Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1267-1337 Italian painter and designer. In his own time and place he had an unrivalled reputation as the best painter and as an innovator, superior to all his predecessors, and he became the first post-Classical artist whose fame extended beyond his lifetime and native city. This was partly the consequence of the rich literary culture of two of the cities where he worked, Padua and Florence. Writing on art in Florence was pioneered by gifted authors and, although not quite art criticism, it involved the comparison of local artists in terms of quality. The most famous single appreciation is found in Dante's verses (Purgatory x) of 1315 or earlier. Exemplifying the transience of fame, first with poets and manuscript illuminators, Dante then remarked that the fame of Cimabue, who had supposed himself to be the leader in painting, had now been displaced by Giotto. Ironically, this text was one factor that forestalled the similar eclipse of Giotto's fame, which was clearly implied by the poet.   Related Paintings of GIOTTO di Bondone :. | Last Judgment | Flight into Egypt | Scenes from the New Testament: Lamentation | Joachim among the Shepherds | Christ Enthroned |
Related Artists:
Jan Baptist Weenix
(Amsterdam, 1621- Vleuten 1660), a painter of the Dutch Golden Age. Despite his relatively brief career, he was a very productive and versatile painter. His favourite subjects were Italian landscapes with large figures among ruins, seaside views, and, later in life, large still life pictures of dead game or dogs. He was mainly responsible for introducing the Italian harbour scene into Dutch art, in mid-size paintings with a group of figures in the foreground. Weenix was the son of an architect and born near Amsterdam's harbour. He could not speak well, apparently from a medical condition, and because he very much liked to read books, his mother sent him to work for a bookseller, who was not able to deal with him. He drew whenever he could, according to Jan Weenix his son, who told the story to Arnold Houbraken. Weenix first studied under Jan Micker, then in Utrecht under Abraham Bloemaert, and later back in Amsterdam under Claes Cornelisz. Moeyaert. In 1643 Weenix travelled to Rome with Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem. He had left his home secretly, but his wife, the daughter of Gillis d'Hondecoeter, traced him to Rotterdam. Then he was allowed to stay away for four months. In Rome he became a member of the Bentvueghels and was much esteemed and worked for Pope Innocent X. He returned to Amsterdam after four years; his wife had refused to come to Rome. In 1649 he became master of the guild of St. Luke in Utrecht and also painted a portrait of Rene Descartes. When his brother-in-law Gijsbert d'Hondecoeter died, he trained his nephew Melchior d'Hondecoeter, together with his own son Jan Weenix. Weenix moved to a castle outside Utrecht, to concentrate on his work or for health reasons, where he probably died in poor circumstances, at an unknown date. He painted a few religious scenes, one of the rare pieces of this kind being the "Jacob and Esau" (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden). In the National Gallery, London, is a "Hunting Scene" by Weenix, and Glasgow has a characteristic painting of ruins. Weenix is represented at most of the important continental galleries, notably at Munich, Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, and St Petersburg.
Jan Fyt
1611-1661 Flemish Jan Fyt Gallery Flemish painter, draughtsman and etcher. He was apprenticed in Antwerp in 1621-2 to Hans van den Berch [Berghe] (not to be confused with Jan van den Bergh of Alkmaar) and probably completed his training with Frans Snyders. In 1629-30 Fyt became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, but he continued to work for Snyders until 1631. In 1633 and 1634 he was in Paris. According to his biographers, he then went to Italy; an Italian journey is confirmed by the fact that in 1650 he joined the Antwerp Guild of Romanists (exclusive to those who had visited Rome), of which he became the dean in 1652. He apparently worked in Rome, where he joined the Schildersbent and was given the nickname Goudvink (Dut.: goldfinch). In Venice, according to Orlandi, Fyt worked for the Sagredo and Contarini families. He is also thought to have visited Naples, Florence and Genoa, and Orlandi stated that he also went to Spain and London. By 5 September 1641 Fyt was back in Antwerp, where, apart from a brief trip to the northern Netherlands in 1642, he apparently remained for the rest of his career. However, Jan-Erasmus Quellinus stated that he again travelled to Italy in the 1650s, a claim supported to some extent by the mention in 1671 of a Self-portrait (untraced) supposedly painted some 20 years earlier in Venice (see 1977 exh. cat.).
Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi
(June 8 (O.S. May 27), 1837 ?C April 6 (O.S. March 24), 1887; was a Russian painter and art critic. He was an intellectual leader of the Russian democratic art movement in 1860-1880. Kramskoi came from a poor petty-bourgeois family. From 1857 to 1863 he studied at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts; he reacted against academic art and was an initiator of the "revolt of fourteen" which ended with the expulsion from the Academy of a group of its graduates, who organized the Artel of Artists Influenced by the ideas of the Russian revolutionary democrats, Kramskoi asserted the high public duty of the artist, principles of realism, and the moral substance and nationality of art. He became one of the main founders and ideologists of the Company of Itinerant Art Exhibitions (or Peredvizhniki). In 1863-1868 he taught at the drawing school of a society for the promotion of applied arts. He created a gallery of portraits of important Russian writers, scientists, artists and public figures (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1873, Ivan Shishkin, 1873, Pavel Mikhailovich Tretyakov, 1876, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, 1879, Sergei Botkin, 1880) in which expressive simplicity of composition and clarity of depiction emphasize profound psychological elements of character. Kramskoi's democratic ideals found their brightest expression in his portraits of peasants, which portrayed a wealth of character-details in representatives of the common people. In one of Kramskoi's most well known paintings, Christ in the Desert (1872, Tretyakov gallery), he continued Alexander Ivanov's humanistic tradition by treating a religious subject in moral Cphilosophical terms. He imbued his image of Christ with dramatic experiences in a deeply psychological and vital interpretation, evoking the idea of his heroic self-sacrifice. Aspiring to expand the ideological expressiveness of his images, Kramskoi created art that existed on the cusp of portraiture and genre-painting ("Nekrasov during the period of 'Last songs,'" 1877-C78; "Unknown Woman," 1883; "Inconsolable grief," 1884; all in Tretyakov gallery). These paintings disclose their subjects' complex and sincere emotions, their personalities and fates. The democratic orientation of Kramskoi's art, his acute critical judgments about it, and his persistent quest for objective public criteria for the evaluation of art exerted an essential influence on the development of democratic art and aesthetics in Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century.