Art History in Credo: Renaissance

Altdorfer's major contribution to the history of European painting is his powerful imaginative vision of landscape.

Hans Baldung (Grien) was a German painter and engraver. He was born at Swäbisch-Gmünd but settled in Strasbourg where he became a member of the city council in his later years.

Fra Bartolommeo was born Baccio della Porta in Florence where he trained in the workshop of Cosimo Roselli.

Florentine painter. He depicted religious and mythological subjects. He was patronized by the ruling Medici family and was deeply influenced by their neo-Platonic circle.

Flemish artist. He was born in the village of Bruegel, near Breda, and was the pupil of Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502-50).

Real name Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi. Florentine sculptor, regarded as the greatest sculptor of the quattrocento, who was greatly influenced by classical sculpture and contemporary humanist theories. Working in the early Renaissance in Italy, Donatello is considered one of the most versatile of all time, unmatched in his technical and expressive range.

The German painter, printmaker, and theorist Albrecht Dürer is generally acknowledged to be the most significant figure in the history of European art outside Italy in the period of the Renaissance.

The Flemish painter Jan or Jennyn Gossaert is also known as Mabuse, this name deriving from Mauberge in Hainault, where he was born.

German painter, architect, and engineer. His altarpiece at Isenheim, southern Alsace, (1515, Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France), with its grotesquely tortured figure of Jesus and its radiant Resurrection, is his most important work.

German painter and woodcut artist who spent much of his career as a portrait artist at the court of Henry VIII of England.

The pupil of Pontormo and his lifelong friend, was the principal practitioner of Florentine Mannerism. He is best known for his portraits of Cosimo de' Medici's family and his courtiers, which reveal beneath their glacial exteriors the sitters' anxieties.

One of a Bolognese family of painters, the oldest of whom, Lodovico (1555–1619), founded a school in Bologna. His cousins Agostino (1557–1602) and Annibale worked in their early years with Lodovico, but left Bologna, working first in north Italy and later in Rome.

Tuscan painter, daughter and pupil of Orazio Gentileschi, b. Rome.

Italian architect and painter in the High Renaissance style; designed the Villa Farnesina and the Palazzo Massimo in Rome.

Born near Florence, the sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati trained in the workshop of Pisa Cathedral, where his first independent work is found (1536).

Italian sculptor, metalsmith, and author. His remarkable autobiography (written 1558–62), which reads like a picaresque novel, is one of the most important documents of the 16th cent.

Spanish painter. He painted elegant portraits and intensely emotional religious scenes with increasingly distorted figures and unearthly light.

Italian architect, painter, and art historian, noted for his Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550; 1568), a principal source for the history of Italian Renaissance art. His most important architectural work was the Uffizi Palace, Florence (now an art gallery).

Italian baroque painter. He was active chiefly in Rome. In his ceiling painting of Aurora (1621–23; Villa Ludovisi, Rome), the chariot-borne figure of Dawn rides across the heavens; the architectural framework is imitated in the painting, giving the illusion that the ceiling opens into the sky.

Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, and scientist, b. near Vinci, a hill village in Tuscany. The versatility and creative power of Leonardo mark him as a supreme example of Renaissance genius. The mass of notes and drawings in which da Vinci recorded his ideas and experiments are not just revealing of the workings of his own mind, but vital for any understanding of the meaning of the Renaissance.

Universally recognized as one of the greatest artists in history, perhaps the greatest. He excelled as a sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the Italian High Renaissance. During his long life, Michelangelo created some of the world's most recognizable works of art. Also known as: Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni or Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Italian painter. His strong chiaroscuro technique of partially illuminating figures against a dark background was immediately adopted by his contemporaries.

Major artist and painter of the Renaissance era. Raphael was the common name of the Italian painter Raffaello Sanzio or Santi.

Jacopo Robusti, whose name derived from the profession of his father, a dyer (tintore), was, with Veronese, the chief Venetian painter of the later 16c.

Venetian painter. Of the very first rank among the artists of the Renaissance, Titian had an immense influence on succeeding generations of painters, especially in his use of color.

Paolo Caliari, with Tintoretto, succeeded Titian as the chief artist of 16c. Venice. Born in Verona, as his popular name, Veronese, indicates, he was trained there by a local painter, Antonio Badile, before moving to Venice about the age of 23.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci (1503-05; Louvre, Paris), a portrait of the wife of a Florentine official, Francesco del Giocondo.

Private chapel of the popes in Rome, one of the principal glories of the Vatican. Built (1473) under Pope Sixtus IV, it is famous for its decorations.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
A polyptych altarpiece painted for the cathedral of St Bavo, in Ghent, by the Flemish artists Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1432.

European art of the 15th–17th centuries, associated with the Renaissance, a revival in learning that began in Florence, Italy, with the rise of a spirit of humanism and a new appreciation of the classical Greek and Roman past.

16th-century reformation that arose largely in answer to the Protestant Reformation; sometimes called the Catholic Reformation. Although the Roman Catholic reformers shared the Protestants' revulsion at the corrupt conditions in the church, there was present none of the tradition breaking that characterized Protestantism.

Italian merchant prince, called Lorenzo il Magnifico [the magnificent]. One of the towering figures of the Italian Renaissance, he was an astute politician, firm in purpose, yet pliant and tolerant; a patron of the arts, literature, and learning; and a reputable scholar and poet. He was a patron of Sandro Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi, Andrea del Verrocchio, Michelangelo, and other famed artists.

Office of the pope, head of the Roman Catholic Church. He is pope by reason of being bishop of Rome and thus, according to Roman Catholic belief, successor in the see of Rome (the Holy See) to its first bishop, St. Peter.

Religious and political movement in 16th-century Europe to reform the Roman Catholic Church, which led to the establishment of the Protestant churches.

Period in European cultural history that began in Italy around 1400 and lasted there until the end of the 1500s. Elsewhere in Europe it began later, and lasted until the 1600s. As increasingly urban, educated, and secular populations became dissatisfied with medieval values—first (circa 1350) in the Italian republics and principalities and then later north of the Alps—they sought to recover the knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world. A new and remarkable self-confidence in human agency resulted, and it sparked an intellectual, cultural, and artistic revolution known as the Renaissance.