Coordinates	33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N
bgcolour	#6495ED
name	Pontormo
birth name	Jacopo Carucci
birth date	May 24, 1494
birth place	Pontorme near Empoli, Italy
death date	January 02, 1557
death place	Florence, Italy
nationality	Italian
field	Painting
movement	Mannerism
works	The Deposition from the Cross
awards	}}

Jacopo Carucci (May 24, 1494 – January 2, 1557), usually known as ''Jacopo da Pontormo'', ''Jacopo Pontormo'' or simply Pontormo, was an Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine school. His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the calm perspectival regularity that characterized the art of the Florentine Renaissance. He is famous for his use of twining poses, coupled with ambiguous perspective; his figures often seem to float in an uncertain environment, unhampered by the forces of gravity.

Biography and early work

Jacopo Carucci was born at Pontorme, near Empoli, to Bartolomeo di Jacopo di Martino Carrucci and Alessandra di Pasquale di Zanobi. Vasari relates how the orphaned boy, "young, melancholy and lonely," was shuttled around as a young apprentice:

Pontormo painted in and around Florence, often supported by Medici patronage. A foray to Rome, largely to see Michelangelo's work, influenced his later style. Haunted faces and elongated bodies are characteristic of his work. An example of Pontormo's early style is ''The Visitation of the Virgin and St Elizabeth'', with its dancelike, balanced figures, painted from 1514 to 1516.

This early ''Visitation'' makes an interesting comparison with his painting of the same subject (at right), which was done about a decade later for the parish church of St. Michael in Carmignano, about 20 km west of Florence. Placing these two pictures together—one from his early style, and another from his mature period—throws Pontormo's artistic development into sharp relief. In the earlier work, Pontormo is much closer in style to his teacher, Andrea del Sarto, and to the early sixteenth century renaissance artistic principles. For example, the figures stand at just under half the height of the overall picture, and though a bit more crowded than true high renaissance balance would prefer, at least are placed in a classicizing architectural setting at a comfortable distance from the viewer. In the later work, the viewer is brought almost uncomfortably close to the Virgin and St. Elizabeth, who drift toward each other in clouds of drapery. Moreover, the clear architectural setting that is carefully constructed in earlier piece has been completely abandoned in favor of a peculiar nondescript urban setting.

The Joseph canvases (now in the National Gallery in London) offer another example of Pontormo's developing style. Done around the same time as the earlier ''Visitation'', these works (such as ''Joseph in Egypt'', at left) show a much more mannerist leaning. According to Giorgio Vasari, the sitter for the boy seated on a step is his young apprentice, Bronzino.

In the years between the SS Annunziata and San Michele ''Visitation''s, Pontormo took part in the fresco decoration of the salon of the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano (1519–20), 17 km NNW of Florence. There he painted frescoes in a pastoral genre style, very uncommon for Florentine painters; their subject was the obscure classical myth of ''Vertumnus and Pomona'' in a lunette.

In 1522, when the plague broke out in Florence, Pontormo left for the Certosa di Galluzzo, a cloistered Carthusian monastery where the monks followed vows of silence. He painted a series of frescoes, now quite damaged, on the passion and resurrection of Christ.

Main works in Florence

The large altarpiece canvas for the Brunelleschi-designed Capponi Chapel in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence, portraying ''The Deposition from the Cross'', is considered by many Pontormo's surviving masterpiece (1528).

