was also collaboration with Palladio. It was commissioned by the Benedictine monks for the San Giorgio Maggiore Monastery, on an island across from Saint Marks. The contract insisted on the size, and that the quality of pigment. For example, the contract specified that the blues should contain the precious mineral lapis-lazuli, the contract also specified that the painting should include as many figures as possible. There are a number of portraits staged upon a canvas surface nearly ten meters wide
10.
Pietro da Cortona
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Pietro da Cortona was an Italian Baroque painter and architect. Along with his contemporaries and rivals Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini and he was also an important designer of interior decorations. He was born Pietro Berrettini, but is known by the name of his native town of Cortona in Tuscany. He worked mainly in Rome and Florence, only a limited number of his architectural projects were built but nonetheless they are as distinctive and as inventive as those of his rivals. Berrettini was born into a family of artisans and masons, in Cortona and he trained in painting in Florence under Andrea Commodi, but soon he departed for Rome at around 1612/3, where he joined the studio of Baccio Ciarpi. In Rome, he had encouragement from many prominent patrons, according to Cortonas biographers his gifted copy of Raphaels Galatea fresco brought him to the attention of Marcello Sacchetti, papal treasurer during the Barberini papacy. Such contacts helped him gain a major commission in Rome. In 1633, Pope Urban VIII commissioned from Cortona a large painting for the main salon ceiling of the Barberini family palace. It was completed six years later, following Cortonas influential visit to northern Italy where he would have seen at first hand perspectival works by Paolo Veronese, Cortonas huge Allegory of Divine Providence and Barberini Power marks a watershed in Baroque painting. The ornamented architectural framework essentially forms five compartments, the central and most significant part celebrates the glorification of the reign of Urban VIII in a light filled scene populated with allegorical figures and Barberini family emblems. The illusion of spatial extension through paint, the grandiose theme, the first two represented the ages of silver and gold. In 1641, he was recalled to paint the Bronze Age and he began work on the decoration of the grand-ducal reception rooms on the first floor of the Palazzo Pitti, now part of the Palatine Gallery. These highly ornate ceilings with frescoes and elaborate stucco work essentially celebrate the Medici lineage, Pietro left Florence in 1647, and his pupil and collaborator, Ciro Ferri, completed the cycle by the 1660s. For a number of years, Cortona was involved for decades in the decoration of the frescoes in the Oratorian Chiesa Nuova in Rome. Other frescoes are in Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona, in 1660, he executed The Stoning of Saint Stephen for the church of San Ambrogio della Massima in Rome. The work currently hangs in the Hermitage, towards the end of his life he devoted much of his time to architecture, but he published a treatise on painting in 1652 under a pseudonym and in collaboration. He refused invitations to both France and Spain and he was elected as director of the Academy of St Luke the painters guild in Rome, in 1634. It was at the Academy in 1636 that Cortona and Andrea Sacchi were involved in controversies regarding the number of figures that were appropriate in a painted work
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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
12.
Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
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Santa Maria del Carmine is a church of the Carmelite Order, in the Oltrarno district of Florence, in Tuscany, Italy. It is famous as the location of the Brancacci Chapel housing outstanding Renaissance frescoes by Masaccio and Masolino da Panicale, the church, dedicated to the Beatæ Virginis Mariæ de monte Carmelo, was built from 1268 as part of Carmelite convent, which is still existing today. Of the original edifice only some Romanesque-Gothic remains can be seen on the sides, the complex was enlarged a first time in 1328 and again in 1464, when the capitular hall and the refectory added, though the church maintained the Latin Cross, one nave plan. Renovated in the Baroque style in the 16th–17th centuries, it was damaged by a fire in 1771, the façade, like in many Florentine churches, remained unfinished. The fire did not touch the sacristy, therefore have survived the Stories of St. Cecilia attributed to Lippo dAndrea, the vault of the nave has a trompe-loeil, quadratura fresco by Domenico Stagi. Also the Brancacci Chapel survived the fire, and was saved by the subsequent restoration by the intervention of a Florentine noblewoman who was opposed to the covering of the frescoes. The Chapel is home to the frescoes by Masaccio and Masolino. Masaccios master Masolino, commissioned by a merchant, Felice Brancacci, began work on the chapel in 1425 and was soon joined in the project by his pupil. The scenes by Masolino are St Peter Healing a Lame Man and Raising Tabitha from the Dead, St Peter Preaching, and Adam and Eve. Those by mostly Masaccio are The Tribute Money, St Peter Healing with his Shadow, The Crucifixion of St Peter, The Baptism of the Neophytes and their treatment of figures in believable space made the frescoes among the most important to have come out of the Early Renaissance. The cycle was finished by Filippino Lippi, the elaborated Italian Rococo ceiling is from one of the most important 18th century artists in the city, Giovanni Domenico Ferretti. The architect Pier Francesco Silvani choose for it the Baroque style then popular in Rome, the altar has a marble bas-relief depicting the Glory of St Andrea Corsini, sculpted by Foggini, and above a God the Father sculpted by Carlo Marcellini. The small dome was frescoed by Giordano in 1682, the frescoes suffered in the great church fire, and were restored by Stefano Fabbrini. The convent suffered in its history from numerous disasters, from the 1771 fire to the 1966 River Arno flood, the second refectory is decorated with the Supper in Simon the Pharisees house by Giovanni Battista Vanni, it also houses fragments of frescoes by Lippo dAndrea. Neri Corsini Holy Places in Tuscany Media related to Santa Maria del Carmine at Wikimedia Commons
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Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 31.
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). 
