Italian art, architecture, craftsmanship, cinema, fashion and world-famous design.
ItalyStories.com Gian Lorenzo Bernini, born in Naples in 1598 and active above all in Rome, was the supreme artist of the Baroque age. Sculptor, architect, designer, draftsman, playwright, and master of theatrical imagination, Bernini transformed seventeenth-century Rome into a city…
The Melancholy Elegance of Modern Art ItalyStories.com Amedeo Modigliani belongs to that rare group of artists whose legend almost threatens to eclipse the work itself. His face, his poverty, his illnesses, his turbulent life in Paris, his early death, and…
The Poet of Marble ItalyStories.com Antonio Canova was the great sculptural voice of European Neoclassicism, an artist who convinced marble to imitate the softness of skin, the weight of sleep, the tenderness of a kiss, and the calm authority of…
The Sculptor Who Brought Stone to Life ItalyStories.com Donatello changed sculpture before the Renaissance had even fully learned what it could become. Born Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi in Florence around 1386, he belonged to the first generation of…
The Rebel of Light and Shadow ItalyStories.com Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio entered European painting like a blade of light through darkness. Born in Milan in 1571 and associated by name with the Lombard town of Caravaggio, he lived only thirty-eight…
Poet of Beauty and Myth ItalyStories.com Sandro Botticelli painted some of the most beautiful and mysterious images of the Italian Renaissance. The Birth of Venus and Primavera have become universal symbols of Florence, of classical myth reborn, and of a…
The Fury of Venetian Painting ItalyStories.com Tintoretto was born Jacopo Robusti in Venice around 1518 or 1519, and almost everything about his mature art seems to carry the speed, tension, and drama of the city in which he spent nearly…
The Splendor of Venice ItalyStories.com Paolo Veronese was born Paolo Caliari in Verona in 1528, but history remembers him through the city that made him famous. “Veronese” simply means “the man from Verona,” yet by the middle of the sixteenth…
The Father of Italian Painting ItalyStories.com Giotto di Bondone stands at one of the great turning points in the history of European art. Born around 1267, probably near Florence, and dead in 1337, he worked in a world still dominated…
Sculpted Vision of the Renaissance ItalyStories.com Andrea Mantegna was born in 1431 near Padua, probably at Isola di Carturo, and became one of the most intellectually ambitious painters of the Italian Renaissance. His art is immediately recognizable: hard, clear contours;…