The figures, with their sharply modeled forms and brilliant colors are united in an enormously complex, swirling ovular composition, housed by a shallow, somewhat flattened space. Although commonly known as ''The Deposition from the Cross'', there is no actual cross in the picture. The scene might more properly be called a ''Lamentation'' or ''Bearing the Body of Christ''. Those who are lowering (or supporting) Christ appear as anguished as the mourners. Though they are bearing the weight of a full-grown man, they barely seem to be touching the ground; the lower figure in particular balances delicately and implausibly on his front two toes. These two boys have sometimes been interpreted as Angels, carrying Christ in his journey to Heaven. In this case, the subject of the picture would be more akin to an ''Entombment'', though the lack of any discernible tomb disrupts that theory, just as the lack of cross poses a problem for the ''Deposition'' interpretation. Finally, it has also been noted that the positions of Christ and the Virgin seem to echo those of Michelangelo's ''Pietà'' in Rome, though here in the ''Deposition'' mother and son have been separated. Thus in addition to elements of a ''Lamentation'' and ''Entombment'', this picture carries hints of a ''Pietà''. It has been speculated that the bearded figure in the background at the far right is a self-portrait of Pontormo as Joseph of Arimathea. Another unique feature of this particular ''Deposition'' is the empty space occupying the central pictorial plane as all the Biblical personages seem to fall back from this point. It has been suggested that this emptiness may be a physical representation of the Virgin Mary's emotional emptiness at the prospect of losing her son. On the wall to the right of the ''Deposition'', Pontormo frescoed an ''Annunciation'' scene (at right). As with the ''Deposition'', the artist's primary attention is on the figures themselves rather than their setting. Placed against white walls, the Angel Gabriel and Virgin Mary are presented in an environment that is so simplified as to almost seem stark. The fictive architectural details above each of them, are painted to resemble the gray stone ''pietra serena'' that adorns the interior of Santa Felicità, thus uniting their painted space with the viewer's actual space. The startling contrast between the figures and ground makes their brilliant garments almost seem to glow in the light of the window between them, against the stripped-down background, as if the couple miraculously appeared in an extension of the chapel wall. The ''Annunciation'' resembles his above mentioned ''Visitation'' in the church of San Michele at Carmignano in both the style and swaying postures.

Vasari tells us that the cupola was originally painted with God the Father and Four Patriarchs. The decoration in the dome of the chapel is now lost, but four roundels with the Evangelists still adorn the pendentives, worked on by both Pontormo and his chief pupil Agnolo Bronzino. The two artists collaborated so intimately, that specialists dispute which roundels each of them painted.

This tumultuous oval of figures took three years for Pontormo to complete. According to Vasari, because Pontormo desired above all to "do things his own way without being bothered by anyone," the artist screened off the chapel so as to prevent interfering opinions. Vasari continues, "And so, having painted it in his own way without any of his friends being able to point anything out to him, it was finally uncovered and seen with astonishment by all of Florence..."

A number of Pontormo's other works have also remained in Florence; the Uffizi Gallery holds his mystical ''Supper at Emmaus'' as well as portraits.

Many of Pontormo's well known canvases, such as the early ''Joseph in Egypt'' series (c. 1515) and the later ''Martyrdom of St Maurice and the Theban Legion'' (c. 1531) depict crowds milling about in extreme contrapposto of greatly varied positions.

His portraits, acutely characterized, show similarly Mannerist proportions.

Lost or damaged works

Many of Pontormo's works have been damaged, including the lunnettes for the cloister in the Carthusian monastery of Galluzo. They are now displayed indoors, although in their damaged state.

Perhaps most tragic is the loss of the unfinished frescoes for the church of San Lorenzo which consumed the last decade of his life. His frescoes depicted a last judgement day composed of an unsettling morass of writhing figures. The remaining drawings, showing a bizarre and mystical ribboning of bodies, had an almost hallucinatory effect. Florentine figure painting had mainly stressed linear and sculptural figures. For example, the Christ in Michelangelo's ''Last Judgment'' in the Sistine Chapel is a massive painted block, stern in his wrath; by contrast, Pontormo's Jesus in the ''Last Judgment'' twists sinuously, as if rippling through the heavens in the dance of ultimate finality. Angels swirl about him in even more serpentine poses. If Pontormo's work from the 1520s seemed to float an a world little touched by gravitational force, the ''Last Judgment'' figures seem to have escaped it altogether and fly through a rarefied air.

In his ''Last Judgment'' Pontormo went against pictorial and theological tradition by placing God the Father at the feet of Christ, instead of above him, an idea Vasari found deeply disturbing:

Critical assessment and legacy

Vasari's ''Life'' of Pontormo, depicts him as withdrawn and steeped in neurosis while at the center of the artists and patrons of his lifetime. This image of Pontormo has tended to color the popular conception of the artist, as seen in the film of Giovanni Fago, ''Pontormo, a heretical love''. Fago portrays Pontormo as mired in a lonely and ultimately paranoid dedication to his final ''Last Judgment'' project, which he often kept shielded from onlookers. Yet as the art historian Elizabeth Pilliod has pointed out, Vasari was in fierce competition with the Pontormo/Bronzino workshop at the time when he was writing his ''Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects''. This professional rivalry between the two ''bottega''s could well have provided Vasari with ample motivation for running down the artistic lineage of his opponent for Medici patronage.

