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4 artworks by or after Jacobus Linthorst at the Art UK site
Jacopo Bellini (c. 1400 – c. 1470) was one of the founders of the Renaissance style of painting in Venice and northern Italy. His sons Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and his son-in-law Andrea Mantegna, were also famous painters.
Few of Bellini's paintings still exist, but his surviving sketch-books (one in the British Museum and one in the Louvre) show an interest in landscape and elaborate architectural design and are his most important legacy. His surviving works show how he accommodated linear perspective to the decorative patterns and rich colors of Venetian painting.
Biography
Born in Venice, Jacopo had probably been a pupil of Gentile da Fabriano, who was then in Venice. In 1411–1412 he was in Foligno, where with Gentile he worked at the Palazzo Trinci frescoes. In 1423 Bellini was in Florence, where he knew the new works by Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masolino da Panicale and Masaccio.
In 1424 he opened a workshop in Venice, which he ran right up until his death, and which trained his sons and other artists.
Many of his greatest works, including the enormous Crucifixion in the cathedral of Verona (1436), have disappeared. From c. 1430 is the panel with Madonna and Child, in the Accademia Carrara, once attributed to Gentile da Fabriano. In 1441, at Ferrara, where he was at the service of Leonello d'Este together with Leon Battista Alberti, he executed a portrait of that Marquess, now lost. Of this period survives the Madonna dell'Umiltà, probably commissioned by one of the brothers of Leonello.
The influence from Masolino da Panicale towards more modern, early Renaissance themes is visible in the Madonna with Child (dated 1448) in the Pinacoteca di Brera: for the first time, perspective is present and the figure are more monumental. Later he contributed with works now lost to the Venetian churches of San Giovanni Evangelista (1452) and St. Mark (1466). From 1459 is a Madonna with Blessing Child in the Gallerie dell'Accademia.
Later he sojourned in Padua, where he trained a young Andrea Mantegna in perspective and classicist themes and where, in 1460, he finished a portrait of Erasmo Gattamelata, now lost. Of his late phase, a ruined Crucifix in the Museum of Verona and an Annunciation in the church of Sant'Alessandro of Brescia remain.
Giovanni Fontana showed Bellini a treatise on perspective.
Selected works
References
Sources
C. Eisler, The genius of Jacopo Bellini: the complete paintings and drawings (London, The British Museum Press, 1989)
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bellini" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 3 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
External links
Italian Paintings, Venetian School, a collection catalog containing information about Bellini and his works (see index; plate 9).
Jacopo da Empoli (30 April 1551 – 30 September 1640) was an Italian Florentine Reformist painter.
Born in Florence as Jacopo Chimenti (Empoli being the birthplace of his father), he worked mostly in his native city. He apprenticed under Maso da San Friano. Like his contemporary in Counter-Maniera (Counter-Mannerism), Santi di Tito, he moved into a style often more crisp, less contorted, and less crowded than mannerist predecessors like Vasari. He collaborated with Alessandro Tiarini in some projects. His younger brother, Domenico Chimenti, born in Empoli, was also a painter. Among his pupils were Felice Ficherelli, Giovanni Battista Brazzè (Il Bigio), Giovanni Battista Vanni, and Virgilio Zaballi.
Finally, working in a thematic often shunned by Florentine painters, after the 1620s he completed a series of exceptional still-life paintings.
Selected works
Madonna in Glory with Saint Luke and Saint Ives (1579) – Louvre, Paris
Sacrifice of Isaac (1590s) – Oil on copper, 32 x 25 cm, Uffizi, Florence [1]
Susanna and the Elders (1600) – Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Sant'Eligio (1614) – Uffizi, Florence
Carlo Borromeo and the Rospigliosi Family (1613) – San Domenico, Pistoia
Still Life with Games (1620s) – Oil on canvas, 114 x 152 cm, Private collection
Judgement of Midas (1624) – Pistoia
Saint Ives, Protector of Widows and Orphans – Palatine Gallery, Florence
Adoration of Shepherds (attributed) – [2]
Preaching of John the Baptist – San Niccolò Oltrarno, Florence
Michelangelo presents his model of San Lorenzo to Leo X (1617–1619) – Casa Buonarroti, Florence
The Wedding of Caterina de Medici to Henry II
Drunkedness of Noah – Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Saint Clair accepts the veil (vows) [3] (1620) – Caen, France
Final Judgement – [4]
Pala della Concezione – San Bartolomeo [5]
"Three Marys At Tomb" – Blanton Art Museum, Austin, Texas
References
Freedberg, Sydney J. (1993). "Painting in Italy, 1500-1600". Pelican History of Art. Penguin Books. pp. 630–632.
