Leo Putz | Impressionist painter

Leo Putz (1869-1940) was a Tyrolean painter. His work encompasses Art Nouveau, Impressionism and the beginnings of Expressionism. Figures and landscapes are his predominant subjects.

Leo Putz was born in Merano in South Tyrol, Italy, in 1869.

His artistic career began in 1885 under the aegis of his stepbrother.

This was Robert Poetzelberger (1856-1930) who was a professor at the Munich Academy and who taught him drawing.

Pontormo | Mannerist painter

Jacopo da Pontormo, original name Jacopo Carrucci (born May 24, 1494, Pontormo, near Empoli, Republic of Florence (Italy)-buried Jan. 2, 1557, Florence) Florentine painter who broke away from High Renaissance classicism to create a more personal, expressive style that is sometimes classified as early Mannerism.

Pontormo was the son of Bartolommeo Carrucci, a painter. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, he was apprenticed to Leonardo da Vinci and afterward to Mariotto Albertinelli and Piero di Cosimo.

Vincenzo Cardarelli | Autunno veneziano /Venetian Autumn, 1931

L'alito freddo e umido m'assale

di Venezia autunnale,

Adesso che l'estate,

sudaticcia e sciroccosa,

d'incanto se n'è andata,

una rigida luna settembrina

risplende, piena di funesti presagi,

sulla città d'acque e di pietre

che rivela il suo volto di medusa

contagiosa e malefica.

Marco Ortolan | The Venetian Mask

Agnolo Bronzino | Mannerist painter

Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1563) of Florence, Italy, known as Il Bronzino, was a Mannerist painter.

Mixing styles of the late High Renaissance into the early Baroque period, Mannerists often depicted their subjects in unnatural forms.

Bronzino’s works have been described as “icy” portraits that put an abyss between the subject and the viewer.

Cristina Fornarelli, 1978 | Pop Art painter

Cristina Fornarelli is an Italian contemporary figurative painter.

Fornarelli was born in Bari, in Southern Italy where light and colors have influenced her art.

After art school, she attended the Institute of Industrial Design in Rome, where she still lives and works.

Angelo Barabino | Divisionist painter

Angelo Barabino (Tortona, 1 January 1883 - Milan, 5 November 1950) was an Italian painter, friend and student of Giuseppe Pellizza Volpedo.

He was born in Tortona on 1 January 1883. Barabino attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and studying Volpedo who initiated him to painting in the Divisionism style.

Francesco Hayez / Shakespeare | The Kiss, 1859 / Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an

ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

Francesco Hayez | The Kiss, 1859 | Pinacoteca di Brera

Marco Busoni, 1962 | Magic Realism painter

Born in Milan, Marco Busoni, at the age of 11 he discovered the paintings of French Impressionists, in particular the works of Claude Monet awake in him the passion for painting.

He degree in aeronautical engineering and in the following year he attended at the drawing and painting lessons the “Bergognone” school of Lodi.

Rosso Fiorentino | Pietà, 1538-1540

This is the only easel painting that can be dated with certainty to Rosso's stay in France in 1530-40.

The cushions beneath Christ's body bear the blue alerions on an orange background of the coat of arms of Constable Anne de Montmorency, from whose château at Ecouen the Pietà was taken to the Louvre in the late 18th century.

The marks visible on the bodies of Christ and St John are due to an initial, reversed composition - vsible under X-ray photography - which Rosso had blacked out.

Antonio Basoli's Architectural Alphabet

Antonio Basoli (1774-1848) was an Italian painter, interior designer, scenic designer, and engraver, active mostly in Bologna.

His first teacher was his father, Lelio Andrea Basoli.

His education was motivated by an insatiable and constant interest in classic art, classic and contemporary literature, and the works, decorations and inscriptions of Piranesi.

Pietro Magni | The Reading Girl / La Lettrice, 1856

Pietro Magni's marble statue The Reading Girl brought the Milanese sculptor international fame and recognition.

