Cosme Tura
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1495
Italian Renaissance artist. He was a leading master of the school of Ferrara and court painter to the city's ruling Este family. Often vividly emotional, Tura's figures range from the graceful to the grotesque, as in the gentle Mary and contorted Jesus of his c.1472 Pieta (Correr Museum, Venice). Combining material splendor with asceticism, his stylistically idiosyncratic paintings are frequently filled with sharply portrayed natural details??diversified landscapes, squirrels, monkeys, fruits, etc.??that serve as both plastic and iconographic elements. His works are executed in a harsh, nervously linear, and rather angular style, with bold and sometimes strident coloring. Examples of his art include two organ panels, Annunciation and St. George Slaying the Dragon (cathedral, Ferrara); Christ on the Cross (Milan); St. Jerome (National Gall., London); Portrait of a Man and Saints (National Gall. of Art, Washington, D.C.). Attributed to him is a portrait of a member of the Este family, The Flight into Egypt, and St. Louis of Toulouse Related Paintings of Cosme Tura :. | St eorge and the Dragon and The Princess | A Muse | St.Dominic | St George and Dragon and The princess | Cosme Tura | Related Artists: Jorg RatgebGerman Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1480-1526 Frederick MacmonniesAmerican Sculpture 1863-1937,American sculptor and painter. During his apprenticeship in New York (1880-84) with Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who discovered and encouraged his talent, he rose from menial helper to assistant, studying in the evenings at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. Through Saint-Gaudens he met two architects who later became invaluable colleagues: Stanford White and Charles F. McKim, who lent him money in 1884 to go to Paris. He studied drawing at Colarossi's then went to Munich, attending drawing and portrait classes at the Akademie (1884-5) and worked for Saint-Gaudens again (1885-6). In Paris he studied sculpture with Alexandre Falguiere at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Witold PruszkowskiPolish Painter, 1846-1896
Polish painter and draughtsman. He spent his early years in Odessa and Kiev, subsequently living in France, in particular in Paris, where he studied under the Polish portrait painter Tadeusz Gorecki (1825-68), continuing (1868-71) at the Akademie der Kenste in Munich. In 1871 he moved to Krakew where he studied until 1875 under Jan Matejko at the School of Fine Arts. During ten years in Krakew he produced many striking portraits. In the portrait of Mrs Fedorowicz (1878; Krakew, N. Mus.) he achieved subtle effects of modelling by means of carefully differentiated tones and meticulously distributed light. The Realism of these portraits is subsumed into an advanced proto-Impressionist technique, on occasion using both small patches of distinct colour and broadly applied areas of impasto. Alongside such works, Pruszkowski produced paintings based on fantastic legends, fables and folk-tales. In these works one can trace influences going back to the artist's Munich period; but Pruszkowski's essentially Romantic vision translated his subjects into an entirely Polish context, as in Midsummer's Night (1875; Warsaw, N. Mus.) and Water Nymphs (1877; Krakew, N. Mus.). In 1882 Pruszkowski moved to the village of Mnikow outside Krakew, where he worked in the isolation he believed essential for creative activity. Contact with the country people, however, provided him with themes for his work; alongside his fantastic and legendary subjects he painted genre scenes of peasant life. He brought to his subjects a diversity of means of formal depiction, from the realistic to the near visionary. However, there are notable recurrent motifs, for example the image of the native willow, the symbolic haunt of spirits, as in Willow on Marshland (1892; Ledz, Mus. A.). The visionary element achieved its apogee in the pastel compositions from the last years of his life. In works such as Death of Ellenai (1892; Wroclaw, N. Mus.) the evanescent nature of forms is expressed through restrained colour schemes, generally tending towards silvery greyish azure or shades of pink.
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