1580-1620 Italian Carlo Saraceni Galleries Carlo Saraceni (Venice 1579-Venice, 16 June 1620) was an Italian early-Baroque painter, whose reputation as a "first-class painter of the second rank" was improved with the publication of a modern monograph in 1968. Though he was born in Venice, his paintings are distinctly Roman in style; he moved to Rome in 1598, joining the Accademia di San Luca in 1607. He never visited France, though he spoke fluent French and had French followers and a French wardrobe. His painting, however, was influenced at first by the densely forested, luxuriantly enveloping landscape settings for human figures of Adam Elsheimer, a German painter resident in Rome; "there are few landscapes by Saraceni which have not been attributed to Elsheimer," Malcolm Waddingham observed, and Anna Ottani Cavina has suggested the influences may have travelled both ways. and Elsheimer's small cabinet paintings on copper offered a format that Saraceni employed in six landscape panels illustrating The Flight of Icarus; in Moses and the Daughters of Jethro and Mars and Venus. Saint Sebastian Castle Museum, PragueWhen Caravaggio's notorious Death of the Virgin was rejected in 1606 as an altarpiece suitable for a chapel of Santa Maria della Scala, it was Saraceni who provided the acceptable substitute, which remains in situ, the only securely dated painting of his first decade in Rome. He was influenced by Caravaggio's dramatic lighting, monumental figures, naturalistic detail, and momentary action (illustration, right), so that he is numbered among the first of the "tenebrists" or "Caravaggisti". Examples of this style can be seen in the candlelit Judith and the Head of Holofernes. Saraceni's matured rapidly between 1606 and 1610, and the next decade gave way to his fully mature works, synthesizing Caravaggio and the Venetians. In 1616?C17 he collaborated on the frescoes for the Sala Regia of the Palazzo del Quirinale. In 1618 he received payment for two paintings in the church of Santa Maria dell'Anima. The compositional details of his fresco of The Birth of the Virgin in the Chapel of the Annunciation of the church of Santa Maria in Aquiro are repeated in a panel on copper at the Louvre In 1620 he returned to Venice, where he died in the same year. He was so influential on the style of an anonymous still life painter working in Rome, that the man is known as "Pensionante del Saraceni"  Related Paintings of Carlo Saraceni :. | landscape with salmacis and hermaphroditus | Mars and Venus, with a Circle of Cupids and a Landscape | Dogs | The Madonna and Child with Saint Anne and an Angle | Andromede attachee |
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William Congreve
(24 January 1670 - 19 January 1729) was an English playwright and poet. Congreve was born in Bardsey, West Yorkshire, England (near Leeds). His parents were William Congreve (1637-1708) and his wife, Mary; a sister was buried in London in 1672. He spent his childhood in Ireland, where his father, a Cavalier, had settled during the reign of Charles II. Congreve was educated at Trinity College in Dublin; there he met Jonathan Swift, who would be his friend for the remainder of his life. Upon graduation, he matriculated in the Middle Temple in London to study law, but felt himself pulled toward literature, drama, and the fashionable life.
BRUNELLESCHI, Filippo
Italian Early Renaissance Sculptor and Architect, 1377-1446 Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 ?C April 15, 1446) was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. All of his principal works are in Florence, Italy. As explained by Antonio Manetti, who knew Brunelleschi and who wrote his biography, Brunelleschi "was granted such honors as to be buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, and with a marble bust, which they say was carved from life, and placed there in perpetual memory with such a splendid epitaph." In 1401,Brunelleschi entered a competition to design a new set of bronze doors for the baptistery in Florence. Along with another young goldsmith, Lorenzo Ghiberti, he produced a gilded bronze panel, depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac. His entry made reference to a classical statue, known as the 'thorn puller', whilst Ghiberti used a naked torso for his figure of Isaac. In 1403, Ghiberti was announced the victor, largely because of his superior technical skill: his panel showed a more sophisticated knowledge of bronze-casting; it was completed in one single piece. Brunelleschi's piece, by contrast, was comprised of numerous pieces bolted to the back plate. Ghiberti went on to complete a second set of bronze doors for the baptistery, whose beauty Michelangelo extolled a hundred years later, saying "surely these must be the "Gates of Paradise."
Emile Jean Horace Vernet
French, 1789-1863,Painter, son of Carle Vernet. He was born in his father's lodgings at the Palais du Louvre, where his grandfather Joseph Vernet also lived; his maternal grandfather was Jean-Michel Moreau. To these antecedents and influences are ascribed the supreme ease of his public career, his almost incredible facility and his fecundity. His early training in his father's studio was supplemented by formal academic training with Francois-Andre Vincent until 1810, when he competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1812. In 1814 Vernet received the Legion d'honneur for the part he played in the defence of Paris, which he commemorated in the Clichy Gate: The Defence of Paris, 30 March 1814.