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External links |
Media related to Simone Cantarini at Wikimedia Commons |
"Simone Cantarini" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. V (9th ed.). 1878. p. 28. |
Simone Martini (c. 1284 – July 1344) was an Italian painter born in Siena. |
He was a major figure in the development of early Italian painting and greatly influenced the development of the International Gothic style. |
It is thought that Martini was a pupil of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the leading Sienese painter of his time. According to late Renaissance art biographer Giorgio Vasari, Simone was instead a pupil of Giotto di Bondone, with whom he went to Rome to paint at the Old St. Peter's Basilica, Giotto also executing a mosaic there... |
Biography |
Simone was doubtlessly apprenticed from an early age, as would have been the normal practice. Among his first documented works is the Maestà of 1315 in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. Lippo Memmi painted a similar Maestà for the Palazzo Comunale in San Gimignano shortly afterwards, an example of the enduring influence S... |
Simone's other major works include the Saint Louis of Toulouse Crowning His Brother Robert of Anjou (1317, now Museo di Capodimonte, Naples); this work was painted during a stay in Naples at the request of the king. During this stay, putative pupils were his son Francesco, Gennaro di Cola, and Stefanone. |
Simone also painted the Saint Catherine of Alexandria Polyptych in Pisa (1319) and the Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus at the Uffizi in Florence (1333), as well as frescoes in the San Martino Chapel in the lower church of the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. Francis Petrarch became a friend of Simone'... |
Simone Martini died while in the service of the Papal court at Avignon in 1344. |
Gallery |
See also |
Memmo di Filippuccio |
Sources |
Vasari, Giorgio; translation by George Bull (1965). Lives of the Artists. Penguin Classics. |
External links |
Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Simone Martini" . Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. |
Frescoes by Simone Martini in the Lower Basilica in Assisi |
Art of Simone Martini |
Simone Martini – Gothic Painter |
Simone Martini at the National Gallery of Art |
Sir Anthony van Dyck (Dutch: Antoon van Dyck [ˈɑntoːɱ vɑn ˈdɛik]; 22 March 1599 – 9 December 1641) was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England after success in the Spanish Netherlands and Italy. |
The seventh child of Frans van Dyck, a wealthy silk merchant in Antwerp, Anthony painted from an early age. He was successful as an independent painter in his late teens and became a master in the Antwerp Guild on 18 October 1617. By this time, he was working in the studio of the leading northern painter of the day, Pe... |
Van Dyck worked in London for some months in 1621, then returned to Flanders for a brief time, before travelling to Italy, where he stayed until 1627, mostly in Genoa. In the late 1620s he completed his greatly admired Iconography series of portrait etchings of mainly other artists and other famous contemporaries. He s... |
With the exception of Holbein, van Dyck and his contemporary Diego Velázquez were the first painters of pre-eminent talent to work mainly as court portraitists, revolutionising the genre. Van Dyck is best known for his portraits of the aristocracy, most notably Charles I, and his family and associates. He was the domin... |
His influence extends into the modern period. The Van Dyke beard is named after him. During his lifetime, Charles I granted him a knighthood, and he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral, an indication of his standing at the time of his death. |
Life and work |
Family and early life |
Anthony van Dyck was born in Antwerp on 22 March 1599 as the seventh of 12 children of his parents. He was baptized the next day in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (now the Antwerp Cathedral) His father was Frans van Dyck, a well-to-do silk merchant. His mother was Maria Cupers (or Cuypers), daughter of Dirk Cupers (or Cuype... |
After his birth his family moved to a house called the Kasteel van Rijssel (Castle of Lille) in the Korte Nieuwstraat. His mother died when he was only 8 years old. At the time the family was living in a more luxurious house in the Korte Nieuwstraat called the Stadt van Ghent (City of Ghent). His artistic talent was ... |
By the age of fifteen he was already a highly accomplished artist, as shown by his Self-portrait dated 1613–14. He was admitted to the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a free master on Saint Luke's day, 18 October 1617. |
Within a few years he became the chief assistant to Peter Paul Rubens, the leading master painter of Antwerp and the whole of Northern Europe. Rubens operated a large workshop and often relied on sub-contracted artists. His influence on the young artist was immense. Rubens referred to the nineteen-year-old van Dyck as... |
The origins and exact nature of their relationship are unclear. It has been speculated that van Dyck was a pupil of Rubens from about 1613, as even his early work shows little trace of van Balen's style, but there is no clear evidence for this. |
