Royal Palace of Caserta | A triumph of Italian Baroque

The Royal Palace of Caserta is a former royal residence in Caserta, southern Italy, constructed by the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies as their main residence as kings of Naples.

It is one of the largest palaces erected in Europe during the 18th century.

In 1997, the palace was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site; its nomination described it as "the swan song of the spectacular art of the Baroque, from which it adopted all the features needed to create the illusions of multidirectional space".

Titian | Danaë and the Shower of Gold, 1560-1565

"The Danaë and the Shower of Gold") comprises at least five oil-on-canvas paintings by the Venetian master Titian, completed between 1540-1570.

The works are based on the mythological princess Danaë.

According to Ovid she was isolated in a bronze dungeon following a prophecy that her firstborn would eventually kill her father.

Although aware of the consequences, Danaë was seduced and became pregnant by Zeus (in Roman mythology Jupiter), who, inflamed by lust, descended from Mount Olympus to entice her as a shower of gold.

Karl Brjullov | The Last Day of Pompeii, 1830-33

The Last Day of Pompeii is a large canvas painting by Russian artist Karl Brjullov in 1830-33.

Brjullov visited the site of Pompeii in 1828, making numerous sketches depicting the 79 CE Vesuvius eruption.

Edvard Munch | Evening Talk, 1889

Title: Evening Talk

Author: Edvard Munch🎨 (Norwegian Symbolist / Expressionist painter, 1863-1944)

Date: 1889

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 175,6 x 216 x 9,1 cm

Current location: National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

Munch’s lifelong obsession with loneliness and psychologically twisted love relationship began with this large picture.

This was the first time that he truly played out the theme that more than anything else infused his depictions of human beings “breathing and feeling, suffering and loving”, to use the artist’s own words.

Giorgio Vasari | The Adoration of the Magi, 1566-1567

Title: The Adoration of the Magi

Artist: Giorgio Vasari🎨 (Italian Mannerist Writer and Painter, 1511-1574)

Date created: 1566-1567

Medium: Oil on panel

Dimensions: 65.00 x 48.00 cm (framed: 95.00 x 69.00 x 10.00 cm)

Current location: Scottish National Gallery

This panel is an autograph, small-scale replica of an altarpiece painted in 1566-7 for the newly elected Pope Pius V, which was destined for the pope’s burial chapel in the church of Santa Croce in his native town of Bosco Marengo in Piemonte.

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