15th century Artists | Sitemap

At the end of the Middle Ages, art across Europe was dominated by a decorative and refined manner known as the International Style.

Ornate, with brilliant color and gilding, it reflected courtly tastes and continued, for some time, to attract patrons in Milan, Ferrara, and other aristocratic Italian cities, even as more naturalistic Renaissance styles began to take root elsewhere.

By the mid-1400s, in Florence especially, both artists and patrons had begun to embrace new subjects and approaches.

Pio Fedi | Love story of Dionora and Ippolito

Ancient Art | Sitemap

Ancient Art refers to the many types of art produced by the advanced cultures of ancient societies with some form of writing, such as those of ancient China, India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestine, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

The art of pre-literate societies is normally referred to as prehistoric art and is not covered here.

Although some pre-Columbian cultures developed writing during the centuries before the arrival of Europeans, on grounds of dating these are covered at pre-Columbian art and articles such as Maya art, Aztec art, and Olmec art.

Ancient Rome / La Civiltà romana

Johannes Vermeer | Legacy

Originally, Vermeer's (1632-1675) works were largely overlooked by art historians for two centuries after his death. A select number of connoisseurs in the Netherlands did appreciate his work, yet even so, many of his works were attributed to better-known artists such as Metsu or Mieris.

The Delft master's modern rediscovery began about 1860, when German museum director Gustav Waagen saw The Art of Painting in the Czernin gallery in Vienna and recognized the work as a Vermeer, though it was attributed to Pieter de Hooch at that time.

Research by Théophile Thoré-Bürger culminated in the publication of his catalogue raisonné of Vermeer's works in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1866.

Symbolism Art History and Sitemap

Symbolism initially developed as a French literary movement in the 1880s, gaining popular credence with the publication in 1886 of Jean Moréas’ manifesto in Le Figaro.

Reacting against the rationalism and materialism that had come to dominate Western European culture, Moréas proclaimed the validity of pure subjectivity and the expression of an idea over a realistic description of the natural world.

This philosophy, which would incorporate the poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s conviction that reality was best expressed through poetry because it paralleled nature rather than replicating it, became a central tenet of the movement.

Marie Spartali Stillman (1844-1927) Love's Messenger, 1885

Photographers | Art History and Sitemap

The history of photography began in remote antiquity with the discovery of two critical principles: camera obscura image projection and the observation that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light.

Apart from a possibly photographic but unrecognized process used on the Turin Shroud there are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.

Around 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze captured cut-out letters on a bottle of a light-sensitive slurry, but he apparently never thought of making the results durable.

Frank Horvat, 1928 ~ Pioneer of digital photography

Italian Art History and Sitemap

Italian art has influenced several major movements throughout the centuries and has produced several great artists, including painters, architects and sculptors.

Today, Italy has an important place in the international art scene, with several major art galleries, museums and exhibitions; major artistic centres in the country include Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Naples, Palermo, Lecce and other cities.

Italy is home to 53 World Heritage Sites, the largest number of any country in the world.

Leonardo da Vinci | La Gioconda (1503-1505) Musée-du-Louvre

Austrian Art History and Sitemap

Egon Schiele

Austria is known for its contributions to music, especially during the Classical and Romantic periods.

The major work of outsiders such as Ludwig van Beethoven (from Bonn [Germany]), Johannes Brahms (from Hamburg), and - in part - Richard Strauss (from Munich) is no less associated with Vienna than that of such natives of Austria and the empire as Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler and Hugo Wolf.

German Art History and Sitemap

August Friedrich Siegert (1786-1869)

German Art has a long and distinguished tradition in the visual arts, from the earliest known work of figurative art to its current output of contemporary art.

Germany has only been united into a single state since the 19th century, and defining its borders has been a notoriously difficult and painful process.

For earlier periods German art often effectively includes that produced in German-speaking regions including Austria, Alsace and much of Switzerland, as well as largely German-speaking cities or regions to the east of the modern German borders.