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[German Version] (c. 1415, Borgo Sansepolcro – Oct 12, 1492, Borgo Sansepolcro), painter. After his apprenticeship, probably in Florence, Piero worked initially for churches near his home town, then in Ferrara and Rimini, and later in Urbino, commissioned by the local rulers. Throughout his lifetime, he also held various public offices in Sansepolcro. His most important work is the multipart fresco cycle on the discovery of the true cross, painted in the choir of the Franciscan church in Arezzo (1452–1466). The formal vocabulary of the frescoes, the polyptychs, the enigmatic Flagella…

[German Version] (actually Guido di Pietro; as a monk, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, also Beato Angelico; c. 1395 near Vecchio, Mugello – Feb 18, 1455, Rome) was an Italian painter and one of the most significant among the numerous monk painters of the early Italian Renaissance (III). He is not attested as a monk of the Dominican friary (Dominicans) of strict observance in Fiesole until 1423. In the Dominican monastery of San Marco in Florence, Fra Angelico and his workshop painted approx. 70 religious scenes in th…

[German Version] (Jul 30, 1511, Arezzo – Jun 27, 1574, Florence), painter, architect, and writer. He worked in Rome but primarily in Florence (remodeling of the town hall to serve as the ducal palace beginning in ¶ 1555, construction of the Uffizi beginning in 1560, radical “modernization” of the major med. churches). His major achievement, however, is his biographical study of Italian artists (1550, 21568; see bibl.; ET: The Lives of the Artists, 1998), in which he sees the rebirth ( rinascità; “Renaissance”) of classical and natural beauty brought to perfection in the work…

[German Version] (Mar 30, 1892, Hannover – Mar 14, 1968, Princeton), art historian. Panofsky studied at Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 1915. He was appointed as a Privatdozent at the University of Hamburg, where he became a full professor in 1926. There, under the influence of E. Cassirer and Aby Warburg (Warburg school), he produced groundbreaking studies, including Die Perspektive als ‘symboli­sche Form’ (1927; ET: Perspective as Symbolic Form, 1991) and Hercules am Scheidewege, 1930. In 1933 he was dismissed and emigrated to the United States, where in…

[German Version] (c. 1465, Venice – 1525 or 1526, Venice). With G. Bellini, the Italian painter Vittore Carpaccio was a dominant figure in Venetian painting between 1490 and 1510. In 1511 he called himself pittore di stato. The nucleus of his work consists of cycles for the assembly rooms of several Venetian confraternities. The large-scale canvasses incorporate vivid details of everyday life but also the concern of the republic and its leading families in the face of the danger posed by the Turks. In 1490 Car…

[German Version] (Jun 28, 1577, Siegen – May 30, 1640, Antwerp), Flemish painter. Rubens was the son of an eminent Antwerp jurisprudent, whose Reformed faith forced him to flee to Cologne in 1568. After his father’s death, in 1589 his mother returned to Antwerp and to the Catholic faith. After an apprenticeship with various artists, including Otto van Veen, in 1598 he became an independent master of the Guild of Saint Luke. In 1600 he traveled to Italy, where he entered the service of the Gonzagas…

[German Version] (baptized May 20, 1593; died Oct 18, 1678, Antwerp), Flemish painter. Jordaens, the son of a wealthy businessman, often liked to translate the elevated rhetoric of his colleagues, among whom he was particularly close to P.P. Rubens, to a popular, sometimes even vulgar level in his painting. The lively style of his popular, frequently repeated genre paintings ( Satyr among Farmers, Munich, Alte Pinakothek; Just As the Old People Sang, So the Young People Twitter, Berlin, Charlottenburg Castle; The King Drinks, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) also marks some …

[German Version] (Stefano di Giovanni di Consolo; c. 1392, Siena or Cortona – 1450, Siena), Italian painter. Although trained in a local stylistic ambiance, in the early altarpieces he began painting c. 1426 Sasseta already showed that his eye was on the revolutionary developments in Florence. His altarpiece painted for a chapel in Siena Cathedral in 1432 (now in the Pitti Palace, Florence) intoduced animating motifs into the conventional iconography of the Santa Conversazione: an angel making a snowball, individual gestures or limbs extended in three-dimensional spa…

[German Version] (between 1398 and 1400, Tournai – Jun 1464, Brussels), Dutch painter. His relationship to his teacher Robert Campin (Master of Flémaille; c. 1375–1444) has been a matter of controversy to the present day. In 1436 he was made town painter of Brussels. In 1449/1450 he made a pilgrimage to Rome: his painting of the entombment (Florence, ¶ Uffizi, c. 1463/1464) recalls a composition by Fra Angelico, and the layout of his painting of the Madonna with saints (Frankfurt, Städel, c. 1463/1464) recalls the sacra conversazione genre developed in Florence. Unlike J. van Eyc…

[German Version] (Raffaello Sanzio; probably Apr 6, 1483, Urbino – Apr 6, 1520, Rome), Italian painter and architect. He was probably apprenticed in 1494 to Perugino in Perugia. In 1504 he went to Florence for further training; in 1508 he went to Rome, where in 1514 he succeeded Bramante as supervising architect of the new St. Peter’s Basilica. His extensive workshop included included Giulio Romano and Pierino del Vaga. Several Madonnas embodying the quintessence of naïve devotion antedate his move to Rome ( Madonna of the Goldfinch, Madonna in Green, c. 1506/1507, both in the Uffiz…

[German Version] (c. 1450 – Oct 16, 1523, Cortona), Italian painter. After studying, probably with Piero della Francesca, Signorelli must quickly have become familiar with Florentine art as well. In 1482 he was commissioned to paint a fresco on the life of Moses in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The Humanistic atmosphere at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici inspired his great painting of the god Pan with his entourage (c. 1488; Berlin, destroyed by fire in 1945), the first history painting in wh…

[German Version] (Apr 15, 1452, near Vinci – May 2, 1519, Amboise), Florentine universal artist, scientist, engineer, and theoretician. Born the illegitimate son of a notary and a young peasant woman, he was apprenticed around 1469 to the painter and sculptor Verrocchio. His drawing of a valley dated Aug 5, 1473, is one of the very earliest landscape pictures. In 1481 Leonardo began an Adoration of the Magi (Florence, Uffizi). Although it remained unfinished, its pyramidal triangular composition coupled with the extremely varied movements and gestures of the fi…