The Sicilian Master of Portraits ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Antonello da Messina occupies a special place in the history of Italian painting. Born in Messina in Sicily around 1430 and dead by 1479, he spent a comparatively short career…
The Poet of Soft Light ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Antonio Allegri, known as Correggio after the small Emilian town where he was born around 1489, was one of the most daring and poetic painters of the Italian Renaissance. He…
Master of Venetian Serenity ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Giovanni Bellini stands at the beginning of one of the greatest chapters in the history of painting: the triumph of Venetian color. Born in Venice around 1430 and active until his…
The Angelic Light of the Early Renaissance ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Fra Angelico, born Guido di Pietro around the end of the fourteenth century in the Mugello region north of Florence, occupies a unique place in Renaissance art. He…
Matter, Fire and Modern Art ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Alberto Burri was born in Città di Castello, Umbria, in 1915, and became one of the most radical Italian artists of the twentieth century. His work changed the meaning of…
A Lady of the Italian Renaissance ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Lavinia Fontana was born in Bologna in 1552 into a world in which painting was overwhelmingly a male profession. Women could appear in portraits, inspire poetry, commission altarpieces, and…
Painter of Alpine Light ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Giovanni Segantini was born in Arco, then part of the Austrian Empire and now in Trentino, in 1858. He died only forty-one years later in the high Alps, but during his…
The Intimate Genius of the Renaissance ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Lorenzo Lotto was born in Venice around 1480 and died in Loreto in the middle of the sixteenth century. For much of his life he worked outside the brightest…
Romantic Soul of Italy ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Francesco Hayez was born in Venice in 1791 and died in Milan in 1882, after a life that spanned almost the entire nineteenth-century transformation of Italy. He began his career when…
Storyteller of the Decameron ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Writers Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313, probably in or near Florence, into a world in which merchants, bankers, clerics, nobles, and ambitious city republics were transforming medieval Italy. He would become…