Perhaps as a result of Vasari's derision, or perhaps because of the vagaries of aesthetic taste, Potormo's work was quite out of fashion for several centuries. The fact that so much of his work has been lost or severely damaged is testament to this neglect, though he has received renewed attention by contemporary art historians. Indeed, between 1989 and 2002, Pontormo's ''Portrait of a Halberdier'' (at right), held the title of the world's most expensive painting by an Old Master.

Regardless as to the veracity of Vasari's account, it is certainly true that Pontormo's artistic idiosyncrasies produced a style that few were able (or willing) to imitate, with the exception of his closest pupil Bronzino. Bronzino's early work is so close to that of his teacher, that the authorship of several paintings from the 1520s and '30s are still under dispute—for example the four ''tondi'' containing the evangelists in the Capponi Chapel, and the ''Portrait of a Lady in Red'' now in Frankfurt (at left).

Pontormo shares some of the mannerism of Rosso Fiorentino and of Parmigianino. In some ways he anticipated the Baroque as well as the tensions of El Greco. His eccentricities also resulted in an original sense of composition. At best, his compositions are cohesive. The figures in the ''Deposition'', for example, appear to sustain each other: removal of any one of them would cause the edifice to collapse. In other works, as in the Joseph canvases, the crowding makes for a confusing pictorial melee. It is in the later drawings that we see a graceful fusion of bodies in a composition which includes the oval frame of Jesus in the ''Last Judgement''.

Anthology of works

Early works (until 1521)

{| class=wikitable ! width="40%" | Painting ! width="14%" | Date ! width="40%" | Site ! width="6%" | Link |- valign="top" |''Leda and the Swan'' (uncertain attribution) |1512–1513 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Holy Conversation'' |1514 |San Luca Chapel, Santa Annunziata, Florence. | |- valign="top" |''Madonna and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist'' |c.1514 |Whitfield Fine Art, London. | |- valign="top" |''Episode of Hospital Life'' |1514 |Accademia, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Veronica and the Image'' |1515 |Medici Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Visitation'' |1514–1516 |Santa Annunziata, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Lady with Basket of Spindles''(attributed to Andrea del Sarto) |1516–1517 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" | Marriage bedchamber panels for Pier Francesco Borgherini. (Two others by Francesco Bachiacca) | | | |- valign="top" |''Joseph reveals himself to his brothers'' |1516-17 |National Gallery, London | |- valign="top" |''Joseph sold to Potiphar'' |1516-17 |National Gallery, London | |- valign="top" |''Joseph's Brothers Beg for Help'' |1515 |National Gallery, London | |- valign="top" |''Pharaoh with his Butler and Baker'' |1516–1517 |National Gallery, London | |- valign="top" |''Joseph in Egypt'' |1517-18 |National Gallery, London | |- valign="top" |*''St. Quentin'' (Also attributed to Giovanni Maria Pichi) |1517 |Pinacoteca comunale, Sansepolcro | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of Furrier'' |1517–1518 |Louvre, Paris | |- valign="top" |''St Jerome & St Francis'' |1518 |Whitfield Fine Art, London | |- valign="top" |''Madonna with Child and Saints'' |1518 |San Michele Visdomini, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of Musician'' |1518–1519 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence |- valign="top" |''St Anthony Abbott'' |1518–1519 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of Cosimo the Elder'' |1518–1519 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" |''John the Evangelist & the Archangel Gabriel'' |1519 |Church of S. Michele, Empoli | |- valign="top" |''Adoration of the Magi'' |1519-21 |Palazzo Pitti, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Vertumnus and Pomona'' |1519–1521 |Villa Medici, Poggio a Caiano | |- valign="top" |''Study of Man's Head '' (Drawing) | |Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City | |- valign="top"| |}

Mature works (1522-1530)

