Art History Resource Guide

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci (1503-05; Louvre, Paris), a portrait of the wife of a Florentine official, Francesco del Giocondo.

Private chapel of the popes in Rome, one of the principal glories of the Vatican.

From The Bloomsbury Guide to Art
A polyptych painted primarily by Jan van Eyck, possibly with the assistance of his brother Hubert van Eyck. It is also known as the Altarpiece of the Holy Lamb.

From Encyclopaedia of the Renaissance
A large-scale triptych commissioned from Hugo van der Goes by Tommaso Portinari, the Italian agent of the Medici in Bruges, for the church of the hospital of Sta Maria Nuova, Florence (now in the Uffizi).

16th-century reformation that arose largely in answer to the Protestant Reformation; sometimes called the Catholic Reformation. Although the Roman Catholic reformers shared the Protestants' revulsion at the corrupt conditions in the church, there was present none of the tradition breaking that characterized Protestantism.

1449–92, Italian merchant prince, called Lorenzo il Magnifico [the magnificent]. He was a patron of Sandro Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi, Andrea del Verrocchio, Michelangelo, and other famed artists.

Office of the pope, head of the Roman Catholic Church. He is pope by reason of being bishop of Rome and thus, according to Roman Catholic belief, successor in the see of Rome (the Holy See) to its first bishop, St. Peter.

From The Bloomsbury Guide to Art
The encouragement and support, often financial, of artists and craftspeople. In the Middle Ages there were two main sources of patronage - the church and the State.

Religious and political movement in 16th-century Europe to reform the Roman Catholic Church, which led to the establishment of the Protestant churches.

Period in European cultural history that began in Italy around 1400 and lasted there until the end of the 1500s.

Altdorfer's major contribution to the history of European painting is his powerful imaginative vision of landscape.

The German painter, printmaker, and theorist Albrecht Dürer is generally acknowledged to be the most significant figure in the history of European art outside Italy in the period of the Renaissance.

Brueghel, or Breughelall: broiʹgəl, Du. bröʹgəl, outstanding family of Flemish genre and landscape painters. The foremost, Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, c.1525–1569, called Peasant Bruegel, studied in Antwerp with his future father-in-law, Pieter Coeck van Aelst, but was influenced primarily by Bosch.

Real name Donato di Betto Bardi. Florentine sculptor, regarded as the greatest sculptor of the quattrocento, who was greatly influenced by classical sculpture and contemporary humanist theories.

Fra Bartolommeo was born Baccio della Porta in Florence where he trained in the workshop of Cosimo Roselli.

Hans Baldung (Grien) was a German painter and engraver. He was born at Swäbisch-Gmünd but settled in Strasbourg where he became a member of the city council in his later years.

German painter and woodcut artist who spent much of his career as a portrait artist at the court of Henry VIII of England.

The Flemish painter Jan or Jennyn Gossaert is also known as Mabuse, this name deriving from Mauberge in Hainault, where he was born.

401–1428?, Italian painter. He is the foremost Italian painter of the Florentine Renaissance in the early 15th cent. Masaccio's original name was Tommaso Guidi. He was enrolled in the guild of St. Luke in 1424. Most of the creations of his brief lifetime have perished.

German painter, architect, and engineer. His altarpiece at Isenheim, southern Alsace, (1515, Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France), with its grotesquely tortured figure of Jesus and its radiant Resurrection, is his most important work.

Florentine painter. He depicted religious and mythological subjects. He was patronized by the ruling Medici family and was deeply influenced by their neo-Platonic circle.

Born near Florence, the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati trained in the workshop of Pisa Cathedral, where his first independent work is found (1536).

Florentine painter. He depicted religious and mythological subjects. He was patronized by the ruling Medici family and was deeply influenced by their neo-Platonic circle.

1500–1571, Italian sculptor, metalsmith, and author. His remarkable autobiography (written 1558–62), which reads like a picaresque novel, is one of the most important documents of the 16th cent.

Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, and scientist, b. near Vinci, a hill village in Tuscany. The versatility and creative power of Leonardo mark him as a supreme example of Renaissance genius.

Italian architect, painter, and art historian, noted for his Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550; 1568), a principal source for the history of Italian Renaissance art.

1571–1610, Italian painter. His strong chiaroscuro technique of partially illuminating figures against a dark background was immediately adopted by his contemporaries.

Spanish painter. He painted elegant portraits and intensely emotional religious scenes with increasingly distorted figures and unearthly light.

Venetian painter, whose real name was Jacopo Robusti. Tintoretto is considered one of the greatest painters in the Venetian tradition. He was called Il Tintoretto [little dyer] from his father's trade.

Venetian painter. Of the very first rank among the artists of the Renaissance, Titian had an immense influence on succeeding generations of painters, especially in his use of color.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. Active in his native Florence and in Rome, his giant talent dominated the High Renaissance. The marble David (1501-04; Accademia, Florence) set a new standard in nude sculpture.

Raphael was the common name of the Italian painter Raffaello Sanzio or Santi.

In this program, journalist Fiona Bruce tells the story behind some of Leonardo da Vinci’s best known works, then investigates the claim of a newly discovered da Vinci masterpiece. Bruce travels to the artist’s birthplace in Tuscany and follows in his footsteps to Florence, and with the aid of curators, biographers, and art historians reveals facets of da Vinci’s life through a study of his drawings and paintings. In Paris,

The Mystery of Jan van Eyck tells the stories of some of the Flemish master’s most significant paintings—The Ghent Altarpiece, The Arnolfini Marriage, The Dresden Triptych, Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati, and Portrait of Baudouin de Lannoy, to name only five—with quiet authority and deep respect.