1593-1652 French Georges de La Tour Galleries His early work shows influences from Caravaggio, probably via his Dutch followers, and the genre scenes of cheats??as in The Fortune Teller ??and fighting beggars clearly derive from the Dutch Caravaggisti, and probably also his fellow-Lorrainer, Jacques Bellange. These are believed to date from relatively early in his career. La Tour is best known for the nocturnal light effects which he developed much further than his artistic predecessors had done, and transferred their use in the genre subjects in the paintings of the Dutch Caravaggisti to religious painting in his. Unlike Caravaggio his religious paintings lack dramatic effects. He painted these in a second phase of his style, perhaps beginning in the 1640s, using chiaroscuro, careful geometrical compositions, and very simplified painting of forms. His work moves during his career towards greater simplicity and stillness ?? taking from Caravaggio very different qualities than Jusepe de Ribera and his Tenebrist followers did. He often painted several variations on the same subjects, and his surviving output is relatively small. His son Etienne was his pupil, and distinguishing between their work in versions of La Tour's compositions is difficult. The version of the Education of the Virgin, in the Frick Collection in New York is an example, as the Museum itself admits. Another group of paintings (example left), of great skill but claimed to be different in style to those of de La Tour, have been attributed to an unknown "Hurdy-gurdy Master". All show older male figures (one group in Malibu includes a female), mostly solitary, either beggars or saints. After his death in 1652, La Tour's work was largely forgotten until rediscovered by Hermann Voss, a German scholar, in 1915. In 1935 an exhibition in Paris began the revival in interest among a wider public. In the twentieth century a number of his works were identified once more, and forgers tried to help meet the new demand; many aspects of his œuvre remain controversial among art historians.  Related Paintings of Georges de La Tour :. | Die Wurfelspieler | Ijob will mock of its woman | St Jerome | Hurdy gurdy player | Carpenter Saint Joseph |
Related Artists:
GADDI, Taddeo
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1300-1366 Italian painter active in Florence. He was the son of a painter and mosaicist and a student of Giotto. His best-known works are frescoes in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. He directed a flourishing workshop for three decades, producing pictures in the style of Giotto but featuring more vivid picturesque effects with narrative detail. His son and pupil Agnolo (c. 1350 C 96) was an influential and prolific artist who likewise produced a notable series of frescoes for Santa Croce, The Legend of the True Cross
Giovanni dal ponte
Italian Painter, 1385-1437 He was reputed to have been a student of Spinello Aretino. He acquired the name dal Ponte due to the location of his studio at Santo Stefano a Ponte, Florence. He joined the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali in 1410 and the Compagnia di S Luca in 1413. Outstanding debts brought him a prison sentence in 1424, but he still owed money to a carpenter three years later. By the late 1420s he had opened his own studio and formed a partnership with the painter Smeraldo di Giovanni (c. 1365-after 1442). Giovanni dal Ponte's varied and prolific production, which continued until his death, included fresco cycles, panels and the decoration of small objects. A number of allegorical panel paintings and cassoni are attributed to him. The animated, stylized figures in the Seven Liberal Arts (1435; Madrid, Prado) are shown in a garden dotted with naturalistic flowers and plants. His early work shows the impact of the Late Gothic style.
BRAMANTE
Italian High Renaissance Architect and Painter, 1444-1514 In the first decade of the 16th century Donato Bramante was the chief architect in Rome, which had just replaced Florence as the artistic capital of Europe because the patronage of Pope Julius II (reigned 1503-1513) attracted all the leading Italian artists to that city. It is particularly the triumvirate of artists - Michelangelo the sculptor and painter, Raphael the painter, and Bramante the architect - who dominated this period, usually called the High Renaissance, and whose influence overwhelmed the following generations. Donato di Pascuccio d'Antonio, called Bramante, was born in 1444 at Monte Asdruvaldo near Urbino. Nothing is known of the first 30 years of his life. During that period, however, the court of Federigo da Montefeltro at Urbino was a flourishing humanistic and cultural center, attended by artists such as Piero della Francesca, Melozzo da Forll, and Luciano Laurana, who probably influenced the young Bramante. The first notice of Bramante dates from 1477, when he decorated the facade of the Palazzo del Podestaat Bergamo with a frescoed frieze of philosophers.