Hobbes, James R. (1849). Picture collector's manual adapted to the professional man, and the amateur. London: T&W Boone.
External links
Retrospective on Jacopo Da Empoli Archived 2006-10-23 at the Wayback Machine
Jacopo Guarana (October 28, 1720 – April 18, 1808) was a Venetian painter of the late Baroque period who was born in Verona. He was active mainly in Venice and its mainland territories.
In 1750 he completed frescoes for the interior of Ca' Rezzonico and, in 1780, for the church of San Tomà. He also painted for the church of San Teonisto in Treviso and the Villa Contarini in Cinto Euganeo and helped decorate the Villa Pisani at Stra. Other works were completed for the Palazzo Balbi, Palazzo Boldù a San Felice, Palazzo Erizzo a San Martino, Palazzo Michiel del Brusà, and Palazzo Mocenigo a San Stae.
Guarana is the last remaining direct heir of the Tiepolesque tradition. He was a founding member of the Venetian Accademia di Belle Arti and is said to have studied under Sebastiano Ricci, then with Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.
Among his most popular works are the wall frescoes at the concert hall of the Ospedaletto, Venice. By the time he painted a Sacred heart of Jesus and Saints for the church of San Polo, his work would have been considered "retardataire", a glimpse of a lapsing past.
His son, Vincenzo Guarana, born in 1742, was also a painter.
Pastellist Anna Pasetti was active as a copyist in Guarana's studio.
Sources
External links
Italian Paintings, Venetian School, a collection catalog containing information about Guarana and his works (see index; plate 25).
Jacopo Carucci or Carrucci (IPA: [ˈjaːkopo ka(r)ˈruttʃi]; May 24, 1494 – January 2, 1557), usually known as Jacopo (da) Pontormo or simply Pontormo (IPA: [ponˈtormo]), was an Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine School. His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the calm perspectival regularity that characterized the art of the Florentine Renaissance. He is famous for his use of twining poses, coupled with ambiguous perspective; his figures often seem to float in an uncertain environment, unhampered by the forces of gravity.
Biography and early work
Jacopo Carucci was born at Pontorme (then known as Pontormo or Puntormo), near Empoli, to Bartolomeo di Jacopo di Martino Carrucci and Alessandra di Pasquale di Zanobi. Vasari relates how the orphaned boy, "young, melancholy, and lonely", was shuttled around as a young apprentice:
Jacopo had not been many months in Florence before Bernardo Vettori sent him to stay with Leonardo da Vinci, and then with Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, and finally, in 1512, with Andrea del Sarto, with whom he did not remain long, for after he had done the cartoons for the arch of the Servites, it does not seem that Andrea bore him any good will, whatever the cause may have been.
Pontormo painted in and around Florence, often supported by Medici patronage. A foray to Rome, largely to see Michelangelo's work, influenced his later style. Haunted faces and elongated bodies are characteristic of his work. An example of Pontormo's early style is a fresco depicting the Visitation of the Virgin and St Elizabeth, with its dancelike, balanced figures, painted from 1514 to 1516.
