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,…
ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Piero della Francesca occupies a unique place in Renaissance art. His paintings are calm, lucid, and geometrically ordered, yet they possess a mystery that resists explanation. Figures stand in clear light, architecture is measured with…
Elegance of Mannerism ItalyStories.com — Great Italian Artists Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, known to history as Parmigianino, was born in Parma in 1503 and died only thirty-seven years later. His life was brief, restless, brilliant, and in the end troubled,…
ItalyStories.com Titian, born Tiziano Vecellio around 1488 or 1490 in Pieve di Cadore, rose from the mountains of the Venetian mainland to become the painter who gave Venice its color, its sensuality, and much of its image in the imagination…