Johannes Vermeer | Legacy

Originally, Vermeer's (1632-1675) works were largely overlooked by art historians for two centuries after his death. A select number of connoisseurs in the Netherlands did appreciate his work, yet even so, many of his works were attributed to better-known artists such as Metsu or Mieris.

The Delft master's modern rediscovery began about 1860, when German museum director Gustav Waagen saw The Art of Painting in the Czernin gallery in Vienna and recognized the work as a Vermeer, though it was attributed to Pieter de Hooch at that time.

Research by Théophile Thoré-Bürger culminated in the publication of his catalogue raisonné of Vermeer's works in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1866.

Symbolism Art 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.

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

Photographers | Art 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.

Frank Horvat, 1928 ~ Pioneer of digital photography

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

Austrian Art History and Sitemap

Egon Schiele

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.