English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1828-1882 Rossetti's first major paintings display some of the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement. His Girlhood of Mary, Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini both portray Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl. His incomplete picture Found was his only major modern-life subject. It depicted a prostitute, lifted up from the street by a country-drover who recognises his old sweetheart. However, Rossetti increasingly preferred symbolic and mythological images to realistic ones. This was also true of his later poetry. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the image of idealized Botticelli's Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci. Although he won support from the John Ruskin, criticism of his clubs caused him to withdraw from public exhibitions and turn to waterhum, which could be sold privately. In 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova. These, and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, inspired his art in the 1850s. His visions of Arthurian romance and medieval design also inspired his new friends of this time, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Rossetti also typically wrote sonnets for his pictures, such as "Astarte Syraica". As a designer, he worked with William Morris to produce images for stained glass and other decorative devices. Both these developments were precipitated by events in his private life, in particular by the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. She had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in his wife's grave at Highgate Cemetery, though he would later have them exhumed. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix. These paintings were to be a major influence on the development of the European Symbolist movement. In these works, Rossetti's depiction of women became almost obsessively stylised. He tended to portray his new lover Fanny Cornforth as the epitome of physical eroticism, whilst another of his mistresses Jane Burden, the wife of his business partner William Morris, was glamorised as an ethereal goddess.  Related Paintings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti :. | Fair Rosamund (mk28) | Writing on the Sand (mk28) | Astarte Syriaca (mk28) | Girlhood of Mary Virgin | John Parsons Jane Morris (mk28) |
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Giovanni Battista Paggi
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1554-1627 Italian painter and theorist. As the son of a newly inscribed nobleman, he received a Renaissance gentleman's education, but as an artist he was it seems self-taught, despite the encouragement of Luca Cambiaso. The gentleman who then set up as a painter was obliged to give his work to patrons, sometimes expecting future remuneration; but when one patron reneged on payment in 1581, Paggi mortally wounded him and was banished from Genoa. He was given protection by Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and settled in Florence. A fresco of St Catherine Converting Two Criminals (1582), painted for Niccol? Gaddi's family chapel at S Maria Novella and thoroughly Florentine in manner, established Paggi's reputation at the Medici court. He painted ephemeral decorations, portraits (all untraced) and altarpieces for many Florentine churches and for the cathedrals of San Gimignano (c. 1590), Pistoia (1591-3) and Lucca (1597-8), having his studio in a house owned by Federico Zuccaro.
Leonard Defrance
Flemish Painter, 1735-1805
Gillis van Coninxloo
(1544 ?C 1607) was a Dutch painter of forest landscapes, the most famous member of a large family of artists. He travelled through France, and lived in Germany for several years to avoid religious persecution. He was born at Antwerp and studied under Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Lenaert Kroes and Gillis Mostaert. He practiced his art in France, but in 1587, on account of religious persecution, emigrated to Frankenthal and passed his later life in Amsterdam, where he died in 1607. Coninxloo ranks as one of the most important Dutch landscape painters of the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century. He exercised a strong influence on Jan Brueghel the Elder, Schoubroeck, Savery, and other Flemish and Dutch landscape painters of the transition period. Coninxloo is considered the founder of a new approach to the painting of forests; while earlier forest landscapes had used woods as backdrops for human activity, van Coninxloo made them a subject, submerging tiny human figures in elaborate compositions of trees in hugely exaggerated scale. During his stay at Frankenthal from 1588 to 1595, he influenced several better known Dutch landscape-painters collectively referred to as the Frankenthal School. Karel van Mander wrote about him and his father Jan den Hollander in his Schilder-boeck. He wrote that his teacher Pieter Coeke van Aelst was his cousin, and that his landscapes were among the best of all Dutch landscape artists.