Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1422-1492 Italian painter and theorist. His work is the embodiment of rational, calm, monumental painting in the Italian Early Renaissance, an age in which art and science were indissolubly linked through the writings of Leon Battista Alberti. Born two generations before Leonardo da Vinci, Piero was similarly interested in the scientific application of the recently discovered rules of perspective to narrative or devotional painting, especially in fresco, of which he was an imaginative master; and although he was less universally creative than Leonardo and worked in an earlier idiom, he was equally keen to experiment with painting technique. Piero was as adept at resolving problems in Euclid, whose modern rediscovery is largely due to him, as he was at creating serene, memorable figures, whose gestures are as telling and spare as those in the frescoes of Giotto or Masaccio. His tactile, gravely convincing figures are also indebted to the sculpture of Donatello, an equally attentive observer of Classical antiquity. In his best works, such as the frescoes in the Bacci Chapel in S Francesco, Arezzo, there is an ideal balance between his serene, classical compositions and the figures that inhabit them, the whole depicted in a distinctive and economical language. In his autograph works Piero was a perfectionist, creating precise, logical and light-filled images (although analysis of their perspective schemes shows that these were always subordinated to narrative effect). However, he often delegated important passages of works (e.g. the Arezzo frescoes) to an ordinary, even incompetent, assistant.   Related Paintings of Piero della Francesca :. | Portrait of Duke Frederico da Montefello and Battista Sfozza | Madonna and Child with Saints Montefeltro Altarpiece | Die Konigin von Saba betet das Kreuzesholz and Ausschnitt | Portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Montefeltro | Augustinian monk |
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Wladyslaw Malecki
(1836 in Maslew - 1900 in Szydłowiec) was a Polish painter.
Robert Dampier
(1799 - 1874) was a British artist and clergyman. Dampier was born in 1799 at the village of Codford St Peter in Wiltshire, England He was baptised on the 20th of Dec. 1799 (LDS IGI record batch # C014402). He was one of 13 children of Codford St Peter's rector Reverend John Dampier (1763-1839) and his wife Jane. In 1819 he went to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil as a clerk. In 1825, he was picked up in Rio to be the expedition artist on the English ship HMS Blonde under the command of Captain George Anson Byron. The ship was returning the bodies of King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamemalu to the Hawaiian islands (known by the British as "Sandwich Islands"), after both died from measles during a visit to England. Robert Dampier spent 11 weeks in Hawaii painting portraits in oil paint and making pencil drawings of landscapes. After returning to England, he studied law at Cambridge University and then was ordained in the Church of England. He married Sophia Francis Roberts in 1828. In 1837 he became rector of Langton Matravers church. Circa 1843 they had a daughter Juliana Sophia, His wife Sophia died in 1864, and he married again in 1872. He had a daughter Frederika from the second marriage. Although employed a rector, he continued to sketch until his death in 1874. Major works by Robert Dampier are held by the Honolulu Academy of Arts and Washington Place, also in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Maurice quentin de la tour
1704-88 French pastellist. He was one of the greatest pastellists of the 18th century, an equal of Jean-Sim?on Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. Unlike them, however, he painted no works in oils. Reacting against the stately portraits of preceding generations and against the mythological portraits of many of his contemporaries, La Tour returned to a more realistic and sober style of work. The fundamental quality of his art lies in his ability to suggest the temperament and psychology of his subjects by means of their facial expression, and thereby to translate their fugitive emotions on to paper: 'I penetrate into the depths of my subjects without their knowing it, and capture them whole', as he himself put it. His considerable success led to commissions from the royal family, the court, the rich bourgeoisie and from literary, artistic and theatrical circles.