Lorenzo Bartolini | Faith in God / Fiducia in Dio, 1835

Lorenzo Bartolini🎨's "Fiducia in Dio" is the artist's best-known work and, more generally, is emblematic of Italian sculpture🎨 in the generation after Canova🎨. The model recalls Canova🎨's Mary Magdalen, but the work is more indebted to the observation of nature than the influence of the antique. It typifies the move towards a softer Neo-classicism which made way for Romanticism in Italian sculpture🎨.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo | Vita ed opere

Tièpolo, Giambattista - Pittore (Venezia 1696 - Madrid 1770), tra i massimi esponenti del rococò e ultimo grande protagonista della decorazione monumentale in Europa.

Tièpolo lavorò in Italia e all'estero, lasciando numerose opere, nelle quali, sempre aggiornato sulle ultime tendenze artistiche, mostra una stupefacente capacità di assorbire con naturalezza le intonazioni stilistiche dai più differenti pittori, rielaborandole poi con la propria sensibilità e una tecnica rapida.

Grazie a lui la tradizione decorativa veneziana tornò a imporsi sulla scena artistica del suo tempo.

Tra le opere più significative dell'evoluzione della sua arte vi sono gli affreschi del palazzo arcivescovile di Udine (1726-30), le tele per la Scuola del Carmine a Venezia (1743), uno dei suoi capolavori, e gli affreschi per la residenza di Carlo Filippo di Greiffenklau a Würzburg (1751-53).

Leo Tolstoy: "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself"

Ilia Efimovich Repin (Ukrainian-born Russian Realist painter, 1844-1930)| Portrait of Leo Tolstoy, 1887

Best known for his two classic novels, 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina' Leo Tolstoy, in full Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy / Лев Никола́евич Толсто́й (1828-1910), was a Russian writer, a master of realistic fiction and one of the world’s greatest novelists.

• "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself".

• "Tutti pensano a cambiare il mondo, ma nessuno pensa a cambiare se stesso".

• "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way".

• "Tutte le famiglie felici si assomigliano fra loro, ogni famiglia infelice è infelice a suo modo".

• "If you look for perfection, you'll never be content".

• "Se cerchi la perfezione, non ti accontenterai mai".

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)

The art of Jacques-Louis David embodies the style known as Neoclassicism, which flourished in France during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

David championed a style of rigorous contours, sculpted forms, and polished surfaces; history paintings, such as his Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (Musée du Louvre, Paris) of 1789, were intended as moral exemplars.

He painted in the service of royalty, radical revolutionaries, and an emperor; although his political allegiances shifted, he remained faithful to the tenets of Neoclassicism, which he transmitted to a generation of students, including Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson, François Gérard, Baron Antoine Jean Gros and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

William Turner | Romantic painter

J.M.W. Turner, in full Joseph Mallord William Turner, (born April 23, 1775, London, England - died December 19, 1851, London), English Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, colour, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity.

Turner was perhaps the greatest landscapist of the 19th century.

Although brought up in the academic traditions of the 18th century, he became a pioneer in the study of light, colour, and atmosphere.

Friedrich Nietzsche | Venice / Venezia

Luca Carlevarijs (Italian painter, 1663-1730) | View of the Molo Venice looking west

Venice

By the bridge I stood

recently in the brown night.

From the distance came the sound of song;

golden drops surged away

over the vibrating surface.

Venezia

Stavo sul ponte,

poco tempo fa, nella notte bruna.

Di lontano giungeva un canto:

gocce d’oro affioravano

sulla superficie vibrante.

Canaletto | Veduta painter

Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697-1768), popularly known as Canaletto, was born in 1697 in Venice, but resided in England for a large portion of his life.

His father, Bernardo Canal, was a scene painter, and he trained Canaletto from a young age.

His earliest paintings are mostly carefully composed, but freely painted, studies of older artists such as Van Wittel and Luca Carlevaris.

Francesco Trevisani (1656-1746) | Rococo painter

Francesco Trevisani was an Italian painter🎨, active in the period called either early Rococo or late Baroque (barochetto).

