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.

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.

Parmigianino | Mannerist Drawings

Parmigianino is an acclaimed painter of the Italian Mannerists, who also worked in printmaking and Alchemy later in life.

Born Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, he retained his artistic name from his birthplace of Parma, Italy. Taken under the care of his uncles, Michele and Pier Ilario, he learned painting from them at a young age. Parmigianino collaborated with them and even completed commissions his uncles did not fulfill later in life.

In just his early twenties, Parmigianino had already executed frescos in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Parma.

Andrea del Sarto | High Renaissance painter

Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530), original name Andrea d’Agnolo, Italian painter and draftsman whose works of exquisite composition and craftsmanship were instrumental in the development of Florentine Mannerism.

His most striking among other well-known works is the series of frescoes on the life of St. John the Baptist in the Chiostro dello Scalzo (c. 1515-26).

Mannerism Art History and Sitemap

Mannerism is a style in European art that emerged in the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520, lasting until about 1580 in Italy, when the Baroque style began to replace it. Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century.

Stylistically, Mannerism encompasses a variety of approaches influenced by, and reacting to, the harmonious ideals associated with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and early Michelangelo.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo | The librarian

Agnolo Bronzino | Hands

Agnolo di Cosimo (1503-1572), usually known as Bronzino or Agnolo Bronzino, was an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence.

His sobriquet, Bronzino, may refer to his relatively dark skin or reddish hair.

He lived all his life in Florence, and from his late 30s was kept busy as the court painter of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

He was mainly a portraitist but also painted many religious subjects, and a few allegorical subjects, which include what is probably his best known work, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, c. 1544-45, now in London.

Agnolo Bronzino | Art in Detail

Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1563)🎨 was a stand-out artist of the second-wave of Italian Mannerism🎨 in the middle of the 16th century.

He lived his entire life in Florence🎨 and modeled his painting style so closely to that of his mentor, Jacopo Pontormo🎨.

For biographical notes and earlier works by Bronzino🎨 see:

• Agnolo Bronzino | Mannerist painter🎨.

16th century Art | Sitemap

The 16th century begins with the Julian year 1501 and ends with either the Julian or the Gregorian year 1600 (depending on the reckoning used; the Gregorian calendar introduced a lapse of 10 days in October 1582).

The 16th century is regarded by historians as the century in which the rise of the West occurred. During the 16th century, Spain and Portugal explored the world's seas and opened worldwide oceanic trade routes.

Large parts of the New World became Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and while the Portuguese became the masters of Asia's and Africa's Indian Ocean trade, the Spanish opened trade across the Pacific Ocean, linking the Americas with Asia.

Francesco Bacchiacca ~ High Renaissance painter

Italian Art History and 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

List of Sculptors | Sitemap

Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions.

Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth.

It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes originally used carving (the removal of material) and modelling (the addition of material, as clay), in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and other materials but, since Modernism, there has been almost complete freedom of materials and process.

Peter Demetz, 1969 ~ Figurative wood sculptor

Rosso Fiorentino | Musician Angel, 1522

Playing putto / Musical Angel is a fragment of a lost altarpiece which probably depicted the Madonna and Child with Saints.

This little work belonging to the period of maturity of the artist.

In 1605 the picture was collocated in the Tribune beside the more precious masterworks Medici family had collected.

Recent studies revealed the panel to be a fragment of a larger painting including - such as other altarpieces by Rosso - the angel in the lower part of the scene.

Michelangelo Buonarroti | Life and Sculptures

Michelangelo, in full Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475, Caprese, Republic of Florence -died February 18, 1564, Rome, Papal States) Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.

Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one of the greatest artists of all time.

A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence.

Giorgio Vasari racconta Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1550

Mentre gli industriosi et egregii spiriti col lume del famosissimo Giotto e de gli altri seguaci suoi si sforzavano dar saggio al mondo de ’l valore che la benignità delle stelle e la proporzionata mistione degli umori aveva dato a gli ingegni loro e, desiderosi di imitare con la eccellenzia della arte la grandezza della natura, per venire il piú che e’ potevano a quella somma cognizione che molti chiamano intelligenzia, universalmente, ancora che indarno si affaticavano, il benignissimo Rettor del Cielo volse clemente gli occhi a la terra e, veduta la vana infinità di tante fatiche, gli ardentissimi studii senza alcun frutto e la opinione prosuntuosa degli uomini, assai piú lontana da ’l vero che le tenebre da la luce, per cavarci di tanti errori si dispose mandare in terra uno spirito, che universalmente in ciascheduna arte et in ogni professione fusse abile, operando per sé solo a mostrare che cosa siano le difficultà nella scienza delle linee, nella pittura, nel giudizio della scultura e nella invenzione della veramente garbata architettura.

Francesco Bachiacca | Renaissance painter

A Florentine painter and draughtsman Francesco Ubertini (1494-1557), alias Bachiacca is chiefly recognized as an artist who helped evolve the style of Mannerism.

He is said to have studied with Umbrian painter, Pietro Perugino (1446-1524) and also collaborated with other artists of the time such as Franciabigio (1482-1525) and Pontormo (1494-1557).

Rosso Fiorentino | Mannerist painter

Italian painter and decorator, Rosso Fiorentino (1494-1540), original name Giovanni Battista di Jacopo, was an exponent of the expressive style that is often called early, or Florentine Mannerism, and one of the founders of the Fontainebleau school.

Pontormo | Portrait of Maria Salviati, 1543-1544

Portrait of Maria Salviati is an oil on panel painting attributed to Pontormo, executed c. 1543-1544, in the Uffizi, Florence.

It was acquired by the Uffizi early in the 20th century as a work by Domenico Beccafumi.

Soon afterwards Lányi identified it as a portrait of Cosimo I's mother Maria Salviati by Pontormo mentioned in Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari.

Jacopo Pontormo | Portrait of Maria Salviati de' Medici, 1543-1544 | Uffizi, Florence

Giorgio Vasari | Allegory of Italian cities

Giorgio Vasari | Allegory of Romagna

Vasari’s (1511-1574) life is intimately rooted in the Uffizi Gallery. With five of his paintings in various rooms throughout the museum, he also chronicled the lives the Renaissance artists that fill the Gallery, but even more importantly, he laid the original architectural design for the Palazzo degli Uffizi.

An acclaimed artist and architect of his time, Vasari is perhaps better known today for his invaluable tome of biographies, Le Vita delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects) or simply the Vite or Lives of Artists.

Lorenzo Bartolini | Neoclassical sculptor

Lorenzo Bartolini (7 January 1777 - 20 January 1850) has been recognised as one of the great sculptors of Europe.

His style is quite different from the traditional Neo-Classical style of Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, because it is not based on the antique or on standard Academic principles.

He was a controversial and polemical artist.

His fascinating life has all the drama of a novel by Stendhal.

Maarten van Heemskerck | Mannerist painter

Maarten van Heemskerck Self-portrait in Rome, 1553

Maarten van Heemskerck (born 1498, Heemskerck, Holland-died 1574, Haarlem), one of the leading Mannerist painters in 16th-century Holland working in the Italianate manner.
He spent a period (c. 1528) in the Haarlem studio of Jan van Scorel, then lately returned from Italy. Van Heemskerck’s earliest works—“Ecce Homo” (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ghent) and “St. Luke Painting the Portrait of the Virgin” (Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem), both dated 1532—while adhering closely to the Romanist style of Scorel, seek to outdo it by dramatic lighting and illusionistic effects of plasticity.