Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1483-1520 Italian painter and architect. As a member of Perugino's workshop, he established his mastery by 17 and began receiving important commissions. In 1504 he moved to Florence, where he executed many of his famous Madonnas; his unity of composition and suppression of inessentials is evident in The Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1506). Though influenced by Leonardo da Vinci's chiaroscuro and sfumato, his figure types were his own creation, with round, gentle faces that reveal human sentiments raised to a sublime serenity. In 1508 he was summoned to Rome to decorate a suite of papal chambers in the Vatican. The frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura are probably his greatest work; the most famous, The School of Athens (1510 C 11), is a complex and magnificently ordered allegory of secular knowledge showing Greek philosophers in an architectural setting. The Madonnas he painted in Rome show him turning away from his earlier work's serenity to emphasize movement and grandeur, partly under Michelangelo's High Renaissance influence. The Sistine Madonna (1513) shows the richness of colour and new boldness of compositional invention typical of his Roman period. He became the most important portraitist in Rome, designed 10 large tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel, designed a church and a chapel, assumed the direction of work on St. Peter's Basilica at the death of Donato Bramante,   Related Paintings of RAFFAELLO Sanzio :. | The Crowning of the Virgin (Oddi altar) | Decoration of the Loggetta | Spozalizio | Adam and Eve | Psychic and angel |
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Jan van Beers
(22 February 1821 - 14 November 1888) was Flemish poet born in Antwerp. He is usually referred to as "van Beers the elder" to distinguish him from his son, Jan van Beers, the painter. Van Beers was essentially a Netherlander, though politically a Belgian, expressing his thoughts in the same language as any North Netherland writer. In fact, the poems of Jan van Beers are perhaps more popular in the Netherlands than in Belgium, and of many of them there exist more editions printed in the Netherlands than in his political fatherland. Van Beers started life as a teacher of Dutch language and literature, first at Mechelen, then at Lier, and in 1860 was appointed a professor of both at the Athenaeum (high school) in Antwerp, where he had also been a sub-librarian in the communal library. Van Beers as a teacher was early in the field, with Hendrik Conscience, Willems and others, when the Flemish movement began. He composed a Dutch grammar (1852), which, in enlarged editions, still holds the field, and a volume of selections from Dutch authors, both books being so much appreciated that the Belgian government made them text-books in the public schools. Van Beers's historical poems, the principal of which is, perhaps, Jakob Van Maerlant (Amsterdam, 1860), helped the Flemish revival in Belgium as powerfully as his school-books. He is best known, however, as the writer of ballads and songs. Jongelingsdroomen ("A Young Man's Dreams") first appeared at Antwerp and Amsterdam in 1853. These poems were followed by Levensbeelden ("Life Figures or Pictures," Amsterdam, 1858) and by Gevoel en Leven ("Feeling Living," Amsterdam, 1869). His Rijzende Blaren ("Rising Leaves") first made its appearance at Ghent and Rotterdam in 1883.
Nicolas de Stael
Russian Painter.1914-1955 was a painter known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles Nocolas de Stael was born in the family of a Russian Lieutenant General, Baron Vladimir Stael von Holstein, (a member of the Stael von Holstein family, and the last Commandant of the Peter and Paul Fortress) and his wife, Olga Sakhanskaya. De Stael's family was forced to emigrate to Poland in 1919 because of the Russian Revolution; Both, his father and stepmother, would die in Poland and the orphaned Nicolas de Stael would be sent with his older sister Marina to Brussels to live with a Russian family (1922). He eventually studied art at the Brussels Acad??mie royale des beaux-arts (1932). In the 1930s, he travelled throughout Europe, lived in Paris (1934) and in Morocco (1936) (where he first met his companion Jeannine Guillou, also a painter and who would appear in some of his paintings from 1941-1942) and Algeria. In 1936 he had his first exhibition of Byzantine style icons and watercolors at the Galerie Dietrich et Cie, Brussels. He joined the French Foreign Legion in 1939 and was demobilized in 1941.
Edward Robert Smythe
British 1810-1899