Baroque art | History and Sitemap

Baroque was the principal European style in the visual arts of the 17th century.

The term covers various national styles that range from the complex and dramatic Italian art of the 17th century to the restrained genre scenes, still-lifes and portraits characteristic of the Dutch Baroque.

In Italy, Caravaggio painted altarpieces and introduced innovations such as dramatic lighting effects that influenced painters like Artemisia Gentileschi. Other artists, such as the Giovanni Battista Gaulli and Pietro da Cortona, executed illusionistic ceiling paintings.

Gianlorenzo Bernini, the most celebrated Baroque artist in Rome, produced the famous baldacchino (central altar) of St Peter’s and groundbreaking sculptural works such as Apollo and Daphne.

In Spain, Francisco de Zurbarán executed pious religious paintings, and Diego Velázquez became the great painter of the Spanish Baroque.

In northern Europe, the Netherlands was divided into two parts, the Northern Netherlands (present day Netherlands) and the Southern Netherlands (present day Belgium and part of France), each usually referred to as Holland (North) and Flanders (South).

Johannes Vermeer | Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665

Czech Artists | Sitemap

Czech art is the visual and plastic arts that have been created in the present day Czech Republic and the various states that occupied the Czech lands in the preceding centuries.

The Czech lands have produced artists that have gained recognition throughout the world, including Alfons Mucha, widely regarded as one of the key exponents of the Art Nouveau style, and František Kupka, a pioneer of abstract art.

The lands now forming the Czech Republic have produced several important finds of prehistoric art, notably the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, a pottery Venus figurine dated to 29,000-25,000 BC, and a distinct style of Celtic art.

For most subsequent periods, Czech art was especially close to Austrian and German art, and participated in most phases of this. In periods when Prague was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, it was a key centre of the current artistic style, using artists of both Czech and foreign origin.

Alphonse Mucha (Czech Art Nouveau Printmaker, 1860-1939)

15th century Artists | Sitemap

At the end of the Middle Ages, art across Europe was dominated by a decorative and refined manner known as the International Style. Ornate, with brilliant color and gilding, it reflected courtly tastes and continued, for some time, to attract patrons in Milan, Ferrara, and other aristocratic Italian cities, even as more naturalistic Renaissance styles began to take root elsewhere.

By the mid-1400s, in Florence especially, both artists and patrons had begun to embrace new subjects and approaches.

Pio Fedi | Love story of Dionora and Ippolito🎨

Women Artists | Sitemap

List of Women Artists: Painters, Sculptors, Photographers, Poets, Musicants, Writers and the artistic movements definition

Berthe Morisot ~ French Impressionist painter🎨

Ancient Art | Sitemap

Ancient Art refers to the many types of art produced by the advanced cultures of ancient societies with some form of writing, such as those of ancient China, India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestine, Egypt, Greece and Rome.

Ancient Rome / La Civiltà romana

Spanish Artists | Sitemap

Spanish art has been an important contributor to Western art and Spain has produced many famous and influential artists including Velázquez, Goya and Picasso.

Spanish art was particularly influenced by Italy and France during the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, but Spanish art has often had very distinctive characteristics, partly explained by the Moorish heritage in Spain (especially in Andalusia), and through the political and cultural climate in Spain during the Counter-Reformation and the subsequent eclipse of Spanish power under the Bourbon dynasty.

The prehistoric art of Spain had many important periods-it was one of the main centres of European Upper Paleolithic art and the rock art of the Spanish Levant in the subsequent periods.

Pablo Picasso - Embrace, 1900

Symbolist Artists | History and Sitemap

Symbolism initially developed as a French literary movement in the 1880s, gaining popular credence with the publication in 1886 of Jean Moréas’ manifesto in Le Figaro.

 Reacting against the rationalism and materialism that had come to dominate Western European culture, Moréas proclaimed the validity of pure subjectivity and the expression of an idea over a realistic description of the natural world.

This philosophy, which would incorporate the poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s conviction that reality was best expressed through poetry because it paralleled nature rather than replicating it, became a central tenet of the movement.

In Mallarmé’s words “To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem… suggestion, that is the dream”.

Marie Spartali Stillman (1844-1927) Love's Messenger, 1885

Photographers | History and Sitemap

The history of photography began in remote antiquity with the discovery of two critical principles: camera obscura image projection and the observation that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light.

Apart from a possibly photographic but unrecognized process used on the Turin Shroud there are no artifacts or descriptions that indicate any attempt to capture images with light sensitive materials prior to the 18th century.

Around 1717, Johann Heinrich Schulze captured cut-out letters on a bottle of a light-sensitive slurry, but he apparently never thought of making the results durable.

Around 1800, Thomas Wedgwood made the first reliably documented, although unsuccessful attempt at capturing camera images in permanent form.

His experiments did produce detailed photograms, but Wedgwood and his associate Humphry Davy found no way to fix these images.

