Édouard Manet | Swallows, 1873

'Swallows' was created in 1873 by French modernist painter Édouard Manet (1832-1883).

The artist’s mother in black and Madame Manet in white have taken their ease on a field behind the dunes, with their billowing skirts and bonnets tied on with veils.

The sun has just been shining, but now the sky is overcast; the artist’s wife has lowered the still opened parasol to her lap, and low flying swallows herald the change in weather.

All this has nothing anecdotal about it, but is merely the expression of the mood of the landscape, which is accentuated on the far horizon in the shape of windmills, the small church and rooftops of the village.

Vincent van Gogh | The Wheat Field series / La serie Campi di grano

The Wheat Field is a series of oil paintings executed by Vincent van Gogh in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. All of them depict the view Van Gogh had from the window of his bedroom on the top floor of the asylum: a field enclosed by stone walls just beneath his window and excluded from normal life by the rear wall of the asylum grounds; beyond this enclosure farm land, accompanied by olive groves and vineyards, ran up to the hills at the foot of the mountain range called Les Alpilles.

From May 1889-1890, Van Gogh recorded this view in changing settings: after a storm, with a reaper in the field, with fresh wheat raising in autumn and with flowers in the spring.

Alberto Sughi | Maestro del Realismo Esistenziale

Alberto Sughi (1928-2012) was born in Cesena. A self-taught painter, by the end of his formative years he had become one of the greatest Italian artists of his generation.

He started painting in the early 1950s, choosing realism in the debate between abstract and figurative art in the immediate post-war period. Even from his early works, however, Sughi’s paintings have avoided any attempt at social moralising.

They depict moments from daily life with no heroes, allowing Enrico Crispolti, in 1956, to define his work as "Existential realism".

His artistic expression proceeds, almost always, in thematic cycles, in the manner of film sequences.

Gino Romiti | Post-Macchiaioli painter

Gino Romiti (1881-1967) was born in Livorno, Italy, in a family of modest economic conditions, this does not prevent him from cultivating his passion for art.

Already at a young age he began to attend School Guglielmo Micheli, like many of his contemporaries Tuscan, where he was undoubtedly influenced by the great teacher inspires Giovanni Fattori.

Among his classmates there were some, as Llewelyn Lloyd, who became the leader of the interesting Post-Macchiaioli, consists of those who, although moving in directions autonomous artistic, always maintained a close relationship with the pictorial tradition of Tuscany.

Leonardo da Vinci | Dello Scultore e del Pittore

Trattato della Pittura

Parte prima | Capitolo 35

Leonardo da Vinci | Trattato della pittura | Testo Integrale

Lo scultore ha la sua arte di maggior fatica corporale che il pittore, cioè piú meccanica, e di minor fatica mentale, cioè che ha poco discorso rispetto alla pittura, perché esso scultore solo leva, ed il pittore sempre pone; lo scultore sempre leva di una materia medesima, e il pittore sempre pone di varie materie.

Lo scultore solo ricerca i lineamenti che circondano la materia sculta, ed il pittore ricerca i medesimi lineamenti, ed oltre a quelli ricerca ombra e lume, colore e scorto, delle quali cose la natura ne aiuta di continuo lo scultore, cioè con ombra e lume e prospettiva, le quali parti bisogna che il pittore se le acquisti per forza d'ingegno e si converta in essa natura, e lo scultore le trova di continuo fatte.