{| class=wikitable ! width="40%" | Painting ! width="14%" | Date ! width="40%" | Site ! width="6%" | Link |- valign="top" | ''Mary and Child with Four saints'' | 1520-30 | Metropolitan Museum, New York City | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of two friends'' |c. 1522 |Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice | |- valign="top" |''Madonna with Child & Two Saints'' (Bronzino?) |c. 1522 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Holy Family with St John'' |1522–1524 |Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg | |- valign="top" |''Madonna with Child & St John'' (Attributed to Rosso Fiorentino) |1523–1525 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Prayer in Gesthemane'' (copies by Jacopo da Empoli) |1523–1525 |Certosa di Galluzo | |- valign="top" |''Walk to Calvary'' |1523–1525 |Certosa di Galluzo | |- valign="top" |''Christ before Pilate'' |1523–1525 |Certosa di Galluzo | |- valign="top" |''Deposition'' |1523–1525 |Certosa di Galluzo | |- valign="top" |''Resurrection'' |1523–1525 |Certosa di Galluzo | |- valign="top" |''Supper in Emmaus'' |1525 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Study of a Carthusian Monk'' (Drawing) |1525 | Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" | ''Madonna and child & two angels'' |1525 | San Francisco Museum Art, San Francisco | |- valign="top" | ''Portrait of young man in pink'' | 1525–1526, |Pinacoteca Communale, Lucca. | |- valign="top" | Tabernacle of San Giuliano, Boldrone, ''Crucifix with Madonna & St. John, and Sant'Agostino'' | 1525–1526: | Accademia, Florence | |- valign="top" | ''Birth of St. John Baptist'' | 1526 | Uffizi Gallery, Florence |- valign="top" | ''Saint Jerome Penitent'' | 1526–1527 | Landesmuseum, Hannover. | |- valign="top" | ''Madonna with Child & St John'' (Bronzino?) | 1526–1528 | Palazzo Corsini, Florence. | |- valign="top" | ''Madonna with Child & St John'' | 1527–1528. | Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" | ''Matthew, Luke, & John'' (Mark painted by Bronzino) | 1525–1526 | Santa Felicita, Capponi Chapel, Florence. | |- valign="top" | ''Deposition'' | 1526–1528 | Santa Felicita, Capponi Chapel, Florence. | |- valign="top" | ''Annunciation'' | 1527–1528 | Santa Felicita, Capponi Chapel, Florence. | |- valign="top" | ''Portrait of Francesca Capponi, as St. Mary Magdalen'' | 1527–1528 | Whitfield Fine Art, London. | |- valign="top" | ''Visitation'' | 1528–1529 | Church of San Francesco e Michele, Carmignano | |- valign="top" | ''Madonna with Child, Saint Anne and Four saints'' | 1528–1529 | Louvre Museum, Paris. | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of a Halberdier'' |1528–1530 |J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles | |- valign="top" | ''Eleven Thousand Martyrs'' | 1529–1530 | Palazzo Pitti, Florence | |- valign="top" |}

Late works (after 1530)

{| class=wikitable ! width="40%" | Painting ! width="14%" | Date ! width="40%" | Site ! width="6%" | Link |- valign="top" |''Martyrdom of San Maurizio and the Theban Legions'' (Pontormo & Bronzino) |1531 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Noli me Tangere'' (Bronzino?) |1531 |Casa Buonarroti, Florence | |- valign="top" | ''Portrait of lady in red with puppy'', (Bronzino?) | 1532–1533 | Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt | |- valign="top" |''Venus and Cupid'' |1532–1534 |Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of Alessandro de' Medici'' |c. 1534-1535 |Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of Alessandro de' Medici'' |c. 1534-1535 |Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago | |- valign="top" |''Adam and Eve'' |1535 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Study for the Three Graces'' (Drawing) |1535 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of Maria Salviati de Medici and Giulia de Medici'' (Painting) |c. 1539 |The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of Niccolò Ardinghelli'' | |National Gallery, Washington D.C. | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of Maria Salviati'' |1543–1545 |Uffizi Gallery, Florence |- valign="top" |''Sacrificial Scene'' |c. 1545 |Capodimonte Museum, Naples | |- valign="top" |''My Book'' (''Pontormo's Diary'') |1554–1556 |National Library, Florence | |- valign="top" |''Portrait of Pontormo'' (Bronzino) | | | |- valign="top" |''St. Francis'' (Drawing) | |Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | |- valign="top" |''San Lorenzo'' (Fresco cartoons) | | | |- valign="top" |}

References

External links

Pontormo's paintings and drawings illustrated

Pontormo at Olga's Gallery

Giorgio Vasari's ''Vita'' (English)

Pontormo's 1554 diary

A diary of his last two years survives

Category:Mannerist painters Category:Italian painters Category:Tuscan painters Category:1494 births Category:1557 deaths Category:People from Empoli

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Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1554/1557 – 12 August 1612) was an Italian composer and organist. He was one of the most influential musicians of his time, and represents the culmination of the style of the Venetian School, at the time of the shift from Renaissance to Baroque idioms.