Born in Capodistria, Istria (modern Koper now in Slovenia, then part of the Republic of Venice), he was the son of Antonio Trevisani, an architect, by whom he was instructed in the first rudiments of design. He then studied in Venice under Antonio Zanchi.

He moved to Rome, where he remained until his death, in 1746. His brother, Angelo Trevisani remained a prominent painter in Venice.

Antonio Balestra (1666-1740) | Baroque painter

Antonio Balestra was a painter and engraver from a merchant family in Verona, Italy.

He was an enthusiastic amateur painter, but at the age of 17, following the sudden death of his father, he had to interrupt his studies to take care of the family business with his brothers.

Subsequently, he decided to dedicate himself to painting and moved to Venice for three years.

Pietro Rotari | Baroque painter

Pietro Antonio Rotari (1707-1762) was an Italian painter and pastellist who was born in Verona.

Here he initially trained with Antonio Balestra, then moved to Venice and studied with Giovanni Battista Piazzetta.

In 1727, he went to Rome and in 1729 to Naples, where he worked with Francesco Solimena.

He later returned to Verona where he opened a private drawing academy and was made a count in 1749.

Pietro Antonio Rotari | A peasant girl In profile wearing a white scarf

Pietro Antonio Rotari 1707-1762) was an Italian painter of the Baroque period.

Born in Verona, he led a peripatetic career, and died in Saint Petersburg, where he had traveled to paint for the Russian court.

His portraits, mostly of women, are renowned for being beautiful and realistic.

Rotari's works were generally limited to royal portraits held by notables such as emperors and court ladies.

Benedetto Luti | Baroque painter

Benedetto Luti (17 November 1666 - 17 June 1724) was an Italian painter.

In 1691, he moved to Rome, where he was patronized by Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, an enthusiast of Luti's pastel portraiture.

Luti was one of the first artists to work in pastels as the final composition as opposed to initial studies for paintings or frescoes.

He also worked in oils and painted frescoes, including for the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano.

Luti was also a successful art dealer and ran a school of drawing; among his pupils were Giovanni Domenico Piastrini, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Claude Arnulphy, Jean-Baptiste van Loo, William Kent, Charles-André van Loo, Gaetano Sardi, Agostino Ratti, Pietro Bianchi and Placido Costanzi.

Knighting

In 1720, he was knighted in the Academy of St Luke of Rome and elected Principe.

The appointment was not without controversy, since some:

"could not find anything (of Luti's) worthy of memory for the benefit of the arts. Pascoli's of account Luti, found him a deep intellect, and even more knowledgeable of the works that he draws, although ... because he knew too much and was never satisfied, he oftentimes recycled thoughts and figures: he did not make friends with anyone, and for this reason, when was elected Prince of the Academy, there was not much applause".

The next year he dedicated himself to painting frescoes the cupola of the Church of Santi Luca e Martina in Rome. | © Wikipedia

Benedetto Luti (1666-1724) è stato un pittore Italiano.

Nato a Firenze, Benedetto Luti si formò artisticamente nella città natale presso lo studio del Gabbiani spinto dal padre Jacopo.

Dopo il primo periodo di apprendistato fiorentino, Luti si trasferì a Roma nel 1691, grazie all'aiuto di Cosimo III de' Medici, che ne apprezzava le qualità di ritrattista a pastello.

A Roma Luti, dove poté giovarsi dei consigli di Ciro Ferri, divenne, insieme a Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, uno dei più prestigiosi artisti della corrente classicista del XVIII secolo, derivata dagli insegnamenti di Carlo Maratta e Francesco Trevisani, ma fu anche collezionista e mercante d'arte.

Autore spesso di pastelli o di opere di piccolo formato, Luti si cimentò solo in pochi casi in imprese di ampio respiro: basti citare la decorazione, con l'apoteosi di Martino V, della sala del Trono di Palazzo Colonna, la tela con San Carlo Borromeo e gli appestati della galleria di Schlessheim e la Vestizione di San Ranieri per il Duomo di Pisa, 1712.

Una delle sue opere migliori è la tela ovale con il Profeta Isaia (1718) nella navata della Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, appartenente al ciclo di lavori promossi da papa Clemente XI.

