Ercole de' Roberti | The miracles of St Vincent Ferrer, 1473

Author: Ercole de' Roberti (Italian Early Renaissance painter, 1450-1496);

Title: The miracles of St Vincent Ferrer;

Date: 1473;

Medium:Tempera on wood;

Dimensions: 30 x 215 cm;

Current location: Vatican Museums

This work by Ercole de' Roberti forms the predella of the altarpiece painted by his teacher, Francesco del Cossa🎨, for the Griffoni Chapel in S. Petronio, Bologna in 1473.

The central panel is preserved in the National Gallery of London, while the side panels are in the Pinacoteca of Brera in Milan.

Francesco del Cossa | Saint Lucy, ca. 1473/1474

Artist: Francesco del Cossa (Italian Early Renaissance painter, 1435-1477);

Title: Saint Lucy / Santa Lucia;

Date: c. 1473-1474;

Medium: Tempera on poplar panel;

Dimensions overall: 77.2 × 56 cm (30 3/8 × 22 1/16 in.);

Sold: May 1936 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;

Gift: 1939 to The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC;

Current location: The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

This work originally formed part of the Griffoni Altarpiece commissioned by Floriano Griffoni for his family chapel in the church of San Petronio in Bologna.

Michelangelo Buonarroti | Tondo Doni, 1505-1506

Michelangelo painted this Holy Family for a Florentine merchant, Agnolo Doni, whose prestigious marriage to Maddalena Strozzi in 1504 took place in a period that was crucial for early 16th-century Florentine art.

The presence in the city of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael together, boosted the already lively Florentine art scene, which in the first decade of the century experienced a period of great cultural fervour.

Pellizza da Volpedo | Il Quarto Stato / The Fourth Estate, 1901

The monumental painting Il Quarto Stato /The Fourth Estate by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868-1907) portrays a group of workers on strike.

It symbolises the social protest at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the emergence of a new social class - the proletariat - which becomes aware of its rights within the new industrial society.

Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo | Il Quarto Stato / The Fourth Estate, 1901 (detail) | GAM - Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Milano, Milano

Pietro Perugino | The Certosa di Pavia Altarpiece, 1496-1500

Pietro Perugino (Italian Early Renaissance painter, ca.1445-1523) painted this altarpiece for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza.

It stood in the side chapel dedicated to the Archangel Michael in the Carthusian monastery (also known as a charterhouse or certosa) in Pavia, a town outside Milan.

The Duke was captured by invading French forces in 1499, and the altarpiece was completed in the early sixteenth century by two other painters: Fra Bartolommeo and Mariotto Albertinelli.

Édouard Manet | Le déjeuner sur l'Herbe, 1863

Rejected by the jury of the 1863 Salon, Manet🎨 exhibited Le déjeuner sur l’herbe under the title Le Bain at the Salon des Refusés (initiated the same year by Napoléon III) where it became the principal attraction, generating both laughter and scandal.

Yet in Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, Manet🎨 was paying tribute to Europe's artistic heritage, borrowing his subject from the Concert champêtre - a painting by Titian🎨 attributed at the time to Giorgione🎨 (Louvre) - and taking his inspiration for the composition of the central group from the Marcantonio Raimondi engraving after Raphael's Judgement of Paris🎨.

Dosso Dossi | Lucrezia Borgia, Duchess of Ferrara, 1518

Artist: Dosso Dossi (Italian High Renaissance painter, ca.1490-1542) (attributed to).

Date: 1518.

Medium: Oil on wood panel.

Dimensions: 74.5 × 57.2 cm.

Current location: Collezione: National Gallery of Victoria, Australia.

The recent (2008) identification of the subject of this painting as Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519) answered a long-running mystery.

This portrait had previously been considered to be that of a young man. This is largely on account of the dagger which is held in the sitter’s hands and the belief that no single Italian Renaissance🎨 portrait of a woman ever showed the sitter holding a weapon.

However, certain aspects of the painting indicate that the sitter is indeed a woman.

Ivan Kramskoi | An unknown lady, 1883

‣ Author: Ivan Kramskoi / Ива́н Крамско́й (Russian painter and art critic, 1837-1887).

‣ Title: Portrait of an Unknown Woman, also known as The Unknown Woman, An Unknown Lady or Stranger - Russian: Неизвестная.

‣ Medium: oil on canvas.

‣ Date: 1883.

‣ Provenance: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

Georges Seurat | A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884

"Bedlam", "scandal", and “hilarity” were among the epithets used to describe what is now considered Georges Seurat’s greatest work, and one of the most remarkable paintings of the nineteenth century, when it was first exhibited in Paris.

Seurat labored extensively over A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884, reworking the original as well as completing numerous preliminary drawings and oil sketches (the Art Institute has one such sketch and two drawings).

Georges Seurat | A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (detail) | Art Institute of Chicago

Gustave Caillebotte | Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877

This complex intersection, just minutes away from the Saint-Lazare train station, represents in microcosm the changing urban milieu of late nineteenth-century Paris.

Gustave Caillebotte grew up near this district when it was a relatively unsettled hill with narrow, crooked streets.

As part of a new city plan designed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, these streets were relaid and their buildings razed during the artist’s lifetime.