At the same time the dominance of Rubens in the relatively small and declining city of Antwerp probably explains why, despite his periodic returns to the city, van Dyck spent most of his career abroad. In 1620, in Rubens's contract for the major commission for the ceiling of the Carolus Borromeuskerk, the Jesuit church... |
Italy |
In 1620, at the instigation of George Villiers, Marquess of Buckingham, van Dyck went to England for the first time where he worked for King James I of England, receiving £100. It was in London in the collection of the Earl of Arundel that he first saw the work of Titian, whose use of colour and subtle modeling of form... |
He returned to Flanders after about four months, and then left in late 1621 for Italy, where he remained for six years. There he studied the Italian masters while starting a successful career as a portraitist. He was already presenting himself as a figure of consequence, annoying the rather bohemian Northern artist's c... |
He was mostly based in Genoa, although he also travelled extensively to other cities, and stayed for some time in Palermo in Sicily, where he was quarantined during the 1624 plague, one of the worst in Sicily's history. There he produced an important series of paintings of the city's plague saint Saint Rosalia. His dep... |
For the Genoese aristocracy, then in a final flush of prosperity, he developed a full-length portrait style, drawing on Veronese and Titian as well as Rubens' style from his own period in Genoa, where extremely tall but graceful figures look down on the viewer with great hauteur. In 1627, he went back to Antwerp where ... |
London and death |
King Charles I was the most passionate collector of art among the Stuart kings and saw painting as a way of promoting his elevated view of the monarchy. In 1628, he bought the fabulous collection that the Duke of Mantua was forced to sell, and he had been trying since his accession in 1625 to bring leading foreign pain... |
Van Dyck remained in touch with the English court and helped King Charles's agents in their search for pictures. He sent some of his own works, including a self-portrait (1623) with Endymion Porter, one of Charles's agents, his Rinaldo and Armida (1629), and a religious picture for Queen Henrietta Maria. He had also pa... |
He was well paid for his paintings in addition to this, at least in theory, as King Charles did not actually pay over his pension for five years and reduced the price of many paintings. He was provided with a house on the River Thames at Blackfriars, then just outside the City of London, thus avoiding the monopoly of t... |
His Blackfriars studio was frequently visited by the King and Queen (later a special causeway was built to ease their access), who hardly sat for another painter while van Dyck lived. |
He was an immediate success in England, where he painted large numbers of portraits of the King and Queen, as well as their children. Many portraits were done in several versions, to be sent as diplomatic gifts or given to supporters of the increasingly embattled king. Altogether van Dyck has been estimated to have pai... |
In England he developed a version of his style which combined a relaxed elegance and ease with an understated authority in his subjects which was to dominate English portrait-painting to the end of the 18th century. His portraits of Charles on horseback updated the grandeur of Titian's Equestrian Portrait of Charles V,... |
The King in Council by letters patent granted van Dyck denizenship in 1638. On 27 February 1640 he married Mary Ruthven, with whom he had one daughter. Mary was the daughter of Patrick Ruthven, who, although the title was forfeited, styled himself Lord Ruthven. She was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen in 1639–40; this ma... |
A letter dated 13 August 1641, from Lady Roxburghe in England to a correspondent in The Hague, reported that van Dyck was recuperating from a long illness. In November, van Dyck's condition worsened, and he returned to England from Paris, where he had gone to paint Cardinal Richelieu. He died in Blackfriars, London on ... |
Portraits and other works |
In the 17th century, demand for portraits was stronger than for other types of work. Van Dyck tried to persuade Charles to commission large-scale series on the history of the Order of the Garter for the Banqueting House, Whitehall, for which Rubens had earlier completed the large ceiling paintings (sending them from An... |
A list of history paintings produced by van Dyck in England survives. It was compiled by van Dyck's biographer Bellori, based on information from Sir Kenelm Digby. None of these works appear to remain, except the Eros and Psyche done for the King (below). But many other works, rather more religious than mythological, ... |
Van Dyck's portraits flattered more than Velázquez's. When Sophia of Hanover first met Queen Henrietta Maria (who was in exile in Holland) in 1641, she wrote: "Van Dyck's handsome portraits had given me so fine an idea of the beauty of all English ladies, that I was surprised to find that the Queen, who looked so fine ... |