Biography

Gabrieli was most likely born in Venice. He was one of five children, and his father came from the town of Carnia and went to Venice shortly before Giovanni's birth. While not much is known about Giovanni's early life, he probably studied with his uncle, the composer Andrea Gabrieli; he may indeed have been brought up by him, as is implied by the dedication to his 1587 book of concerti, in which he described himself as "little less than a son" to his uncle. He also went to Munich to study with the renowned Orlando de Lassus at the court of Duke Albert V; most likely he stayed there until about 1579. Lassus was to be one of the principal influences on the development of his musical style.

By 1584 he had returned to Venice, where he became principal organist at San Marco di Venezia, also known as Saint Mark's Basilica, in 1585, after Claudio Merulo left the post; following his uncle's death the following year he took the post of principal composer as well. Also after his uncle's death he began editing much of the older man's music, which would otherwise have been lost; Andrea evidently had had little inclination to publish his own music, but Giovanni's opinion of it was sufficiently high that he devoted much of his own time to compiling and editing it for publication.

Gabrieli's career rose further when he took the additional post of organist at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, another post he retained for his entire life. San Rocco was the most prestigious and wealthy of all the Venetian confraternities, and second only to San Marco itself in splendor of its musical establishment. Some of the most renowned singers and instrumentalists in Italy performed there and a vivid description of its musical activity survives in the travel memoirs of the English writer Thomas Coryat. Much of his music was written specifically for that location, although he probably composed even more for San Marco.

San Marco had a long tradition of musical excellence and Gabrieli's work there made him one of the most noted composers in Europe. The vogue that began with his influential volume ''Sacrae symphoniae'' (1597) was such that composers from all over Europe, especially from Germany, came to Venice to study. Evidently he also made his new pupils study the madrigals being written in Italy, so not only did they carry back the grand Venetian polychoral style to their home countries, but also the more intimate style of madrigals; Heinrich Schütz and others helped transport the transitional early Baroque music north to Germany, a trend that decisively affected subsequent music history. The productions of the German Baroque, culminating in the music of J.S. Bach, were founded on this strong tradition, which had its roots in Venice.

Gabrieli was increasingly ill after about 1606, at which time church authorities began to appoint deputies to take over duties he could no longer perform. He died in 1612, of complications from a kidney stone.

Music and style

Though Gabrieli composed in many of the forms current at the time, he preferred sacred vocal and instrumental music. All of his secular vocal music is relatively early; he never wrote lighter forms, such as dances; and late in his career he concentrated on sacred vocal and instrumental music that exploited sonority for maximum effect. Among the innovations credited to him – and while he was not always the first, he was the most famous to do these things – were the use of dynamics; the use of specifically notated instrumentation (as in the famous ''Sonata pian' e forte''); and the use of massive forces arrayed in multiple, spatially separated groups, an idea which was to be the genesis of the Baroque concertato style, and which spread quickly to northern Europe, both by the report of visitors to Venice and by Gabrieli's students, which included Hans Leo Hassler and Heinrich Schütz.

Like composers before and after him, he would use the unusual layout of the San Marco church, with its two choir lofts facing each other, to create striking spatial effects. Most of his pieces are written so that a choir or instrumental group will first be heard on one side, followed by a response from the musicians on the other side; often there was a third group situated on a stage near the main altar in the center of the church. While this polychoral style had been extant for decades (Adrian Willaert may have made use of it first, at least in Venice) Gabrieli pioneered the use of carefully specified groups of instruments and singers, with precise directions for instrumentation, and in more than two groups. The acoustics were and are such in the church that instruments, correctly positioned, could be heard with perfect clarity at distant points. Thus instrumentation which looks strange on paper, for instance a single string player set against a large group of brass instruments, can be made to sound, in San Marco, in perfect balance.

Gabrieli's first motets were published alongside his uncle Andrea's compositions in his 1587 volume of ''Concerti''. These pieces show much influence of his uncle's style in the use of dialogue and echo effects. There are low and high choirs and the difference between their pitches is marked by the use of instrumental accompaniment. The motets published in Giovanni's 1597 ''Sacrae Symphoniae'' seem to move away from this technique of close antiphony towards a model in which musical material is not simply echoed, but developed by successive choral entries. Some motets, such as ''Omnes Gentes'' developed the model almost to its limits. In these motets, instruments are an integral part of the performance, and only the choirs marked "Capella" are to be performed by singers for each part.

