Forgotten Artists: Pisanello

-Lionello d'Este

Pisanello (c. 1395 – c. 1455), known professionally as Antonio di Puccio Pisano or Antonio di Puccio da Cereto was one of the most distinguished painters of the early Italian Renaissance and Quattrocento. He was compared to such illustrious names as Cimabue, Phidias and Praxiteles.

-The Apparition of the Virgin and Child Appears to Saints George and Anthony Pisanello is known for his resplendent frescoes in large murals, elegant portraits, small easel pictures, and many brilliant drawings. 

-Princess of the House of d'Este

-Cheetah 

He was employed by the Doge of Venice, the Pope in the Vatican and the courts of Verona, Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, Rimini, and by the King of Naples. He stood in high esteem of the Gonzaga and Este families.

-Emperor Sigismundo Pisanello had many of his works wrongly ascribed to other artists such as Piero della Francesca, Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, to name a few. While most of his paintings have perished, a good many of his drawings have survived.

-Dog Between 1415 and 1420, Pisanello was the assistant of the renowned painter and illuminator Gentile da Fabriano from whom he acquired his refined, delicate, detailed style. Pisanello also acquired from him a taste for precious materials and beautiful fabrics that can be found in his later paintings.

-Gentile da Fabriano- Adoration of the Magi

-The Vision of Saint Eustace Pisanello's drawings are generally prized as jewels of the quattrocento, and provide evidence of the elegant garb of the time, including spectacular hats. In contrast with his contemporaries, his drawings are not drafts for future paintings but are autonomous works of art. He compiled several books of drawings, detailed and accurate studies of fauna and flora drawn with a poetic naturalism, and elegant costumes.

-Figure Studies

-Wolf

-Horse

-Cat Studies

Forgotten Artists: Anon. (Maestro del Trionfo della Morte): Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death)

The Triumph of Death is a fresco in the Regional Gallery of Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, southern Italy. It is considered one of the most representative works of the late Gothic painting in Italy. The author of the work, which is dated around 1446, is unknown. The work comes from the court of Palazzo Sclafani, also in Palermo. Due to its highly refined style, it is thought to have been commissioned directly by the Aragonese Kings of Naples, probably to a Catalan or Provençal artist. The theme of the "Triumph of Death" was already widespread in Europe during the 14th century, but here is represented with a particular stress on macabre and grotesque themes characterized by a cruel appearance, all features rare in Italy. Names proposed for the author include Guillaume Spicre from Bourgogne.

Forgotten Artists: Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio: Portrait of a Youth Crowned with Flowers

Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio (c. 1466 – 1516): An Italian painter of the High Renaissance from Lombardy, who worked in the studio of Leonardo da Vinci. Boltraffio and Bernardino Luini are the strongest artistic personalities to emerge from Leonardo's studio. According to Giorgio Vasari, he was of an aristocratic family and was born in Milan.

La Gioconda

Re: What are you looking at?

Personally I don't think the Mona Lisa is the greatest painting ever... nor even Leonardo's greatest. I would probably have assigned that honor to his Last Supper... if it had survived more intact. As it is, I'd probably go with the Virgin of the Rocks...

... or the marvelous "cartoon" for the Virgin and Child, St. Anne, and the Infant John the Baptist:

Nevertheless, La Gioconda still resonates as a magical portrait... one that persists and inhabits the mind's eye... a rare achievement... but not the only one:

  One might argue that few of the people portrayed in these paintings are attractive by today's standards... but that's irrelevant. Artists have always had the ability to create an image of beauty from a subject that might not be recognized as traditionally beautiful.

As for her smile...

... obviously there is more than one type of smile and quite certainly the smile of La Gioconda is not a smile of beaming joy. But no one has ever suggested as much. Mona Lisa's smile is commonly spoken of as "enigmatic"... "mysterious"... It is the slightest hint of a smile... the ironic, knowing smile of a woman who looks out at the audience... or perhaps even the artist... and smiles inwardly... knowingly... aware of something unknown to them... unknown to us. 

"Good art tells a story"? Perhaps... but all art is not narrative. Indeed, the very notion that the best art is narrative in nature is quite dated... an idea rooted in the old notions of the hierarchy in art with the Histoire... the narrative historical or mythological painting stood unassailable at the top of the heap... and the lowly still life at the bottom. This notion began to unravel with Ingres, the Romantics, and Impressionism, and was finally laid to death by the Modernists. But even if the old idea were true... Oscar Wilde noted that "It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors." In other words, criticism says as much or more about the critic as it does about the artist or art work. The narrative found within a work of depends upon what the viewer brings to the table. While some see little that is special in the Mona Lisa, others have imagined a mysterious... even frightening... Sphinx-like figure sitting amidst an almost unearthly and haunted landscape. The entire painting is ethereal and atmospheric as if all were dissolving into the fog and shadows... into the mists of time. The landscape itself fascinates me as it is suggestive of nothing so much as the ink on silk paintings of the Chinese:

  Walter Pater has written eloquently upon this painting... and Leonardo's work in his marvelously poetic book, The Renaissance... but I am most impressed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet to Leonardo's The Virgin of the Rocks, which always strikes me more as an image of La Gioconda: Mother, is this the darkness of the end, The Shadow of Death? and is that outer sea Infinite imminent Eternity?