Library: Art History by Credo Reference: Renaissance

Early Renaissance Artists

Albrecht Altdorfer (1480 - 1538): Topic Page
Altdorfer's major contribution to the history of European painting is his powerful imaginative vision of landscape.
Hans Baldung (1484 - 1585): Topic Page
Hans Baldung (Grien) was a German painter and engraver. He was born at Swäbisch-Gmünd but settled in Strasbourg where he became a member of the city council in his later years.
Fra Bartolommeo (1472 - 1517): Topic Page
Fra Bartolommeo was born Baccio della Porta in Florence where he trained in the workshop of Cosimo Roselli.
Sandro Botticelli (1445 - 1510): Topic Page
Florentine painter. He depicted religious and mythological subjects. He was patronized by the ruling Medici family and was deeply influenced by their neo-Platonic circle.
Pieter Brueghel (1525 - 1569): Topic Page
Flemish artist. He was born in the village of Bruegel, near Breda, and was the pupil of Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502-50).
Donatello (1386 - 1466): Topic Page
Real name Donato di Betto Bardi. Florentine sculptor, regarded as the greatest sculptor of the quattrocento, who was greatly influenced by classical sculpture and contemporary humanist theories.
Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528): Topic Page
The German painter, printmaker, and theorist Albrecht Dürer is generally acknowledged to be the most significant figure in the history of European art outside Italy in the period of the Renaissance.
Jan Mabuse Gossaert (1478 - 1533): Topic Page
The Flemish painter Jan or Jennyn Gossaert is also known as Mabuse, this name deriving from Mauberge in Hainault, where he was born.
Matthias Grünewald (1475 - 1528): Topic Page
German painter, architect, and engineer. His altarpiece at Isenheim, southern Alsace, (1515, Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France), with its grotesquely tortured figure of Jesus and its radiant Resurrection, is his most important work.
Hans Holbein (1497 - 1543): Topic Page
German painter and woodcut artist who spent much of his career as a portrait artist at the court of Henry VIII of England.

High & Late Renaissance Artists

Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572): Topic Page
The pupil of Pontormo and his lifelong friend, was the principal practitioner of Florentine Mannerism. He is best known for his portraits of Cosimo de' Medici's family and his courtiers, which reveal beneath their glacial exteriors the sitters' anxieties.
Annibale Carracci (1560-1609): Topic Page
One of a Bolognese family of painters, the oldest of whom, Lodovico (1555–1619), founded a school in Bologna. His cousins Agostino (1557–1602) and Annibale worked in their early years with Lodovico, but left Bologna, working first in north Italy and later in Rome.
Artemisia Gentileschi,1593-1652 or 1653: Topic Page
Tuscan painter, daughter and pupil of Orazio Gentileschi, b. Rome.
Baldassare Peruzzi (1481 - 1536): Topic Page
Italian architect and painter in the High Renaissance style; designed the Villa Farnesina and the Palazzo Massimo in Rome.
Bartolomeo Ammanati (1511 - 1592): Topic Page
Born near Florence, the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati trained in the workshop of Pisa Cathedral, where his first independent work is found (1536).
Benvenuto Cellini (1500 - 1571): Topic Page
1500–1571, Italian sculptor, metalsmith, and author. His remarkable autobiography (written 1558–62), which reads like a picaresque novel, is one of the most important documents of the 16th cent.
El Greco (1541 - 1614): Topic Page
Spanish painter. He painted elegant portraits and intensely emotional religious scenes with increasingly distorted figures and unearthly light.
Giorgio Vasari (1511 - 1574): Topic Page
Italian architect, painter, and art historian, noted for his Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550; 1568), a principal source for the history of Italian Renaissance art.
Guercino (1591-1666): Topic Page
Italian baroque painter. He was active chiefly in Rome. In his ceiling painting of Aurora (1621–23; Villa Ludovisi, Rome), the chariot-borne figure of Dawn rides across the heavens; the architectural framework is imitated in the painting, giving the illusion that the ceiling opens into the sky.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 - 1519): Topic Page
Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, and scientist, b. near Vinci, a hill village in Tuscany. The versatility and creative power of Leonardo mark him as a supreme example of Renaissance genius.
Michelangelo (1475 - 1564): Topic Page
Universally recognized as one of the greatest artists in history, perhaps the greatest. He excelled as a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the Italian High Renaissance.
Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571 - 1610): Topic Page
1571–1610, Italian painter. His strong chiaroscuro technique of partially illuminating figures against a dark background was immediately adopted by his contemporaries.
Raphael Sanzio (1483 - 1520): Topic Page
Raphael was the common name of the Italian painter Raffaello Sanzio or Santi.
Tintoretto (1518 - 1594): Topic Page
Jacopo Robusti, whose name derived from the profession of his father, a dyer (tintore), was, with Veronese, the chief Venetian painter of the later 16c.
Titian (1490 - 1576): Topic Page
Venetian painter. Of the very first rank among the artists of the Renaissance, Titian had an immense influence on succeeding generations of painters, especially in his use of color.
Veronese (1528-1588): Topic Page
Paolo Caliari, with Tintoretto, succeeded Titian as the chief artist of 16c. Venice. Born in Verona, as his popular name, Veronese, indicates, he was trained there by a local painter, Antonio Badile, before moving to Venice about the age of 23.

Famous Works

Mona Lisa
From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci (1503-05; Louvre, Paris), a portrait of the wife of a Florentine official, Francesco del Giocondo.
Sistine Chapel: Topic Page
Private chapel of the popes in Rome, one of the principal glories of the Vatican.
Adoration of the Lamb (The Ghent Altarpiece)
From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
A polyptych altarpiece painted for the cathedral of St Bavo, in Ghent, by the Flemish artists Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432.

General History

Art & Architecture, Renaissance: Topic Page
European art of the 15th–17th centuries, associated with the Renaissance, a revival in learning that began in Florence, Italy, with the rise of a spirit of humanism and a new appreciation of the classical Greek and Roman past.
Counter-Reformation: Topic Page
16th-century reformation that arose largely in answer to the Protestant Reformation; sometimes called the Catholic Reformation. Although the Roman Catholic reformers shared the Protestants' revulsion at the corrupt conditions in the church, there was present none of the tradition breaking that characterized Protestantism.
Lorenzo de Medici (1449 - 1492): Topic Page
1449–92, Italian merchant prince, called Lorenzo il Magnifico [the magnificent]. He was a patron of Sandro Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi, Andrea del Verrocchio, Michelangelo, and other famed artists.
Papacy: Topic Page
Office of the pope, head of the Roman Catholic Church. He is pope by reason of being bishop of Rome and thus, according to Roman Catholic belief, successor in the see of Rome (the Holy See) to its first bishop, St. Peter.
Patronage in the Renaissance
From Thames & Hudson Dictionary of the Italian Renaissance
Axiomatic as the notion that Renaissance culture flourished in an atmosphere of patronage is, it remains a vague one.
Reformation: Topic Page
Religious and political movement in 16th-century Europe to reform the Roman Catholic Church, which led to the establishment of the Protestant churches.
Renaissance: Topic Page
Period in European cultural history that began in Italy around 1400 and lasted there until the end of the 1500s.

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