There seems to be a distinct change in Gabrieli's style after 1605, the year of publication of Monteverdi's ''Qinto libro di madrigale'', and Gabrieli's compositions are in a much more homophonic style as a result. There are sections purely for instruments - called "Sinfonia" - and small sections for soloists singing florid lines, accompanied simply by a basso continuo. "Alleluia" refrains provide refrains within the structure, forming rondo patterns in the motets, with close dialogue between choirs and soloists. In particular, one of his best-known pieces, ''In Ecclesiis'', is a showcase of such polychoral techniques, making use of four separate groups of instrumental and singing performers, underpinned by the omnipresent organ and continuo.

References

Further reading

David Bryant. "Gabrieli, Giovanni." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40693 (accessed September 22, 2009).

Giulio Ongaro, et al. "Venice." In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/41311 (accessed September 22, 2009).

Donald Jay Grout, ''A History of Western Music''. W.W. Norton & Co., 1980. ISBN 0-393-95136-7

Richard Charteris, ''Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555–1612): a Thematic Catalogue of his Music with a Guide to the Source Materials and Translations of his Vocal Texts''. New York, 1996.

Egon Kenton, ''Life and Works of Giovanni Gabrieli''. American Institute of Musicology, 1967 (Armen Carapetyen).

Eleanor Selfridge-Field, ''Venetian Instrumental Music, from Gabrieli to Vivaldi.'' New York, Dover Publications, 1994. ISBN 0-486-28151-5

Denis Arnold, ''Giovanni Gabrieli and the Music of the Venetian High Renaissance.'' London: Oxford University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-19-315247-9

Denis Arnold, ''Monteverdi.'' London, J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1975. ISBN 0-460-03155-4

Denis Arnold, "Giovanni Gabrieli," in ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2

Gustave Reese, ''Music in the Renaissance''. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1954. ISBN 0-393-09530-4

Manfred Bukofzer, ''Music in the Baroque Era''. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1947. ISBN 0-393-09745-5

External links

Listen to free recordings of songs from Umeå Akademiska Kör.

Gabrieli Gabrieli Gabrieli Gabrieli Gabrieli Gabrieli Gabrieli Category:Venetian school composers

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Coordinates	33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N
bgcolour	#6495ED
name	Francesco Guardi
birth date	October 05, 1712
birth place	Venice
death date	January 01, 1793
nationality	Italian
field	Painting
movement	Venetian School
awards	}}

Francesco Lazzaro Guardi (October 5, 1712 – January 1, 1793) was a Venetian painter of veduta, a member of the Venetian School. He is considered to be among the last practitioners, along with his brothers, of the classic Venetian school of painting.

Biography

Francesco Guardi was born in Venice into a family of lesser nobility from Trentino. His father Domenico (born in 1678) and his brothers Niccolò and Gian Antonio were also painters, the latter inheriting the family workshop after the father's death in 1716. They probably all contributed as a team to some of the larger commissions later attributed to Francesco. His sister Maria Cecilia married the pre-eminent Veneto-European painter of his epoch, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

In 1735, Guardi moved to the workshop of Michele Marieschi, where he remained until 1743. His first certain works is from 1738, for a parish at Vigo d'Anuania, in Trentino. In this period he worked alongside his better-known brother, Gian Antonio. The first work signed by Francesco is a ''Saint Adoring the Eucarist'' (circa 1739).

His works in this period included landscapes as well as figure representations. His early vedutas show influence both from Canaletto and Luca Carlevarijs. On February 15, 1757 he married Maria Mattea Pagani, the daughter of painter Matteo Pagani. In the same year his brother Gian Antonio died and his first son, Vincenzo, was born. His second son, Giacomo, was born in 1764.

In 1763 he worked in Murano, in the church of San Pietro Martire, finishing a ''Miracle of a Dominican Saint'' clearly influenced by Alessandro Magnasco in its quasi-expressionistic style.

