Of all Italian painters, Caravaggio (c. 1565-1609) speaks most intensely to the modern world. His early works suggest a fascination with his own youth and sexuality and the trancience of love and beauty his later religious art speaks of violence, passion, solitude and death. Ugly, almost brutal-looking, Caravaggio was constantly embroiled in fights and entangled with the law; the prototype anti-social artist, he moved between the worlds of powerful patrons and the street life of boys and prostitutes. Helen Langdon uncovers his progress from childhood in plague-ridden Milan to wild success in Rome, and eventual exile and persecution in the South, and sets his work against the political, intellectual and spiritual movements of the day. Fully illustrated, her dramatic portrait shows Carravigio's life to be as sensational and enigmatic as his powerful and enduring art.
A compelling biography of the Renaissance painter, known equally for his magnetic personality and unusual subject matter: witchcraft and the sublime. Painter, poet, and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the preeminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new biography traces Rosa’s strategies of self-promotion and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject matter—witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic, and dark violence—and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime. Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age.
Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543) is renowned for his incisive portraits of Norhern Europe’s courtiers, thinkers and statesmen, but his output was far more various, and included book illustration, large religious paintings and designs for jewellery and court fashions. This fine record of his career examines these varied aspects of his genius and beautifully illustrates the ways in which his miraculous technical accomplishment and attention to surface detail were married to acute observations of an empathy with his human subjects. For this new edition of Helen Langdon's introduction to Holbein, art historian James Malpas has selected additional illustrations and written detailed commentaries on each colour plate.
A new title in the successful Lives of the Artists series, which offers illuminating, and often intimate, accounts of iconic artists as viewed by their contemporaries. The most notorious Italian painter of his day, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) forever altered the course of Western painting with his artistic ingenuity and audacity. This volume presents the most important early biographies of his life: an account by his doctor, Giulio Mancini; another by one of his artistic rivals, Giovanni Baglione; and a later profile by Giovanni Pietro Bellori that demonstrates how Caravaggio’s impact was felt in seventeenth-century Italy. Together, these accounts have provided almost everything that is known of this enigmatic figure.
This book is basically concerned with painting but also includes sculpture of outstanding importance and some collections of sculpture, particularly those in parks and gardens. For reasons of space I have limited the works described to the western tradition from the early Renaissance to the present day. I have included all the major museums and a vast selection of minor but equally fascinating museums, churches, villas and houses. My approach has been empirical; I have tried to respond to the experiences that each city has to offer. - Note on the contents.
In Throwing Caution to the Wind - A Third Age Writers' Perspective, Bryan McNally and Jan Marshall have compiled a collection of special works written by very talented people in their Third Age.A tale of what it would be like to take a trip back in time to talk with 'Banjo' Patterson about his legendary works.The highs and lows of returning to your homeland as you reminisce together.The intensity that a loved one experiences when that inevitable day comes when you lose a parent. Of verse that tells of losing friends and loved ones near and dear to you and much, much more. The collection relates feelings. Feelings of joy, humour; of life and death, and everything in between. A variety of writing media allows the authors freedom of expression in their works. The broad spectrum includes memoirs, short stories, stage performance, essays, poems and exercises undertaken in the Whittlesea U3A Writers' Group class.
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