This early Visitation makes an interesting comparison with his painting of the same subject which was done about a decade later, now housed in the parish church of St. Michael Archangel in Carmignano, about 20 km west of Florence. Placing these two pictures together—one from his early style, and another from his mature period—throws Pontormo's artistic development into sharp relief. In the earlier work, Pontormo is much closer in style to his teacher, Andrea del Sarto, and to the early sixteenth-century renaissance artistic principles. For example, the figures stand at just under half the height of the overall picture, and though a bit more crowded than true high renaissance balance would prefer, at least are placed in a classicizing architectural setting at a comfortable distance from the viewer. In the later work, the viewer is brought almost uncomfortably close to the Virgin and St. Elizabeth, who drift toward each other in clouds of drapery. Moreover, the clear architectural setting that is carefully constructed in the earlier piece has been completely abandoned in favour of a peculiar nondescript urban setting.
The Joseph canvases (now in the National Gallery in London) offer another example of Pontormo's developing style. Done around the same time as the earlier Visitation, these works (such as Joseph in Egypt, at left) show a much more mannerist leaning. According to Giorgio Vasari, the sitter for the boy seated on a step is his young apprentice, Bronzino.
In the years between the SS Annunziata and San Michele Visitations, Pontormo took part in the fresco decoration of the salon of the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano (1519–20), 17 km NNW of Florence. There he painted frescoes in a pastoral genre style, very uncommon for Florentine painters; their subject was the obscure classical myth of Vertumnus and Pomona in a lunette.
In 1522, when the plague broke out in Florence, Pontormo left for the Certosa di Galluzzo, a cloistered Carthusian monastery where the monks followed vows of silence. He painted a series of frescoes, now quite damaged, on the passion and resurrection of Christ. These frescoes reveal especially strongly the influence of Albrecht Dürer's engravings, which often provided inspiration to Pontormo after he returned to Florence.
Main works in Florence
The large altarpiece canvas for the Brunelleschi-designed Capponi Chapel in the church of Santa Felicita, Florence, portraying The Deposition from the Cross (1528), is considered by many Pontormo's surviving masterpiece.
The figures, with their sharply modelled forms and brilliant colours, are united in an enormously complex, swirling ovular composition, housed by a shallow, somewhat flattened space. Although commonly known as The Deposition from the Cross, there is no actual cross in the picture. The scene might more properly be called a Lamentation or Bearing the Body of Christ. Those who are lowering (or supporting) Christ appear as anguished as the mourners. Though they are bearing the weight of a full-grown man, they barely seem to be touching the ground; the lower figure in particular balances delicately and implausibly on his front two toes. These two boys have sometimes been interpreted as angels, carrying Christ in his journey to Heaven. In this case, the subject of the picture would be more akin to an Entombment, though the lack of any discernible tomb disrupts that theory, just as the lack of cross poses a problem for the Deposition interpretation. Finally, it has also been noted that the positions of Christ and the Virgin seem to echo those of Michelangelo's Pietà in Rome, though here in the Deposition mother and son have been separated. Thus in addition to elements of a Lamentation and Entombment, this picture carries hints of a Pietà. It has been speculated that the bearded figure in the background at the far right is a self-portrait of Pontormo as Joseph of Arimathea. Another unique feature of this particular Deposition is the empty space occupying the central pictorial plane as all the Biblical personages seem to fall back from this point. It has been suggested that this emptiness may be a physical representation of the Virgin Mary's emotional emptiness at the prospect of losing her son.
On the wall to the right of the Deposition, Pontormo frescoed an Annunciation scene (at left). As with the Deposition, the artist's primary attention is on the figures themselves rather than their setting. Placed against white walls, the Angel Gabriel and Virgin Mary are presented in an environment that is so simplified as to almost seem stark. The fictive architectural details above each of them, are painted to resemble the gray stone pietra serena that adorns the interior of Santa Felicità, thus uniting their painted space with the viewer's actual space. The startling contrast between the figures and ground makes their brilliant garments almost seem to glow in the light of the window between them, against the stripped-down background, as if the couple miraculously appeared in an extension of the chapel wall. The Annunciation resembles his above-mentioned Visitation in the church of San Michele at Carmignano in both the style and swaying postures.
Vasari tells us that the cupola was originally painted with God the Father and Four Patriarchs. The decoration in the dome of the chapel is now lost, but four roundels with the Evangelists still adorn the pendentives, worked on by both Pontormo and his chief pupil Agnolo Bronzino. The two artists collaborated so closely that specialists dispute which roundels each of them painted.