Francesco Guardi's most important later works include the ''Doge's Feasts'', a series of twelve canvases celebrating the ceremonies held in 1763 for the election of Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo. In his later years, Canaletto's influence on his art diminished, as showed by the ''Piazzetta'' in the Ca' d'Oro of Venice. In circa 1778, he painted the severe ''Holy Trinity Appearing to Sts. Peter and Paul'' in the parish church of Roncegno. In 1782 Guardi was commissioned by the Venetian government six canvases to celebrate the visit of the Russian Archdukes in the city, of which only two remain, and two others for that of Pope Pius VI. On September 12 of that year he was admitted to the Fine Art Academy of Venice.

A stronger attention to colours is present in late works such as the ''Concerto of 80 Orphans'' of 1782, now in Munich, in the ''Façade of Palace with Staircase'' in the Accademia Carrara of Bergamo.

Guardi died at Venice in 1793.

Mature style

Among all the paintings attributed to either Francesco and his brother Gian Antonio Guardi, the most praised work is not a landscape, but instead the airy sfumato ''Story of Tobit'' painted for the organ loft in the small Chiesa dell'Angelo San Raffaele. To quote from the Web Gallery of Art:

Perspective, organized aerial space, the Palladian solidity of Tiepolo... are exchanged for a personal style of coloured handwriting - now brilliantly calligraphic, and now brilliantly cloudy''.

Guardi's painterly style is known as ''pittura di tocco'' (of touch) for its small dotting and spirited brush-strokes. This looser style of painting had been used by Giovanni Piazzetta and Sebastiano Ricci, and recalls, in some religious themes, the sweetened sfumato of Barocci's Bolognese style. In this he differs from the more linear and architecturally accurate style of Canaletto's painting.This style, a century later, would make Guardi's works highly prized by the French Impressionists.

Canaletto, as a vedutista, concentrated on glamorous urban architecture erected by the imperial republic; on the other hand, in Guardi, the buildings often appearto be melting and sinking into a murky lagoon. Canaletto's canvases often have intricate linear and brilliant details, and depict Venice in sunny daylight. Guardi paints clouded skies above a city at dusk. These contrasts, however, simplify the facts, since Canaletto often painted the drab communal life and neighborhoods (creating in them some epic artistic qualities), while Guardi did not avoid sometimes painting the ceremonies of Ducal Venice. Ultimately, Guardi's paintings evoke the onset of the dissipation. The citizenry has shrunken to an impotent lilliputian crowd of "rubber-neckers", unable to rescue the crumbling Republic, as for example in the ''Fire in the Oil Depot in San Marcuola''. It was fitting depiction of the rapidly declining empire, which had declined, in Napoleon's assessment, into a "drawing room of Europe" peopled with casinos, carnivals, and courtesans for hire.

''A View of San Marco'' - National Museum of Serbia, Belgrade.

''La Piazzetta verso l'Isola San Giorgio'' - Alessandro Malaguti PRIVATE COLLECTION, ITALY.

Footnotes

References

Short biography in the Web Gallery of Art

Aldo Rizzi, ''I maestri della pittura veneta del '700'', Electa - Milano 1973

External links

Category:1712 births Category:1793 deaths Category:People from Venice (city) Category:Italian painters Category:Venetian painters Category:Landscape artists

cs:Francesco Guardi de:Francesco Guardi es:Francesco Guardi fr:Francesco Guardi hr:Francesco Guardi it:Francesco Guardi hu:Francesco Guardi nl:Francesco Guardi no:Francesco Guardi pl:Francesco Guardi pt:Francesco Guardi ru:Гварди, Франческо sh:Francesco Guardi sv:Francesco Guardi uk:Франческо Гварді

Coordinates	33°51′35.9″N151°12′40″N
Name	Laura Betti
Birth date	May 01, 1927
Birth place	Bologna, Italy
Death date	July 31, 2004
Death place	Rome, Latium, Italy }}

Laura Betti (May 1, 1927 - July 31, 2004) was an Italian actress.

Born Laura Trombetti in Bologna, this blonde and flamboyant actress started her career as jazz singer. Betti made her film debut in Federico Fellini's ''La dolce vita''. In 1963 she became a close friend of the poet and movie director Pier Paolo Pasolini, for whom she made a documentary after his death. Under Pasolini's direction she proved a wonderful talent, in many films like ''La ricotta'' (1963) and ''Teorema'' (''Theorem'', 1968). In 1976 she portrayed a cruel and eroto-maniacal fascist in ''Novecento'' (''1900''), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Since the 1960s she dedicated much of her times to literature and politics. She became the muse for a number of leading political and literary figures in Italy and came to personify the revolutionary and marxist era of 1970s Italy.

