Marc Chagall | The Tree of Life, 1963 | Stained glass

The Tree of Life or The Peace window - La Paix ou L’Arbre de vie - at the chapel of Cordeliers of Sarrebourg, a small town in the Vosges Mountains in France, is a stained-glass window about 15 feet (4,6 meters) wide and 12 feet (3,7 meters) high, contains several symbols of peace and love, such as the young child in the center, being kissed by an angelic face which emerges from a mass of flowers.

The Peace Window / Tree of Life is the largest stained-glass window made by Marc Chagall.

On the left, below and above, motherhood and the people who are struggling for peace are depicted.

Musical symbols in the panel evoke thoughts of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which was a favourite of Mr. Hammarskjöld's.

Leonardo da Vinci | Ultima Cena / Last Supper, 1494-1498

Last Supper, one of the most famous artworks in the world, painted by Leonardo da Vinci probably between 1494 and 1498 for the Dominican monastery Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.

It depicts the dramatic scene described in several closely connected moments in the Gospels, including Matthew 26:21–28, in which Jesus declares that one of the Apostles will betray him and later institutes the Eucharist.

According to Leonardo’s belief that posture, gesture, and expression should manifest the “notions of the mind”, each one of the 12 disciples reacts in a manner that Leonardo considered fit for that man’s personality.

The result is a complex study of varied human emotion, rendered in a deceptively simple composition.

Leonardo da Vinci | Ultima Cena / Last Supper, 1494-1498 | Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan

Rogier van der Weyden | Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, 1435-40

Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin is a large oil and tempera on oak panel painting, usually dated between 1435-1440, attributed to the Early Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400 - 1464).

The painting is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

According to tradition, Saint Luke created the first portraits of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus from life, making him the patron saint of painters.

Here, in one of the most important Renaissance paintings in North America, Rogier van der Weyden introduces an unprecedented sense of naturalism, grounding a sacred episode in everyday experience.

5 Masterpieces at the Uffizi Gallery

The Uffizi Gallery entirely occupies the first and second floors of the large building constructed between 1560-1580 and designed by Giorgio Vasari.

It is famous worldwide for its outstanding collections of ancient sculptures and paintings (from the Middle Ages to the Modern period).

The collections of paintings from the 14th-century and Renaissance period include some absolute masterpieces: Giotto, Simone Martini, Piero della Francesca, Beato Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Mantegna, Correggio, Leonardo, Raffaello, Michelangelo and Caravaggio, in addition to many precious works by European painters (mainly German, Dutch and Flemish).

Moreover, the Gallery boasts an invaluable collection of ancient statues and busts from the Medici family, which adorns the corridors and consists of ancient Roman copies of lost Greek sculptures.

Johan Zoffany (1733-1810) | Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772-1777 | Royal Collection (UK)

10 masterpieces at the Museo Nacional del Prado

Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina | Santa Caterina, 1510 | Museo Nacional del Prado

This is one of the Spanish Renaissance’s most emblematic depictions of a female figure and the best known of Yáñez de la Almedina’s works.

Both considerations are due to the visibility this work has received at the Museo del Prado, where it has been one of the essential icons in its galleries of 16th-century Spanish painting ever since it arrived in 1946.

According to Jacopo de la Vorágine’s The Golden Legend, Saint Catherine of Alexandria was a young, wise and virtuous princess who loved the Lord.

Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina (1489-1536) | Santa Caterina, 1510 | Museo Nacional del Prado

José Luis Corella, 1959 | Classical realism painter

"A painting should be vivid, and not a mere composition of paint" - José Luis Corella.

Jose Luis Corella is a notable and prominent representative of Contemporary Spanish Realism.

The subtlety of the realism of his portraits encompasses the profound complexity of the human being, with everyday images transformed into wonderful works of art.

José Luis Corella was born in Valencia, Spain.

Jaroslav Seifert | Se al cuore si potesse dire / If one could tell one’s heart…

Se al cuore si potesse dire:

non correre!

Se potessi ordinargli: brucia!

Già si spegne.

Marc Chagall

Lucio Massari | Madonna of the Laundry, 1620

"Mary washed, Joseph laid... "

The subject of this painting really seems to illustrate the famous lullaby your grandparents or parents used to sing to you when you were a child.

You know, no one can escape household affairs, not even Joseph, Mary and Jesus!

The scene depicted by the Bolognese painter Lucio Massari (1568-1633) is in fact very unusual: every member of the Sacraiglia works with commitment and organization to clean and iron the laundry.

Lucio Massari Holy Family (Madonna of the Laundry), 1620 | Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze

François-Joseph Navez | The Massacre of the Innocents, 1824

"The massacre of the innocents' was created in 1824 by Belgian painter François-Joseph Navez (1787-1869) in Neoclassicism style.

The painting is currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"The Massacre of the Innocents" is a story from the life of Christ.

As recounted in the Gospel of Matthew (2:16-18), Herod the Great, King of Judea, ordered the slaughter of all boys under the age of two in and near the town of Bethlehem.

Herod’s larger aim was to kill the infant Jesus, who had been heralded as King of the Jews.

François-Joseph Navez | The Massacre of the Innocents, 1824 | Metropolitan Museum of Art

Corinne Geertsen, 1953 | Digital photo collage

Corinne Geertsen, born in Salt Lake City, Utah. is an Arizona artist who creates digital photocollages.

Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States, is in collections worldwide, as well as in the permanent collections of museums.

Geertsen received her BA and MFA in drawing and printmaking from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

Post-Impressionism | Art History and Sitemap

Breaking free of the naturalism of Impressionism in the late 1880s, a group of young painters sought independent artistic styles for expressing emotions rather than simply optical impressions, concentrating on themes of deeper symbolism.

