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

Women Artists | Sitemap

"Someone, I say, will remember us in the future".

"Qualcuno, dico, si ricorderà di noi in futuro".

Saffo

The absence of women from the canon of Western art has been a subject of inquiry and reconsideration since the early 1970s.

Linda Nochlin's influential 1971 essay, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" examined the social and institutional barriers that blocked most women from entering artistic professions throughout history, prompted a new focus on women artists, their art and experiences, and contributed inspiration to the Feminist art movement.

Berthe Morisot ~ French Impressionist painter

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

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

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