German 1497-1543 Hans Holbein Galleries Holbein always made highly detailed pencil drawings of his portrait subjects, often supplemented with ink and colored chalk. The drawings emphasize facial detail and usually did not include the hands; clothing was only indicated schematically. The outlines of these drawings were then transferred onto the support for the final painting using tiny holes in the paper through which powdered charcoal was transmitted; in later years Holbein used a kind of carbon paper. The final paintings thus had the same scale as the original drawings. Although the drawings were made as studies for paintings, they stand on their own as independent, finely wrought works of art. How many portraits have been lost can be seen from Holbein's book (nearly all pages in the Royal Collection) containing preparatory drawings for portraits - of eighty-five drawings, only a handful have surviving Holbein paintings, though often copies have survived. David Hockney has speculated in the Hockney-Falco thesis that Holbein used a concave mirror to project an image of the subject onto the drawing surface. The image was then traced. However this thesis has not met with general acceptance from art historians. A subtle ability to render character may be noted in Holbein's work, as can be seen in his portraits of Thomas Cromwell, Desiderius Erasmus, and Henry VIII. The end results are convincing as definitive images of the subjects' appearance and personality.  Related Paintings of Hans Holbein :. | Nicolas Clerides Zheer | Portrait of a Man | Portrait of Derich Berck | Erasmus of Rotterdam | Portrait of Fane Seymour,Queen of England |
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Giovanni Toscani
Italian Painter, ca.1370-1430
BREGNO, Andrea
Italian Early Renaissance Sculptor and Architect, 1418-1503 Andrea Bregno was invited to move from Venice to Rome when the Venetian Paul II was elected Pope. During the pontificate of the Della Rovere Pope Sixtus IV he received many commissions and headed a large workshop, producing many wall tombs of cardinals and other figures of the papal curia with varying degrees of personal responsibility. He was famous among his contemporaries, and was compared to the Greek sculptor Polykleitos in the epitaph of his tomb in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, mentioned Bregno in the 1480s, in his biography of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino. Bregno often worked with Mino da Fiesole in Rome, and his refined Lombard manner was rendered more classical by the contact and by the example of Roman sculptures that were increasingly coming to light, of which Andrea Bregno was an early collector: a certain "Prospettivo Milanese", writing in 1499-1500 refers to a torso in the collection of a "Maestro Andrea" that seems to have been the Belvedere Torso. He moved in humanist circles and was an esteemed friend of the humanist in Sixtus' circle, Bartolomeo Platina, the librarian of the Vatican Library. Bregno played a significant role in the standardization of an authentically classicizing style of epigraphy, in the inscriptions that accompany his tombs. In the Sistine Chapel he collaborated with Mino da Fiesole and Giovanni Dalmata to produce the little cantoria or choristers' gallery set into the wall, with its own coffered ceiling and carved marble balusters, and the marble screen.
William Morris Prints
English Pre-Raphaelite Writer and Designer, 1834-1896 was an English architect, furniture and textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Born in Walthamstow in north London, Morris was educated at Marlborough and Oxford. In 1856, Morris became an apprentice to Gothic revival architect G. E. Street. That same year he founded the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, an outlet for his poetry and a forum for development of his theories of hand-craftsmanship in the decorative arts. In 1861, Morris founded a design firm in partnership with the artist Edward Burne-Jones, and the poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti which had a profound impact on the decoration of churches and houses into the early 20th century. Morris's chief contribution was as a designer of repeating patterns for wallpapers and textiles, many based on a close observation of nature. Morris was also a major contributor to the resurgence of traditional textile arts and methods of production. Morris wrote and published poetry, fiction, and translations of ancient and medieval texts throughout his life. His best-known works include The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), The Earthly Paradise (1868?C1870), A Dream of John Ball and the utopian News from Nowhere. Morris was an important figure in the emergence of socialism in Great Britain, founding the Socialist League in 1884, but breaking with the movement over goals and methods by the end of that decade. Morris devoted much of the rest of his life to the Kelmscott Press which he founded in 1891. The 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer is considered a masterpiece of book design.