Through the use of simplified colors and definitive forms, their art was characterized by a renewed aesthetic sense as well as abstract tendencies.

Vincent van Gogh | The Starry Night, 1889 | MoMA, Museum of Modern Art

Emily Dickinson: Ho un Uccello in primavera, che per me sola canta..

Durante gli anni 1850, la relazione più forte e più affettuosa della poetessa Statunitense Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) era con sua cognata, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, nota come Susan Gilbert o Sue Gilbert (poetessa Statunitense, 1830-1913).

Durante la sua vita le ha inviato oltre trecento lettere, più che a qualsiasi altro corrispondente, nel corso della loro relazione.

Susan era favorevole alle poesia della Dickinson, interpretando il ruolo di "amico, influenza, musa e consigliere più amato" i cui suggerimenti editoriali spesso venivano seguiti.

Emily Dickinson by Jane DeDecker

Orsola Caccia (1596-1676) | Mannerist painter

Orsola Maddalena Caccia, born Theodora Caccia (1596-1676) was an Italian Mannerist painter and Catholic nun.

She painted religious images, altarpieces, and still lifes.

The daughter of painter Guglielmo Caccia and Laura Olivia, she was baptized Theodora Orsola on December 4, 1596.

In 1620, she entered the Ursulines convent at Bianzè, where she changed her name to Orsola Maddalena after she took her vows.

Greek Art History and Sitemap

Greek art began in the Cycladic and Minoan civilization, and gave birth to Western classical art in the subsequent Geometric, Archaic and Classical periods (with further developments during the Hellenistic Period).

It absorbed influences of Eastern civilizations, of Roman art and its patrons, and the new religion of Orthodox Christianity in the Byzantine era and absorbed Italian and European ideas during the period of Romanticism (with the invigoration of the Greek Revolution), until the Modernist and Postmodernist.

Greek art is mainly five forms: architecture, sculpture, painting, pottery and jewelry making.

Zorba's Dance / La Danza di Zorba, 1964

Spanish Art History and Sitemap

Spanish art has been an important contributor to Western art and Spain has produced many famous and influential artists including Velázquez, Goya and Picasso.

Spanish art was particularly influenced by Italy and France during the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, but Spanish art has often had very distinctive characteristics, partly explained by the Moorish heritage in Spain (especially in Andalusia), and through the political and cultural climate in Spain during the Counter-Reformation and the subsequent eclipse of Spanish power under the Bourbon dynasty.

Pablo Picasso - Embrace, 1900

Orazio Borgianni | Baroque painter

Orazio Borgianni (6 April 1574 - 14 January 1616) was an Italian painter and etcher of the Mannerist and early-Baroque periods. He was the stepbrother of the sculptor and architect Giulio Lasso.

Borgianni was born in Rome, where he was documented in February 1604. He was instructed in the art of painting by his brother, Giulio Borgianni, called Scalzo.

The patronage by Philip II of Spain induced him to visit Spain, where he signed an inventory in January 1605.

He returned to Rome from Spain after April 1605 at the height of his career, and most of the work of his maturity was carried out 1605–16.

Marc Chagall | Stained glass windows

One of Chagall's major contributions to art has been his work with stained glass. This medium allowed him further to express his desire to create intense and fresh colors and had the added benefit of natural light and refraction interacting and constantly changing: everything from the position where the viewer stood to the weather outside would alter the visual effect (though this is not the case with his Hadassah windows).

It was not until 1956, when he was nearly 70 years of age, that he designed windows for the church at Assy, his first major project. Then, from 1958-1960, he created windows for Metz Cathedral.

Vlaho Bukovac | Post-Impressionist painter

Vlaho Bukovac (1855-1922) was born in Cavtat, near Dubrovnik. He showed inclination to drawing in his early childhood, but because of his family's poverty he could not continue his education.

At the age of eleven his uncle took him to the United States, where he spent four hard years. His uncle soon died.

In 1871, he returned to Dubrovnik and embarked as an apprentice on a merchant ship that sailed on regular line Istanbul- Odessa-Liverpool.

In 1873 he went to Latin America, where he worked as a letter drawer in a coach factory in Peru. Three years later he returned to Cavtat.

He found a sponsor in the person of Medo Pucic, a poet who recommended him to the archbishop Strossmayer, a very famous and influential Croatian at that time.

Edward Simmons (1852-1931)

Edward Emerson Simmons was an American Impressionist painter, remembered for his mural work.

Biography

His father was a Unitarian minister. He graduated from Harvard College in 1874, and was a pupil of Lefebvre and Boulanger in Paris, where he took a gold medal.

In 1894, Simmons was awarded the first commission of the Municipal Art Society, a series of murals - Justice, The Fates, and The Rights of Man - for the interior of the Criminal Courthouse at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan.

This court is the criminal branch of New York Supreme Court (the trial court in New York), where many New Yorkers serve on jury duty.

Later Simmons decorated the Waldorf Astoria New York hotel, the Library of Congress in Washington, and the mural series "Civilization of the Northwest" in the Minnesota State Capitol rotunda in Saint Paul.

Eugenè Burnand (1850-1921) | Naturalist painter

Eugène Burnand was a prolific Swiss painter and illustrator from Moudon, Switzerland.

Born of prosperous parents who taught him to appreciate art and the countryside, he first trained as an architect but quickly realised his vocation was painting.

He studied art in Geneva and Paris then settled in Versailles.

In the course of his life he travelled widely and lived at various times in Florence, Montpellier, Seppey (Moudon) and Neuchâtel.