Nella chiesa del Crocifisso di Pontedera è presente una sua tela con La madonna del Rosario.

Fu insegnante di disegno nell'Accademia di Francia di Palazzo Mancini.

Tra gli allievi della sua celebrata scuola di disegno vanno ricordati alcuni artisti di primo piano come Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Jean-Baptiste van Loo, Giovanni Antonio Grecolini e Charles-André van Loo.

Fu anche membro dell'Accademia di San Luca che diresse nel 1720.

Benedetto Luti, divenuto con il tempo molto apprezzato anche all'estero, dipinse «molti anni per la Francia, per l'Inghilterra, e per la Germania» come afferma lo storico perugino Lione Pascoli nel suo Vite de' pittori, scultori, ed architetti moderni. | © Wikipedia

Market painting | Page 3

Constantine Paul Lafargue (1729-1782)

Jean-Baptiste Greuze | Broken Eggs, 1756

Broken Eggs attracted favorable comment when exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1757.

One critic noted that the young serving girl had a noble pose worthy of a history painter.

The canvas was painted in Rome, but the principal source may have been a seventeenth-century Dutch work by Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635-1681) - State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, which Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French painter, 1725-1805) would have known from an engraving.

The broken eggs symbolize the loss of the girl's virginity. | © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Marcantonio Franceschini | Baroque painter

Marcantonio Franceschini, (born April 5, 1648, Bologna, Papal States [Italy] - died Dec. 24, 1729, Bologna), Italian painter🎨, a leading artist of the Bolognese school of the Baroque period🎨.

Franceschini worked in Genoa, Modena, and Rome as well as in Bologna and worked extensively for patrons in Austria and Germany.

He was made director of the Clementina Academy in Bologna in 1721.

Franceschini was the last important representative of the tradition of the Carracci🎨; the works of Lodovico Carracci🎨 and Francesco Albani are the main sources of his style.

Donato Creti | Baroque painter

Donato Creti (24 February 1671 - 31 January 1749) was an Italian painter🎨 of the Rococo period, active mostly in Bologna.

Born in Cremona, he moved to Bologna, where he was a pupil of Lorenzo Pasinelli.

He is described by Wittkower as the "Bolognese Marco Benefial", in that his style was less decorative and edged into a more formal neoclassical style.

It is an academicized grand style, that crystallizes into a manneristic🎨 neoclassicism, with crisp and frigid modeling of the figures.

Norbert Goeneutte | Impressionist painter

From: The National Gallery

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Born in Paris, Norbert Gœneutte (1854-1894) enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1872, studying first under Isidore Pils, who died in 1875, and then under his replacement, Henri Lehmann.

In the mid-1870s he met Marcellin Desboutin, who taught him etching.

He was associated with the Impressionists, especially Renoir, and in the 1880s painted Parisian scenes, from famous landmarks to boulevard subjects.

He also worked in Brittany, Normandy and Bordeaux.

In his later years he settled in Auvers-sur-Oise. | © The National Gallery

Market painting | Page 2

Hendrik Martensz Sorgh (Dutch Baroque Era painter, ca.1611-1670)

Donato Creti | Astronomical Observations, 1711

Donato Creti (24 February 1671 - 31 January 1749) was an Italian painter🎨 of the Rococo period, active mostly in Bologna.

The series of Astronomical observations was commissioned in 1711 by the Bolognese count Luigi Marsili.

He had the artist Donato Creti paint all the planets in as many small pictures and made a gift of these to the Pope to convince him of the importance for the Holy Church of an astronomical observatory.

The gift made it possible to achieve his goal, because with the support of Clement XI (pontiff from 1700-1721) the first public astronomical observatory was opened in Bologna a short time later.

Donato Creti | Osservazioni Astronomiche - Marte

Sculptures in Notre-Dame de Paris

Notre-Dame de Paris🎨 - Stone, copper and bronze statues, including statues of the twelve Apostles that surrounded the base of the spire, had been removed from the site days prior to the 2019 fire as part of the renovations.

Adam - West facade