Cornelis de Vos (1584-1651) was born into a Catholic family in Hulst, near the border between Holland and Flanders. This area was hotly disputed during the Eighty Years War (1568–1648) and in 1596 the De Vos family moved to Antwerp, confirming their Flemish rather than Dutch heritage. Soon after, Cornelis became an assistant in the workshop of the Antwerp artist David Remeeus, securing the young man’s place in the Flemish artistic tradition.
Probably painted around 1535 in the Northern Netherlands. The pansy symbolises thought (from the French 'pensée') and the skull is probably intended as a memento mori (a symbol of human frailty and reminder of death).
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.
Dutch Mannerist painter Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574) lived in Rome for four years (1532-36) and was deeply affected by the city's art and antiquities.
Here, the half-length, seated figure, the tense yet elegant hands, and even the grotesque classical mask reflect the impact of that experience, while the love of meticulously represented textures is traditionally associated with northern European art.
Salvator Rosa (1615-1673) was one of the least conventional artists of 17th-century Italy, and was adopted as a hero by painters of the Romantic movement in the later 18th and early 19th centuries. He was mainly a painter of landscapes, but the range of his subject matter was unusually wide and included portraits and allegories...
For biographical notes and works by Rosa, see Salvator Rosa | Baroque Era style.
Daniele Ricciarelli (c. 1509 - 4 April 1566), better known as Daniele da Volterra, was an Italian painter, Mannerist and sculptor.
Daniele's best-known painting is the Descent from the Cross in the Trinità dei Monti (circa 1545), after drawings by Michelangelo; by an excess of praise this work was at one time grouped with Raphael's Transfiguration and the Last Communion of St. Jerome by Domenichino as the most famous pictures in Rome.
Benato Natali (1883-1979) was born in Livorno-Italy, from a modest family, where perhaps the father, hatter by profession, led him to enroll at the School of Arts and Crafts. Not too temperamentally suited to the school system began to devote himself to drawing a self-taught, and even when one of his companions urged him to attend the study of Guglielmo Micheli little and did so against his will.
As he did in "The four seasons", in the series of "The four elements" Arcimboldo assigned to any element a face formed by the most characteristic of any of them. Nevertheless, the series possesses some elements that make it quite different, and even more interesting, than the previous one.
First, and contrary to the previous series, every face is formed by only one kind of element. The face of "The Earth" is formed exclusively by land animals, "The Air" is made of birds, and "The Water" by fish and marine animals.
