French Baroque Era Painter, 1594-1665 French painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. His supreme achievement as a painter lies in his unrivalled but hard-won capacity to subordinate dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. The development of his art towards this end was focused on the search for a point of equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s. Poussin did not aspire to the classicism of Raphael's idealized human forms or Michelangelo's re-embodiment of the physical splendours of the antique world, nor did he attempt to vie with the bravura and energy of Annibale Carracci's treatment of Classical mythology in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Equally he was not concerned with the illusionistic effects and heightened emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco. He was concerned above all with interpreting his subject-matter, whether Classical or religious, and telling a story with the greatest possible concentration of emotional response,  Related Paintings of POUSSIN, Nicolas :. | Landscape with Diogenes af | The Martyrdom of St Erasmus sg | The Triumph of David a | L.Hiver ou Le deluge | A Roman Road af |
Related Artists:
RIJCKHALS, Frans
Dutch painter (b. 1600, Middelburg, d. 1647, Middelburg)
Maso da San Friano
(1536-1571) was an Italian painter active in Florence. His real name was Tomaso D'Antonio Manzuoli. He was born in San Friano and died in Florence. According to Giorgio Vasari, Maso was a pupil of Pier Francesco Foschi while others claim it was Carlo Portelli. He collaborated with an elder Michelangelo on some projects. His altarpiece of the Visitation was painted in 1560 for the church of San Pier Maggiore of Florence - now in Trinity Hall Chapel, Cambridge, England. A similar work can be seen in the Prato cathedral. After 1561, he painted in the church of Ognissanti, Florence and in the church of Santa Felicita. He participated in the decoration of the Studiolo of Francesco I with an oval canvas relating the Fall of Icarus story (1572). The canvas has an affected milling in individuals below and an anomalous perspective; both are classic features of mannerist painting. His second contribution Mining of Diamonds. A portrait of Ferdinando I de' Medici (1570) by Maso can be found in the Town Council Hall of Prato. He is thought to be one of part of the Contra-Maniera or Counter-Mannerism movement in Florence. His most important pupils were Jacopo da Empoli and Alessandro Fei. One of his paintings, thought to be of Cosimo I de Medici in 1560, is believed to be the oldest to show a watch
Crane, Walter
English Golden Age Illustrator, 1845-1915 English painter, illustrator, designer, writer and teacher. He showed artistic inclinations as a boy and was encouraged to draw by his father, the portrait painter and miniaturist Thomas Crane (1808-59). A series of illustrations to Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott (Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Houghton Lib.) was shown first to Ruskin, who praised the use of colour, and then to the engraver William James Linton, to whom Crane was apprenticed in 1859. From 1859 to 1862 Crane learnt a technique of exact and economical draughtsmanship on woodblocks.