Dita Omuri | Fashion/Abstract painter

Award winning artist Dita Omuri, born and raised in northern Albania, escaped her home country running towards the unknown and away from the restricted ways of expressing her emotions through art.
From a very young age, Dita’s sketchbook was her constant companion. By winning a young art competition she secured a scholarship at a traditional Art school aged 14. Learning the “Old Masters Techniques” and becoming aware that the only legal art form in Albania was Social Realism. Her passion for art, freedom and creativity was stifled in Albania.

William Shakespeare | The Sonnets, 1609

Italian translation ➦ William Shakespeare ~ I Sonetti, 1609

Sonnet V

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,

Will play the tyrants to the very same

And that unfair which fairly doth excel:

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there;

Sap cheque'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness every where:

Then, were not summer's distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:

But flowers distill'd though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Tom Lovell | Western painter and illustrator

Tom Lovell (1909-1997) was a founding member of the National Academy of Western Art. He received many honors for his illustrations and paintings. He was winner of the prestigious Prix de West award twice for his paintings. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators in 1974. In 1992, Lovell received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Robert Lougheed Memorial Award for Traditional Painter of Western History.

Robert Hagan, 1947 | Western painting

Robert Hagan raised in the lush, languorous sub-tropical northern New South Wales, Australia and educated at Newcastle University, he communicates in a typical offhanded Aussie manner.

Widely traveled with studios in Suffolk, England, San Diego, USA, Southport, Australia and Pattaya, Thailand.

Lorenzo Bartolini | Neoclassical sculptor

Lorenzo Bartolini (7 January 1777 - 20 January 1850) has been recognised as one of the great sculptors of Europe.

His style is quite different from the traditional Neo-Classical style of Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, because it is not based on the antique or on standard Academic principles.

He was a controversial and polemical artist.

His fascinating life has all the drama of a novel by Stendhal.

Giambologna | Hercules and the Centaur Nessus, 1599

The marble group of Hercules and the Centaur Nessus, was completed in 1599 by Flemish sculptor Giambologna, born Jean Boulogne (1529-1608). The sculpture was carved, impressively, from a single block of marble by Giambologna and it sits in the open-air gallery Loggia dei Lanzi on the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, among the square's other famous marble occupants.

Showing an advanced understanding of anatomy - visible in Hercules' rib cage, showing through his taut skin and the veined legs of the centaur, poised in battle - Giambologna's statue is a powerful evocation of the strength of mortal man.

Lorenzo Bartolini | The Nymph Arnina, 1825

For the first time ever, the original marble The Nymph Arnina by Lorenzo Bartolini (1777-1850), was exposed to the public for the first time on 18 November until February 8th 2015, accompanied by his beautiful plaster cast, owned by the Academy Gallery, returned after being deposited for a few decades at the Civic Museum of Prato, and together with some documents aimed to evoke the complex history of the work that Bartolini, in this version, shows the dedication to Giovanni degli Alessandri, leading figure in the cultural life of the early nineteenth century Florentine.

Pio Fedi ~ The Rape of Polyxena, 1865 | Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence

The Rape of Polyxena is a marble statue located in the Loggia dei Lanzi, the  open-air museum in Florence, Italy’s Piazza della Signoria.
It was sculpted in 1868 by Italian sculptor who worked chiefly in the Romantic style, Pio Fedi (1815-1892), but it was placed alongside several sculptures from the Renaissance. The Rape of Polyxena embodies Hellenistic, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassicist mannerisms regarding its style and theme. Fedi intricately blended multiple styles and stories in order to construct The Rape of Polyxena. The most prominent literary sources of the Greek legend concerning Polyxena are Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Euripides’ Hecuba and Bocaccio’s Famous Women. This project discusses the various sources of the scene presented and the different sculptures that may have inspired Fedi to create his work.