Frank Horvat, 1928 ~ Pioneer of digital photography🎨

Italian Artists | Sitemap

Italian art has influenced several major movements throughout the centuries and has produced several great artists, including painters, architects and sculptors.

Today, Italy has an important place in the international art scene, with several major art galleries, museums and exhibitions; major artistic centres in the country include Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Naples, Palermo, Lecce and other cities.

Italy is home to 53 World Heritage Sites, the largest number of any country in the world.

Leonardo da Vinci | La Gioconda (1503-1505) Musée-du-Louvre

Austrian Artists | Sitemap

Austria is known for its contributions to music, especially during the Classical and Romantic periods.

The major work of outsiders such as Ludwig van Beethoven (from Bonn [Germany]), Johannes Brahms (from Hamburg), and—in part—Richard Strauss (from Munich) is no less associated with Vienna than that of such natives of Austria and the empire as Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, and Hugo Wolf.

Much of the pioneer work in modern music was done by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern, who are known collectively as the Second Viennese school. Vienna is also associated with two popular genres of music: the waltz and the operetta.

Both forms find a common source in the person of Johann Strauss the Younger, who with his father, Johann the Elder, and his brothers, Josef and Eduard, constituted a virtual musical dynasty in the 19th century.

Egon Schiele🎨

German Artists | Sitemap

August Friedrich Siegert (1786-1869)

German Art has a long and distinguished tradition in the visual arts, from the earliest known work of figurative art to its current output of contemporary art.

Germany has only been united into a single state since the 19th century, and defining its borders has been a notoriously difficult and painful process.

For earlier periods German art often effectively includes that produced in German-speaking regions including Austria, Alsace and much of Switzerland, as well as largely German-speaking cities or regions to the east of the modern German borders.

Abstract Artists | Sitemap

Abstract art, also called nonobjective art or nonrepresentational art, painting, sculpture, or graphic art in which the portrayal of things from the visible world plays no part.

All art consists largely of elements that can be called abstract - ments of form, color, line, tone, and texture.

Prior to the 20th century these abstract elements were employed by artists to describe, illustrate, or reproduce the world of nature and of human civilization - and exposition dominated over expressive function. Abstract art has its origins in the 19th century.

The period characterized by so vast a body of elaborately representational art produced for the sake of illustrating anecdote also produced a number of painters who examined the mechanism of light and visual perception.

Robert Delaunay 1885-1941 - Le Premier Disque, 1912-1913

List of Sculptors | Sitemap

List of Sculptors and artistic movements definition

Peter Demetz, 1969 ~ Figurative wood sculptor🎨

Art Movements and Styles | Sitemap

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, (usually a few months, years or decades) or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years.

Art movements were especially important in modern art, when each consecutive movement was considered as a new avant-garde.

18th-19th century Artists | Sitemap

18th-19th century Artists: Painters, Sculptors, Photographers, Poets, Musicants, Writers and the artistic movements definition

French Artists | Sitemap

List of French Artists: Painters, Sculptors, Photographers, Poets, Musicants, Writers and the artistic movements definition

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Jeune fille en rose dans un paysage, 1903

British Artists | Sitemap

The Art of the United Kingdom refers to all forms of visual art in or associated with the United Kingdom since the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707 and encompass English art, Scottish art, Welsh art and Irish art, and forms part of Western art history.

During the 18th century Britain began to reclaim the leading place England had played in European art during the Middle Ages, being especially strong in portraiture and landscape art.

Surrealist Artists | History and Sitemap

Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early ’20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious.

Officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by the poet and critic André Breton (1896-1966), Surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement.

Breton, a trained psychiatrist, along with French poets Louis Aragon (1897-1982), Paul Éluard (1895-1952) and Philippe Soupault (1897-1990), were influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818-1883).

Michael Alfano | Figurative and surrealistic sculptures🎨

American Artists | Sitemap

List of American Artists: Painters, Sculptors, Photographers, Poets, Musicants, Writers and artistic movements definition

Andrew Wyeth | Christina's World, 1948

Nabis Art | History and Sitemap

Ambitious decorative painting enjoyed a resurgence in Europe from the late 1880s through the early twentieth century.

In Paris, Pierre Bonnard🎨, Maurice Denis🎨 and Édouard Vuillard🎨 were among the most influential artists to embrace decoration as painting’s primary function.

Their works celebrate pattern and ornament, challenge the boundaries that divide fine arts from crafts, and, in many cases, complement the interiors for which they were commissioned.

Disaffected with the rigidly representational painting methods taught at the Académie Julian, Bonnard and Denis joined with other like-minded students in the fall of 1888 to form a brotherhood called the “Nabis”, a Hebrew word meaning “prophets”.

The group was spearheaded by Paul Sérusier🎨, who had visited Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven over the summer and was now spreading an aesthetic message based on his interpretation of Gauguin🎨’s Symbolism.

Paul Sérusier - The Bois d'Amour à Pont-Aven / The Talisman (Le Talisman), 1888, Musée d'Orsay, Paris