This tumultuous oval of figures took three years for Pontormo to complete. According to Vasari, because Pontormo desired above all to "do things his own way without being bothered by anyone," the artist screened off the chapel so as to prevent interfering opinions. Vasari continues, "And so, having painted it in his own way without any of his friends being able to point anything out to him, it was finally uncovered and seen with astonishment by all of Florence..."
A number of Pontormo's other works have also remained in Florence; the Uffizi Gallery holds his mystical Supper at Emmaus as well as portraits.
Many of Pontormo's well-known canvases, such as the early Joseph in Egypt series (c. 1515) and the later Martyrdom of St Maurice and the Theban Legion (c. 1531) depict crowds milling about in extreme contrapposto of greatly varied positions.
His portraits, acutely characterized, show similarly Mannerist proportions.
Lost or damaged works
Many of Pontormo's works have been damaged, including the lunettes for the cloister in the Carthusian monastery of Galluzo. They now are displayed indoors, although in their damaged state.
Perhaps most tragic is the loss of the unfinished frescoes for the choir of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence which consumed the last decade of his life. His frescoes depicted a Last Judgment day composed of an unsettling morass of writhing figures. The remaining drawings, showing a bizarre and mystical ribboning of bodies, had an almost hallucinatory effect. Florentine figure painting had mainly stressed linear and sculptural figures. For example, the Christ in Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel is a massive painted block, stern in his wrath; by contrast, Pontormo's Jesus in the Last Judgment twists sinuously, as if rippling through the heavens in the dance of ultimate finality. Angels swirl about him in even more serpentine poses. If Pontormo's work from the 1520s seemed to float in a world little touched by gravitational force, the Last Judgment figures seem to have escaped it altogether and flail through rarefied air.
In his Last Judgment, Pontormo went against pictorial and theological tradition by placing God the Father at the feet of Christ, instead of above him, an idea Vasari found deeply disturbing:
But I have never been able to understand the significance of this scene, ... I mean, what he could have intended to signify in that part where there is Christ on high, raising the dead, and below His feet is God the Father, who is creating Adam and Eve. Besides this, in one of the corners, where are the four Evangelists, nude, with books in their hands, it does not seem to me that in a single place did he give a thought to any order of composition, or measurement, or time, or variety in the heads, or diversity in the flesh-colours, or, in a word, to any rule, proportion or law of perspective, for the whole work is full of nude figures with an order, design, invention, composition, colouring, and painting contrived after his own fashion ...
Critical assessment and legacy
Vasari's Life of Pontormo depicts him as withdrawn and steeped in neurosis while at the centre of the artists and patrons of his lifetime. This image of Pontormo has tended to colour the popular conception of the artist, as seen in the film of Giovanni Fago, Pontormo, a heretical love. Fago portrays Pontormo as mired in a lonely and ultimately paranoid dedication to his final Last Judgment project, which he often kept shielded from onlookers. Yet as the art historian Elizabeth Pilliod has pointed out, Vasari was in fierce competition with the Pontormo/Bronzino workshop at the time when he was writing his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. This professional rivalry between the two bottegas could well have provided Vasari with ample motivation for running down the artistic lineage of his opponent for Medici patronage.
Perhaps as a result of Vasari's derision, or perhaps because of the vagaries of aesthetic taste, Pontormo's work was quite out of fashion for several centuries. The fact that so much of his work has been lost or severely damaged is a testament to this neglect, though he has received renewed attention from contemporary art historians. Indeed, between 1989 and 2002, Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier (at right), held the title of the world's most expensive painting by an Old Master.
Regardless of the veracity of Vasari's account, it is certainly true that Pontormo's artistic idiosyncrasies produced a style that few were able (or willing) to imitate, with the exception of his closest pupil Bronzino. Bronzino's early work is so close to that of his teacher, that the authorship of several paintings from the 1520s and '30s is still under dispute—for example, the four tondi containing the Evangelists in the Capponi Chapel.