Rachel Ruysch | Baroque painter

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), who has been called the "most celebrated Dutch woman artist of the 17th and 18th centuries", was successful for nearly 70 years as a specialist in flower paintings.

Born in The Hague, Ruysch moved to Amsterdam with her family when she was three.

Her maternal grandfather, Pieter Post, was an important architect and her father, Frederik Ruysch, an eminent scientist from whom she learned how to observe and record nature with great accuracy.

Maria Sibylla Merian | Baroque Era Illustrator

Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was a German naturalist and scientific illustrator.

She was one of the earliest European naturalists to observe insects directly. Merian was a descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Merian family.

Merian received her artistic training from her stepfather, Jacob Marrel, a student of the still life painter Georg Flegel.

Merian published her first book of natural illustrations in 1675.

Giacomo Leopardi | The Lonely Sparrow / Il Passero Solitario, 1835

D'in su la vetta della torre antica,

Passero solitario, alla campagna

Cantando vai finchè non more il giorno;

Ed erra l’armonia per questa valle.

Primavera dintorno

Brilla nell’aria, e per li campi esulta,

Caspar David Friedrich | Il sognatore, 1835 | Hermitage Museum St Petersburg

Philippe Mercier | Rococo painter

Philippe Mercier (also spelled Philip Mercier; 1689 - 18 July 1760) was an artist of French Huguenot descent from the German realm of Brandenburg-Prussia (later Kingdom of Prussia), usually defined to French school.

Active in England for most of his working life, Mercier is considered one of the first practitioners of the Rococo style, and is credited with influencing a new generation of 18th-century English artists.

Mercier was born c. 1689-1691 in Berlin, the son of Pierre Mercier (died 1729, Dresden), a Huguenot tapestry-worker.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe | Per l'Anno Nuovo / For the New Year

Tra il vecchio e il nuovo,

la sorte dona

queste ore liete;

e il passato impone

d’aver fiducia

a guardare avanti

e a guardare indietro.

Andy Warhol | Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 1982

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun | Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782

"Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat" is a signed copy by the artist of a very popular self portrait that she painted in 1782 and which is now in the collection of the baronne Edmond de Rothschild.

The pose is deliberately modelled on Rubens’s Portrait of Susanna Lunden (?) (also in the National Gallery’s collection), which was formerly, but incorrectly, known as Le Chapeau de Paille (The Straw Hat).

Francisco Goya | Vita ed Opere

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Fuendetodos, 30 marzo 1746 – Bordeaux, 16 aprile 1828) è stato un pittore ed incisore Spagnolo.

Considerato il pioniere dell’arte moderna, è stato uno dei più grandi pittori spagnoli vissuti tra la fine del XVIII secolo e dell'inizio del XIX.

I suoi dipinti, i suoi disegni e le sue incisioni riflettevano gli sconvolgimenti storici in corso e influenzarono i più importanti pittori coevi e del secolo successivo.

Luca Carlevarijs | Baroque Era / Veduta painter

Luca Carlevarijs or Carlevaris (1663-1730) was an Italian painter and engraver working mainly in Venice.

He pioneered the genre of the cityscapes (vedute) of Venice, a genre that was later widely followed by artists such as Canaletto and Francesco Guardi.

Carlevarijs was born in Udine.

He was also known as 'Luca Casanobrio' or 'Luca di ca Zenobrio', for his patronage by the latter family.

Reading / Lettura | Quotes and painting

"The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book".

Édouard Manet - Woman Reading, 1880

"La macchina tecnologicamente più efficiente che l’uomo abbia mai inventato è il libro" 

- Herman Northrop Frye CC FRSC (1912-1991) - Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) was a French Neoclassicist painter. Although he thought of himself as a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was his portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.

A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eugène Delacroix.

His exemplars, as he once explained, were "the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art ... I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator".

Louis Béroud | An elegantly dressed copyist at the Louvre, 1898

Copying was an essential part of any 19th century artist’s education and the Musée du Louvre - unlike most academies and ateliers - was open to both men and women who studied its many masterpieces.

Louis Béroud was a regular copyist at the Louvre; indeed, in August 1911, it was Béroud who alerted authorities that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was missing (the painting, stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, was returned two years later).

Béroud so relished the practice of copying works in the museum's collection, that he made at least twenty-six compositions of the subject.

Here, a woman in blue paints at an easel positioned in front of Leonardo’s monumental painting of the so-called Virgin of the Rocks.

Sitting on a stool with a protective tarp beneath her, she raises her right arm, touching her paintbrush to the surface of the canvas, her left hand resting on her hip, and a ready rag spills out of the box of supplies open on a stool to her left.

Almost all of the copyists in Béroud’s scenes are women who enjoyed access to the museum as amateur painters. | © Sotheby's

Louis Béroud | An elegantly dressed copyist at the Louvre, 1898 | Sotheby's

Charles Meynier (1768-1832) | History painter

Charles Meynier was a French painter of historical subjects in the late 18th and early 19th century. He was a contemporary of Antoine-Jean Gros und Jacques-Louis David.