It was exhibited numerous times at international exhibitions throughout Europe and America, each time to great public and critical acclaim.

Stylistically it owes much to the artistic tradition of verismo or "realism" that characterized Italian art during the middle years of the nineteenth century, but it also recalls earlier aspects of Italian romanticism.

Luca Postiglione | Genre painter

Luca Postiglione (Naples, 1876-1936) was an Italian painter, mainly of portraits, historic and genre subjects, in a Realist style.

Luca Postiglione was born in a family of painters. He was the son of the painter Luigi Postiglione.

His uncle, Salvatore Postiglione (1861-1906) was also a painter and his teacher.

Giovanni Panza | Impressionist /Genre painter

Giovanni Panza (1894-1989) was an Italian painter.

Born into a family of poets and painters, he was the nephew of Salvatore Postiglione and Luca Postiglione, sons of the painter Raphael Postiglione, who introduced him to painting.

Salvatore Postiglione | Genre painter

Salvatore Postiglione (1861-1906) was born to father Luigi (1812-1881), who was a painter of sacred subjects.

His brother, also named Luigi Postiglione and his nephew, and Luigi's son, Lucawere also painters. He studied at the Neapolitan Institute of Fine Arts under his uncle, Raffaele and Domenico Morelli.

Raimondo Roberti, 1947 | Impressionist painter

Raimondo Roberti was born in Naples, Italy.

Members of his family, who were high military officers of the Royal Fleet, strongly influenced Roberti and his lifelong attraction to all things pertaining to the sea.

His family’s isolated villa was very near the grounds of G. Gigante.

Gigante was one of the foremost exponents of Neopolitan classical painting, a painting style known as the School of Posillipo, an artistic style that Roberti would study later in life.

Francesco Vinea | Genre painter

Francesco Vinea (Forlì, August 10, 1845 - Florence, October 22, 1902) was an Italian painter, known for his period costume Genre subjects.

He studied first at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, but had to discontinue his studies due to his poverty, and spent some time traveling without home.

He worked for a photographer, also as a designer of illustrated magazines, but returned to Florence and studied under professor Enrico Pollastrini, but only for a year.

Caravaggio's hands

Revolutionary in his way of painting, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) personifies in every aspect of his eventful life the romantic figure of the damned artist.

Caravaggio was a leading Italian painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works.

Caravaggio's innovations inspired Baroque painting, but the latter incorporated the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism.

Giuseppe Gigli, 1955 | Hyperrealist painter

Giuseppe Gigli was born in Arcevia (Ancona) in 1955, where he still lives and works.

In the mid 70's, after the first paintings and exhibits, he attended various schools and workshops in Florence where he specialized in the restoration of works of art.

Giuseppe spent the following 30 years as an art restorer, consulter, and dealer, proving himself on an international level and collaborating with art historians, superintendence, auction houses, galleries and museums.

Carlo Wostry | Belle Époque painter

A painter of historical and genre subjects, Carlo Wostry (1865-1943) was also a sculptor and engraver. He studied in Vienna and also at the Baviere School in Munich, so gaining a varied and comprehensive training as a young man.

His first exhibition was in his hometown of Trieste, Italy and he painted a number of fine portraits there and soon produced a good living from his vocation as an artist.

Greatly influenced by Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931) the great portrait and genre painter from Ferare, Italy.

Giovanni Boldini | Ballerine Spagnole al Moulin Rouge, 1900

No artist captured the glamour, energy and optimism of the Parisian Belle Époque better than the Italian master Giovanni Boldini.

After leaving his native Italy for the French capital in 1871, Boldini enjoyed meteoric success, attracting the support of the city's influential dealer Adolphe Goupil as well as its most esteemed members of high society.

Among those who sat for the celebrated painter were Marchesa Luisa Casati, Consuelo Vanderbilt the Duchess of Marlborough, Count Robert de Montesquieu, Giuseppe Verdi and many other cultural and societal luminaries.

Giovanni Boldini | Ballerine Spagnole al Moulin Rouge, 1905 | Christie's