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;…
ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Giorgio Morandi is one of those rare artists whose world appears small only until one begins to look closely. Bottles, jars, boxes, pitchers, a few flowers, the hills outside Bologna: these were the modest subjects…
ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Umberto Boccioni lived only thirty-three years, yet in that short life he helped give visual form to one of the most explosive ideas in modern art: that the world had changed so radically that painting…
ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Masaccio's career lasted scarcely more than six years, yet he changed the direction of European painting. He died in 1428 at only twenty-six or twenty-seven, leaving behind a small body of work. But in those…
ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Giorgio de Chirico created some of the most haunting images of modern art: empty squares under hard afternoon light, arcades stretching into silence, long shadows cast by unseen figures, classical statues standing beside trains, clocks,…