Some critics have blamed van Dyck for diverting a nascent, tougher English portrait tradition—of painters such as William Dobson, Robert Walker and Isaac Fuller—into what certainly became elegant blandness in the hands of many of van Dyck's successors, like Lely or Kneller. The conventional view has always been more fa... |
A fairly small number of landscape pen and wash drawings or watercolours made in England played an important part in introducing the Flemish watercolour landscape tradition to England. Some are studies, which reappear in the background of paintings, but many are signed and dated and were probably regarded as finished w... |
Printmaking |
Probably during his period in Antwerp after his return from Italy, van Dyck began his Iconographie, which became a very large series of prints with half-length portraits of eminent contemporaries. He produced drawings, and for eighteen of the portraits he himself etched the heads and main outlines of the figure, for an... |
He left most of the printmaking to specialists, who engraved after his drawings. His etched plates appear not to have been published until after his death, and early states are very rare. Most of his plates were printed after only his work had been done. Some exist in further states after engraving had been added, some... |
The series was a great success, but was his only venture into printmaking; portraiture probably paid better. At his death there were eighty plates by others, of which fifty-two were of artists, as well as his own eighteen. The plates were bought by a publisher; with the plates reworked periodically as they wore out the... |
The Iconographie was highly influential as a commercial model for reproductive printmaking; now forgotten series of portrait prints were enormously popular until the advent of photography: "the importance of this series was enormous, and it provided a repertory of images that were plundered by portrait painters through... |
Etchers have studied Van Dyck ever since, for they can hope to approximate his brilliant directness, whereas nobody can hope to approach the complexity of Rembrandt's portraits. |
Studio |
Van Dyck's success led him to maintain a large workshop in London, which became "virtually a production line for portraits". According to a visitor he usually only made a drawing on paper, which was then enlarged onto canvas by an assistant; he then painted the head himself. The costume in which the client wished to be... |
In addition many copies untouched by him, or virtually so, were produced by the workshop, as well as by professional copyists and later painters. The number of paintings ascribed to him had by the 19th century become huge, as with Rembrandt, Titian and others. However, most of his assistants and copyists could not appr... |
The relatively few names of his assistants that are known are Dutch or Flemish. He probably preferred to use trained Flemish artists, as no equivalent English training existed in this period. Van Dyck's enormous influence on English art does not come from a tradition handed down through his pupils. In fact it is not po... |
Flemish painter Pieter Thijs studied in van Dyck's workshop as one of van Dyck's last pupils. He became a very successful portrait and history painter in his native Antwerp. |
Legacy |
Much later, the styles worn by his models provided the names of the Van Dyke beard for the sharply pointed and trimmed goatees popular for men in his day, and the van Dyke collar, "a wide collar across the shoulders edged copiously with lace". During the reign of George III, a generic "Cavalier" fancy-dress costume cal... |
A confusing number of different pigments used in painting have been called "Vandyke brown" (mostly in English-language sources). Some predate van Dyck, and it is not clear that he used any of them. Van Dyke brown is an early photographic printing process using such a colour. |
When van Dyck was knighted in 1632, he anglicized his name to Vandyke. The heraldic blazon of his coat of arms is Quarters 1 & 4. Azure six roundels 3, 2 and 1 Or and for augmentation on a chief Gules a lion passant gardant Or. 2 & 3. Sable a saltire Or. Over all an inescutcheon Or thereon a bend sinister Azure. The co... |
Collections |
The British Royal Collection, which still contains many of his paintings, has a total of twenty-six paintings. The National Gallery, London (fourteen works), The Museo del Prado (Spain) (twenty-five Works, such as: Self-portrait with Endymion Porter, The Metal Serpent, Christ Crowned with Thorns, The taking of Christ, ... |
Tate Britain held the exhibition Van Dyck & Britain in 2009. In 2016 the Frick Collection in New York had an exhibition "Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture", the first major survey of the artist's work in the United States in over two decades. |
The estate of the Earl Spencer at Althorp houses a small collection of van Dycks including War and Peace (Portrait of Sir George Digby, 2nd Earl of Bristol, English Royalist politician with William Russell, 1st Duke of Bedford), which is the most valuable painting in the collection and the favourite of the earl. |
Gallery |
See also |
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