Meynier was the son of a tailor.

Already at a young age he was trained by Pierre-Philippe Choffard.

He was a proficient student but nevertheless wished to become a painter, so his elder brother Meynier St-Phal, an actor at the Comédie-Française in Paris, paid for him to train from 1785 with François-André Vincent, who then enjoyed a considerable reputation.

Vladimir Borovikovsky | Portrait of Maria Lopukhina, 1797

Vladimir Lukich Borovikovsky (1757-1825) - Russian artist🎨 of Ukrainian background who was the foremost portraitist of the sentimentalist era and a master of ecclesiastic painting.

Borovikovsky lived in Ukraine until he was 31 years old, having learned the trade of painting from his father, a Cossack and a minor member of the nobility who worked as an icon painter. Only a few of his father’s icons and portraits are extant. Though deeply sincere, they are slightly rough in execution.

Jean Raoux | Rococo painter

Jean Raoux, French painter, was born at Montpellier.

After the usual course of training he became a member of the Academy in 1717 as an historical painter.

His reputation had been previously established by the acclaimed decorations executed during his three years in Italy on the palace of Giustiniani Solini in Venice, and by some easel paintings, the Four Ages of Man (National Gallery), commissioned by the grand prior of Vendôme.

Camillo Rusconi | Baroque sculptor

Camillo Ruscóni (14 July 1658 - 8 December 1728) was an Italian sculptor of the late Baroque in Rome.

His style displays both features of Baroque and Neoclassicism. He has been described as a Carlo Maratta in marble.

Initially trained in his hometown of Milan with Giuseppe Rusnati.

By 1685-1686, he had moved to Rome and into the studio of Ercole Ferrata, who died within a year or two of his arrival.

Francisque Duret | Academic sculptor

Francisque Joseph Duret (1804-1865) was a French sculptor, son and pupil of François-Joseph Duret (1732-1816).

Before becoming a sculptor, Francisque Duret had shown interest in pursuing a career in theater.

He studied for a brief time at the Conservatoire and his friend Charles Blanc (1813-1882), in an article which he dedicated in 1866, attested to the quality of observing human behavior which Duret had acquired outside his studies of drama: "His continual studies of the pantomime led him to pin down the language of gesture and the meaning of each disposition".

Ludwig van Beethoven: "L'amore vuole tutto e ha ragione.."

"L'Arte! Chi la può comprendere? A chi si può rivolgere una persona per attirare l'attenzione di questa grande Dea.."

Beethoven

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) | Beethoven

- Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) è stato la figura predominante musicale nel periodo di transizione tra l'epoca Classica e Romantica.

Beethoven fu un innovatore, che ampliò il campo di applicazione della sonata, sinfonia, concerto e quartetto, e la combinazione di voci e strumenti in un modo nuovo.

La sua vita personale è stata segnata da una lotta contro la sordità, e alcune delle sue opere più importanti sono stati composti nel corso degli ultimi 10 anni della sua vita, quando era ancora in grado di sentire.

Andrea Appiani (1754-1817) | Neoclassical painter

Andrea Appiani was an Italian🎨 neoclassical painter. He is known as "the elder", to distinguish him from his great-nephew Andrea Appiani, an historical painter in Rome.

Born in Milan, it had been intended that he follow his father's career in medicine but instead entered the private academy of the painter Carlo Maria Giudici (1723-1804) where he received instruction in drawing, copying mainly from sculpture and prints.

Godfried Schalcken (1643-1706)

Godfried Schalcken or Gottfried Schalken was a Dutch genre and portrait painter.

He was noted for his mastery in reproducing the effect of candlelight, and painted in the exquisite and highly polished manner of the Leiden fijnschilders.

Life and work

Godfried Schalcken was born in Made, North Brabant, the son of Cornelis Schalcken and Aletta Lydius.

Saint Cecilia: Patroness of Musicians

In the fourth century a Greek religious romance on the Loves of Cecilia and Valerian was written in glorification of virginal life with the purpose of taking the place of then-popular sensual romances.

Consequently, until better evidence is produced, we must conclude that St. Cecilia was not known or venerated in Rome until about the time when Pope Gelasius (496) introduced her name into his Sacramentary.

It is said that there was a church dedicated to St. Cecilia in Rome in the fifth century, in which Pope Symmachus held a council in 500.

The story of St. Cecilia is not without beauty or merit. She is said to have been quite close to God and prayed often:

"In the city of Rome there was a virgin named Cecilia, who came from an extremely rich family and was given in marriage to a youth named Valerian. She wore sackcloth next to her skin, fasted, and invoked the saints, angels, and virgins, beseeching them to guard her virginity".

Orazio Gentileschi🎨 | Saint Cecilia with an Angel