In this monumental urban view, which measures almost seven by ten feet and is considered the artist’s masterpiece, Caillebotte strikingly captured a vast, stark modernity, complete with life-size figures strolling in the foreground and wearing the latest fashions.

Venice in the 19th-Century paintings

Friedrich Nerly🎨 (German painter, 1842–1919) Piazza San Marco in Venedig bei Mondlicht, 1871

A Visit to Venice

by Ivan Sergeevič Turgenev - Novel "On the Eve", 1860

"Whoever has not seen Venice in the month of April will find it hard to picture to himself the indescribable charm of this fairy city. The softness and mildness of spring are to Venice, what the bright summer sun is to glorious Genoa, or what the purple golden autumn is to ancient Rome.

Like spring, the beauty of Venice excites and arouses our softest desires; it animates and stirs the unspoiled heart like the promise of some near, undefined, mysterious pleasure".

Vincent van Gogh | Wheatfield under Thunderclouds, 1890

Landscapes inspired overwhelming, but also very complex emotions in Vincent van Gogh🎨 (1853-1890).

The paintings of wheatfields are an expression of extreme sadness and loneliness, while they at the same time embody the strength he derived from them.

In 1890, an emotionally unsettled, humorless and argumentative Van Gogh was sent by his brother to the rural French city of Auberge Ravoux where he lived under the care and supervision of Dr. Cachet.

For almost three months until his death on July 29th of that year Van Gogh made about 70 paintings, thirteen of which focused on the wheat harvest from the middle of late July.

Edvard Munch | Love and Pain, 1893-1895

Love and Pain is a painting by Edvard Munch🎨. It has also been called Vampire, though not by Munch.

Munch painted six different versions of the subject in the period 1893-1895:

• Three versions are at the Munch Museum in Oslo;
• One is at the Gothenburg Museum of Art;
• One is owned by a private collector;
• The last one is unaccounted for.

He also painted several versions and derivatives in his later career.

The painting shows a woman with long flame-red hair kissing a man on the neck, as the couple embrace.

Edvard Munch | Vampire, 1895 | The Munch Museum Oslo

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

Claude Monet | The Geese / Le oche, 1874

The Geese was painted a few months after the first Impressionist exhibition and the painting's bright tone and thickly applied touches of color are characteristic of Monet’s🎨 experimental technique during this period.

More unusual is the painting’s vertical format and dense composition.

Tall trees shade a path that leads our eye from the rippling water in the foreground to the diminutive figures of a woman and child standing in front of a sunlit, whitewashed building. | © The Clark Art Institute

Johannes Vermeer | The Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665

Girl with a Pearl Earring / Meisje met de parel is Vermeer’s most famous painting.

It is not a portrait, but a ‘tronie’ - a painting of an imaginary figure. Tronies depict a certain type or character; in this case a girl in exotic dress, wearing an oriental turban and an improbably large pearl in her ear.

Johannes Vermeer was the master of light. This is shown here in the softness of the girl’s face and the glimmers of light on her moist lips. And of course, the shining pearl. | © Mauritshuis Museum in Hague

Adam de Coster | Baroque / Genre painter

Little is known of the biography of Adam de Coster (1586 in Mechelen - 4 May 1643 in Antwerp).

Born in 1586 in the Flemish city of Mechelen, a province of Antwerp, he appears to have spent much of his career in Antwerp and became a Master of the Guild of Saint Luke around 1607.

His portrait was reproduced as an engraving in Anthony van Dyck's🎨 Iconography, where he was described as "pictor noctium", signaling that his reputation as a painter of night scenes had firmly been established in Northern Europe by the 1630s.

Although documentary evidence only ever records de Coster outside of Antwerp in 1635 when he visited Hamburg, Nicolson has noted that correspondences between his paintings and the works of the Lombard artist Antonio Campi suggest a possible sojourn to Italy.

Hubert Robert | Visionary painter

Hubert Robert, (born May 22, 1733, Paris, France - died April 15, 1808, Paris), French🎨 landscape painter sometimes called Robert des Ruines because of his many romantic representations of Roman ruins set in idealized surroundings.

Robert left Paris for Rome in 1754 and studied at the French Academy there.

He also met the French painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard in Rome, and in 1760 they traveled together with the Abbé de Saint-Non through southern Italy on a drawing expedition.

Robert developed a strong fascination with architecture and ruins, and he was strongly influenced by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the renowned etcher of architectural subjects who was then publishing his great collections of etchings of Roman architecture.

Among Robert’s best-known works from his Roman period is a series of red chalk drawings of the gardens at the Villa d’Este, that feature the garden’s dilapidated Classical-style architecture set in an overgrown landscape and animated with small human figures.

Hubert Robert | The Grande Galerie of the Louvre

Hubert Robert🎨 (22 May 1733 - 15 April 1808), was a French painter🎨, noted for his landscape paintings and picturesque depictions of ruins.

In 1784 Louis XVI appointed him keeper of his pictures and gave him responsibility for creating a museum at the Louvre🎨.

For biographical notes and earlier works by Hubert Robert see:

• Hubert Robert | Visionary painter🎨.