References

External links

BBC Obituary

Il Manifesto Obituaries

Category:1927 births Category:2004 deaths Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Deaths from surgical complications Category:Italian film actors Category:People from Bologna

ca:Laura Betti de:Laura Betti fr:Laura Betti it:Laura Betti hu:Laura Betti pl:Laura Betti sc:Laura Betti sv:Laura Betti zh:劳拉·贝蒂

Alessandro di Cristofano di Lorenzo del Bronzino Allori (3 May 1535 – 22 September 1607) was an Italian portrait painter of the late Mannerist Florentine school.

Born in Florence, in 1540, after the death of his father, he was brought up and trained in art by a close friend, often referred to as his 'uncle', the mannerist painter Agnolo Bronzino, whose name he sometimes assumed in his pictures. In some ways, Allori is the last of the line of prominent Florentine painters, of generally undiluted Tuscan artistic heritage: Andrea del Sarto worked with Fra Bartolomeo (as well as Leonardo da Vinci), Pontormo briefly worked under Andrea, and trained Bronzino, who trained Allori. Subsequent generations in the city would be strongly influenced by the tide of Baroque styles pre-eminent in other parts of Italy.

Freedburg derides Allori as derivative, claiming he illustrates "the ideal of Maniera by which art (and style) are generated out of pre-existing art." The polish of figures has an unnatural marble-like form as if he aimed for cold statuary. It can be said of late phase mannerist painting in Florence, that the city that had early breathed life into statuary with the works of masters like Donatello and Michelangelo, was still so awed by them that it petrified the poses of figures in painting. While by 1600 the Baroque elsewhere was beginning to give life to painted figures, Florence was painting two-dimensional statues. Furthermore, in general, with the exception of the ''Contra Maniera'' (Counter-Mannerism) artists, it dared not stray from high themes or stray into high emotion.

Among his collaborators was Giovanni Maria Butteri and his main pupil was Giovanni Bizzelli. Cristoforo del Altissimo, Cesare Dandini, Aurelio Lomi, John Mosnier, Giovanni Battista Vanni, and Monanni also were his pupils. Allori was one of the artists, working under Vasari, included in the decoration of the Studiolo of Francesco I.

He is the father of Cristofano Allori (1577–1621).

Main works

''Christ and the Samaritan Woman'', (Altarpiece, 1575, Santa Maria Novella, now Prato)

''Road to Calvary'', (1604, Rome)

''Dead Christ and Angels'', (Museum Fine Arts, Budapest)

''Portrait of Piero de Médici'', (São Paulo Art Museum, São Paulo)

''Pearl Fishing'', (1570–72, Studiolo of Francesco I, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence)image

''Sussana and the Elders''

''Allegory of Human Life'' ''The Miracle of St. Peter Walking on Water'' ''Venus and Cupid'', (Musée Fabre, Montpellier)

In 2006 the BBC foreign correspondent Sir Charles Wheeler returned an original Alessandro Allori painting to the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. He had been given it in Germany in 1952, but only recently realized its origin and that it must have been looted in the wake of World War II. The work is possibly a portrait of Eleonora (Dianora) di Toledo de' Medici, niece of Eleonora di Toledo, and measures 12 cm x 16 cm.

References

The article is available here: Alessandro Allori - LoveToKnow 1911

Alessandro Allori in the "History of Art"

''Painting in Italy 1500-1600'', S.J. Freedberg, (Penguin History of Art, 2nd Edition, 1983).

External links

Category:1535 births Category:1607 deaths Category:People from Florence Category:Italian painters Category:Tuscan painters Category:Mannerist painters Category:Portrait artists Category:16th-century Italian people Category:17th-century Italian people

br:Alessandro Allori ca:Alessandro Allori da:Alessandro Allori de:Alessandro Allori et:Alessandro Allori es:Alessandro Allori fa:الساندرو آلوری fr:Alessandro Allori gl:Alessandro Allori it:Alessandro Allori hu:Alessandro Allori nl:Alessandro Allori pl:Alessandro Allori pt:Alessandro Allori ro:Alessandro Allori ru:Аллори, Алессандро sv:Alessandro Allori vls:Alessandro Allori