Italian 1489-1534 Correggio Locations Italian painter and draughtsman. Apart from his Venetian contemporaries, he was the most important northern Italian painter of the first half of the 16th century. His best-known works are the illusionistic frescoes in the domes of S Giovanni Evangelista and the cathedral in Parma, where he worked from 1520 to 1530. The combination of technical virtuosity and dramatic excitement in these works ensured their importance for later generations of artists. His altarpieces of the same period are equally original and ally intimacy of feeling with an ecstatic quality that seems to anticipate the Baroque. In his paintings of mythological subjects, especially those executed after his return to Correggio around 1530, he created images whose sensuality and abandon have been seen as foreshadowing the Rococo. Vasari wrote that Correggio was timid and virtuous, that family responsibilities made him miserly and that he died from a fever after walking in the sun. He left no letters and, apart from Vasari account, nothing is known of his character or personality beyond what can be deduced from his works. The story that he owned a manuscript of Bonaventura Berlinghieri Geographia, as well as his use of a latinized form of Allegri (Laetus), and his naming of his son after the humanist Pomponius Laetus, all suggest that he was an educated man by the standards of painters in this period. The intelligence of his paintings supports this claim. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Correggio was to have an enormous posthumous reputation. He was revered by Federico Barocci and the Carracci, and throughout the 17th and 18th centuries his reputation rivalled that of Raphael.  Related Paintings of Correggio :. | View of the Camera di San Paolo and of the vault | The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine | Danae | Portrait of a Young Man | Detail of the cupola with the apostles Peter and Paul |
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HOLBEIN, Hans the Younger
German painter (b. 1497, Augsburg, d. 1543, London). Hans Holbein the Younger, born in Augsburg, was the son of a painter, Hans Holbein the Elder, and received his first artistic training from his father. Hans the Younger may have had early contacts with the Augsburg painter Hans Burgkmair the Elder. In 1515 Hans the Younger and his older brother, Ambrosius, went to Basel, where they were apprenticed to the Swiss painter Hans Herbster. Hans the Younger worked in Lucerne in 1517 and visited northern Italy in 1518-1519. On Sept. 25, 1519, Holbein was enrolled in the painters' guild of Basel, and the following year he set up his own workshop, became a citizen of Basel, and married the widow Elsbeth Schmid, who bore him four children. He painted altarpieces, portraits, and murals and made designs for woodcuts, stained glass, and jewelry. Among his patrons was Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had settled in Basel in 1521. In 1524 Holbein visited France. Holbein gave up his workshop in Basel in 1526 and went to England, armed with a letter of introduction from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More, who received him warmly. Holbein quickly achieved fame and financial success. In 1528 he returned to Basel, where he bought property and received commissions from the city council, Basel publishers, Erasmus, and others. However, with iconoclastic riots instigated by fanatic Protestants, Basel hardly offered the professional security that Holbein desired. In 1532 Holbein returned to England and settled permanently in London, although he left his family in Basel, retained his Basel citizenship, and visited Basel in 1538. He was patronized especially by country gentlemen from Norfolk, German merchants from the Steel Yard in London, and King Henry VIII and his court. Holbein died in London between Oct. 7 and Nov. 29, 1543. With few exceptions, Holbein's work falls naturally into the four periods corresponding to his alternate residences in Basel and London. His earliest extant work is a tabletop with trompe l'oeil motifs (1515) painted for the Swiss standard-bearer Hans Baer. Other notable works of the first Basel period are a diptych of Burgomaster Jakob Meyer zum Hasen and his wife, Dorothea Kannengiesser (1516); a portrait of Bonifacius Amerbach (1519); an unsparingly realistic Dead Christ (1521); a Madonna and Child Enthroned with Two Saints (1522); several portraits of Erasmus, of which the one in Paris (1523 or shortly after), with its accurate observation of the scholar's concentrated attitude and frail person and its beautifully balanced composition, is particularly outstanding; and woodcuts, among which the series of the Dance of Death (ca. 1521-1525, though not published until 1538) represents one of the high points of the artist's graphic oeuvre. Probably about 1520 Holbein painted an altarpiece, the Last Supper, now somewhat cut down, which is based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting, and four panels with eight scenes of the Passion of Christ (possibly the shutters of the Last Supper altarpiece), which contain further reminiscences of Italian painting, particularly Andrea Mantegna, the Lombard school, and Raphael, but with lighting effects that are characteristically northern. His two portraits of Magdalena Offenburg, as Laïs of Corinth and Venus with Cupid (1526),
Paolo Ucello
1395-1475 Italian Paolo Ucello Gallery
william witherington
William Frederick Witherington (26 May 1785 - 10 April 1865) was an English painter and academic. Born in London, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1805. Except for one year he exhibited annually at the Royal Academy from 1811 until his death. He was elected A.R.A. on 1 November 1830 and R.A. on 10 February 1840. He retired as an academician on 28th May 1863. His early works were mostly landscapes, but the influence of artists like George Morland (1763 - 1804) can be seen in the importance he gave to the figurative element in his paintings. Witherington enjoyed painting English scenery and never travelled abroad. As with many of his works, he does not depict the harsh realities of rural life, but instead records incidents of family life. Like his contemporary, Augustus Wall Callcott, RA, he creates a composition with a lively foreground of figures and animals, combined with a landscape with distant vistas glimpsed through the wood.