Pierre-Auguste Renoir: "I grandi uomini sono modesti”!

• "Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and, second, it must be inimitable".

• "Vuoi sapere quali sono le due qualità di un'opera d'arte? In primo luogo, deve essere indescrivibile e, in secondo luogo, deve essere inimitabile".

• "I grandi uomini sono modesti".

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pietro Perugino (1450-1523) | Raphael's master

Perugino🎨, byname of Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, Italian Renaissance painter🎨 of the Umbria school and the teacher of Raphael🎨.

His work (e.g., Giving of the Keys to St. Peter🎨, 1481-82, a fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Rome) anticipated High Renaissance ideals in its compositional clarity, sense of spaciousness, and economy of formal elements.

Perugino | The Sistine Chapel frescoes

The wall paintings of the Sistine Chapel🎨 are among the most important examples of the type of painting developed in Florence in the later fifteenth century.

The five artists brought to Rome to execute them came from various different art centres: Botticelli🎨, Ghirlandaio and Rosselli from Florence, Perugino from Umbria🎨, Signorelli from Cortona.

Perugino | Early Renaissance painter

Pietro Perugino (1450-1523), was born Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci.

Contemporaries regarded Perugino as one of the leading painters in Florence in the 1480s and as the "best master in Italy" in 1500, but soon afterward his reputation suffered a decline from which it has only partly recovered.

The grounds for this criticism, then as now, is the formulaic quality of his work, in particular his tendency to repeat figure types or even whole compositions again and again.

Maya Green, 1957 | Abstract painter

Maya Green [Майя Грин] -born Maya Greenblat, is a Ukrainian-Jewish contemporary painter, graphic artist, illustrator and sculptor.

I have been an artist my whole life. Originally, i was born and raised in Ukraine and I first developed my love of art there. Since my childhood, I have been intrigued with the patterning of light and the interaction of color. I studied at the School of Art in Ukraine.

Luke Hillestad, 1982

I am a Minneapolis based figurative painter. I began painting in 2006 with Rembrandt and Caravaggio books open next to my empty canvas.

Since then, I have worked to create paintings with themes that would be raw and enduring.

My focus has been on narratives of birth, kinship, ritual, and healing. The most beautiful objects are paintings, and the most beautiful subjects should be painted.

Artus Wolffort | Baroque painter

Artus Wolffort, Artus Wolffaert or Artus Wolffaerts (1581-1641) was a Flemish painter known mainly for his history paintings depicting religious and mythological scenes.

Wolffort and his work were not well known until the late 1970s and some of his paintings were even classified as early works by Rubens.

His oeuvre was reconstructed from a fully signed work (Esther's Toilet in the Harem of Ahasuerus, original untraced, 10 copies of which one fully signed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) and various paintings bearing a monogram.

Giorgio Dante, 1982 | Figurative painter

Giorgio Dante is an Italian figurative painter living and working in Rome, Italy.

After graduating in 2006 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, Dante distinguished himself as an artist of contemporary revival of classical painting.

His work emphasizes traditional methods and techniques of old masters.

Italian art inspired him to paint since his childhood and influenced his choice to pursue an academic figurative style, focused on 19th century European painting (William Bouguereau, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton, John William Waterhouse, Paul Delaroche, Jan Jaques Henner, ecc).

He exhibited in Europe and Usa.

Bernardino Luini | High Renaissance painter

Bernardino Luini - born Bernardino Scapi (1480-1532), was a North Italian painter from Leonardo's circle during the High Renaissance.

Both Luini and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio were said to have worked with Leonardo directly; he was described as having taken "as much from Leonardo as his native roots enabled him to comprehend".

Consequently, many of his works were attributed to Leonardo.

He was known especially for his graceful female figures with elongated eyes, called Luinesque by Vladimir Nabokov.

Juan Carlos Verdial, 1957 | Surrealist painter

Cuban painter Juan Carlos Verdial was born in Havana, Cuba. Graduated from Art Academy of San Alejandro, Havana, Cuba.

He is a graduate of the San Alejandro Academy of Art, the oldest and most prestigious Fine Art school in Cuba, and a member of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC).

His works have been shown in close to 100 solo and group exhibitions across South, Central, and North America, including Chile, Panama, Puerto Rico and Costa Rica, as well as Miami, Boston and New York.

Richard Bergh | Naturalist painter

Sven Richard Bergh (1858–1919) was a Swedish painter, art critic and museum manager. Despite many years in France, he remained unattracted to Impressionism, preferring instead the Naturalism of painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage. He also rejected the idea of creating landscapes en plein aire.

Both of his parents, Johan Edvard Bergh and Amanda Helander (1825-1888), were artists and, presumably, his first teachers. He began his formal studies with Edvard Perséus, at his private school then, from 1878-1881, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts.

His first works were scenes from Swedish history, painted in the Academic style.

In 1881, he went to Paris, where he took lessons from Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Colarossi. His first exhibition at the Salon came in 1883 and he completed his studies in 1884.

The following year, he and his friend, Ernst Josephson, became members of the Nordic art colony at Grez-sur-Loing.

Ricardo Celma, 1975 | Art Nouveau style painter

Ricardo Celma was born in Buenos Aires. His artistic vocation showed up at the early age of 5 when he started attending to an art workshop and he continued to do so for 20 years.

At the end of high school he entered the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón, where he obtained the title of national professor of drawing and painting, with excellent grades.

And a few years later, he received a degree, Bachelor of Visual Arts at the National University of Art (UNA).

His works are part of permanent museum´s collections and also private collections around the world.

Malcolm T. Liepke, 1953 | Figurative painter

Malcolm T. Liepke, American painter, was born and raised in Minneapolis. As a student he hungered for 'classical' training rather than the 'conceptual' ideas being taught. In a bold move, he left the Art Center College in Los Angeles and went to New York.

That Malcolm Liepke’s paintings are arrestingly beautiful is evident, but they are much more.

Through pattern, colour and bravura brushwork, Liepke delves deeply into profound areas of human nature. He has exhibited extensively internationally enjoying phenomenal success with a string of sell out exhibitions.

He is an experienced, mid-career painter who has exhibited all over the world; his work is represented in numerous private and public collections.

Carlo Maratta (1625-1713) | Baroque painter

Carlo Maratta, Maratta also spelled Maratti, (born May 15, 1625, Camerano, Papal States [Italy]- died Dec. 15, 1713, Rome), one of the leading painters of the Roman school in the later 17th century and one of the last great masters of Baroque🎨 classicism.

His final works offer an early example of “arcadian good taste” (named for the Academy of Arcadians, of which he was a member), a style that was to dominate Roman art for the first half of the 18th century.

Rafal Olbinski, 1943 | Surrealist painter

Rafał Olbiński is a Polish-born illustrator, painter and educator, living in the United States.

Olbiński graduated from the architecture program of the Warsaw University of Technology in 1969.

Olbiński immigrated to the United States in 1981, where he soon established himself as a prominent painter, illustrator and designer.

Boccaccio Boccaccino (1467-1525) | Early Renaissance painter

Boccaccio Boccaccino was a painter of the early Italian Renaissance🎨, belonging to the Emilian school. He is profiled in Vasari's🎨 "Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori" (or, in English, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects).

He was born in Ferrara and studied there, probably under Domenico Panetti.

Few facts of his life are known.

His principal artistic activity was in Venice, Ferrara, and especially in Cremona, where he founded a school in which Garofalo🎨 was a pupil.

Laurits Andersen Ring | Style and motifs

Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring (1854-1933) was one of the finest Danish painters of his generation, a golden generation that established Danish painting in the eyes of the world, numbering amongst his contemporaries his friend Harmmershoi (1864-1916), Holsoe (1863-1935), Ilsted (1861-1933) and Monsted (1859-1941).

A feature often seen in Ring's art is to place one or more objects at the edge of picture, which can be seen in e.g. Runesten ved Roskilde Landevej, Når taget ventes. Jernbaneoverkørsel ved Roskilde Landevej, Summerday by Roskilde Fjord and Lundbyes bænk ved Arresø.

Jacobello Alberegno (Venice, c.1367-1397)

Jacobello Alberegno | Polyptych of the Apocalypse | Whore of Babylon | Accademia Venice

Jacobello Alberegno also Jacobello Albaragno or Jacopo Alberegno (born before 1367; died before July 14, 1397 in Venice) was an Venetian painter active in the second half of the fourteenth century.

Jacobello Alberegno was fixed in the tradition of early Venetian painting masterpieces.

Gustave Caillebotte | A Balcony in Paris

Those boulevards, don’t forget, were still pretty new in 1877.

In the mid-19th Century, Napoléon III had ordered a massive redevelopment of the unruly French capital - led by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of the Seine, who boldly (you might say pitilessly) cleared out Paris’s dense, politically restless faubourgs.

In their place arose standardised blocks of housing, fronting new extended axes that showcased landmarks like so many imperial baubles.

Lorenzo Bartolini | Faith in God / Fiducia in Dio, 1835

Lorenzo Bartolini🎨's "Fiducia in Dio" is the artist's best-known work and, more generally, is emblematic of Italian sculpture🎨 in the generation after Canova🎨. The model recalls Canova🎨's Mary Magdalen, but the work is more indebted to the observation of nature than the influence of the antique. It typifies the move towards a softer Neo-classicism which made way for Romanticism in Italian sculpture🎨.