Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 15th Century artist of the Early Renaissance movement, Fra Filippo Lippi [Florentine, 1406-1469] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Lippi_Fra_Filippo

The Italian painter Fra Filippo Lippi (ca. 1406–1469) was an important link between the early and late 15th-century Florentine painters. He was born in Florence and took his vows in 1421 in the monastery S. Maria del Carmine, where Masaccio frescoed the Brancacci Chapel in the church (1426–1427). By 1430 Lippi is mentioned in church documents as “painter.” Masaccio’s influence, as well as Donatello’s, can be seen in Lippi’s early works, such as the Tarquinia Madonna of 1437 (National Gallery, Rome) and the Annunciation (S. Lorenzo, Florence) and Barbadori Altar (Louvre, Paris), both begun in 1437–1438. However, the severity of Masaccio and Donatello was mitigated by Lippi, who was instrumental in salvaging from the Gothic past the lyrical expressiveness of a linear mode which Masaccio had all but given up for modeling in chiaroscuro.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Dadaist movement, Hanna Höch [German, 1889-1978] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Hoch_Hanna

Hannah Höch, born Joanne Höch in Gotha, studied art in Berlin and worked as a pattern designer and writer on women’s handicrafts from 1916–1926. Her affair and artistic partnership with Raoul Hausmann, a Viennese artist, lasted from 1915 to 1922. Through Hausmann, she became part of the Berlin Club Dada, the German group of Dadaists, an artistic movement dating from about 1916 and also involved, after the first World War, with political radicalism. Höch herself expressed herself less politically than many of the others in the group. From 1926–1929 she lived and worked in Holland. She lived for some years in a lesbian relationship with Dutch poet Til Brugman.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 16th Century artist, Correggio [Italian, 1494-1534] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Alegris_Antonio

Correggio (Antonio Allegri) (c. 1489-1534). Italian painter, named after the small town in Emilia where he was born. Little is known of his life, but his paintings suggest under whom he may have formed his style. Echoes of Mantegna‘s manner in many of his early paintings indicate that he may have studied that master’s work in Mantua, and he was influenced in these works also by Lorenzo Costa and Leonardo, adopting Costa’s pearly Ferrarese coloring and, in the St John of the St Francis altarpiece (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, 1514), his first documented work, Leonardo’s characteristic gesture of the pointing finger. Later he initiated a style of sentimental elegance and conscious allure with soft sfumato and gestures of captivating charm. Correggio may well have visited Rome early in his career, although Vasari maintains that he never went there and the obvious inspiration of the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo could be accounted for by drawings and prints which were known all over Italy.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 17th Century artist of the Baroque movement, Mattia Preti [Italian, 1613-1699] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Preti_Mattia

Mattia Preti, known as “Il Cavaliere Calabrese”, left his home town of Taverna in 1630, at the age of 17, destined for Rome. Poussin had recently settled there; the young Velazquez was then paying his first visit. The influence of Caravaggio, though he had died 20 years earlier, was still strongly felt. Preti would leave many works behind in the capital. Among them are the stunning frescoes of “The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew” in the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle — the setting for the first act of Puccini’s “Tosca”.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 19th Century artist of the Barbizon movement, Charles-François Daubigny [French, 1817-1878] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Daubigny_Charles-Francois

Charles-François Daubigny was born on February 15, 1817 in Paris. Daubigny was taught how to paint by Paul Delaroches and his father, the landscape painter Edme-François Daubigny. From 1838 Daubigny regularly contributed to exhibitions, but did not reach his full artistic development before 1848, when he received great public acclaim for his landscape paintings, which were some of the first plein air paintings.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Expressionist movement, Joan Mitchell [American, 1926-1992] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Mitchell_Joan

Joan Mitchell (American artist, 1926–1992), has had her reputation increase dramatically in the past few decades, and she’s now considered one of the major Abstract Expressionists. The Chicago native received her formal training in the mid-1940s at that city’s Art Institute. After a year in Europe, she moved to New York, where she fell in with the Abstract Expressionists and was considered a “second-generation” member of that movement. She moved to France in 1955, spent most of her life there, and died in Paris. Mitchell often painted big, both in terms of the size of the canvas and the seemingly all-out, vigorous, somewhat aggressive style that exuded an energy not unlike Willem de Kooning’s work. Mitchell’s wild mark making took place within risky but exquisite, precise compositions that often evoked landscapes. The Whitney Museum in 2002 organized a traveling Mitchell retrospective. Her work is in many prominent museums throughout the world, including New York’s Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, Washington, D.C’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Phillips Collection, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 16th Century artist, Il Giorgione [Venetian, 1478-1511] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Barbarelli_Giorgio

Italian painter, one of the main artists of the Venetian high renaissance. He was born as Giorgio Barbarelli in the town of Castelfranco in the Veneto region.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 20th Century artist of the Contemporary Realist movement, William Bailey [American, 1930-] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Bailey_William

William Bailey was born in 1930 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, William Bailey is certainly American, but he has spent summers in his studio in the Italian countryside for more than forty years. The colors and feeling of Italy are important influences on his art. In American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Robert Hughes writes that Bailey’s “calm arrays of pots, jugs, eggs, and bowls make up an ideal form-world, Platonic in its removal from ‘the itch of desire.’ Nothing spills out, thrusts forward, or wants to be touched or possessed — the traditional solicitations of still-life painting, most materialistic of arts. They are as removed from touch (and as grandly articulate in their scale) as the facade of a fine quattrocento building, seen from the other side of the piazza … an extreme opposite to the American taste for works of art which bear the signs of their struggle, unedited, in their final form.”

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 15th Century artist, Fra Angelico [Italian, 1387-1455] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Fra_Angelico

Fra Angelico (Fra Giovanni da Fiesole) (Guido di Pietro) (c. 1400-55). Florentine painter, a Dominican friar. Although in popular tradition he has been seen as ‘not an artist properly so-called but an inspired saint’ (Ruskin), Angelico was in fact a highly professional artist, who was in touch with the most advanced developments in contemporary Florentine art and in later life travelled extensively for prestigious commissions. He probably began his career as a manuscript illuminator, and his early paintings are strongly influenced by International Gothic. But even in the most lavishly decorative of them all — the Annunciation in the Diocesan Museum in Cortona — Masaccio’s incluence is evident in the insistent perspective of the architecture. For most of his career Angelico was based in S. Domenico in Fiesole (he became Prior there in 1450), but his most famous works were painted at S. Marco in Florence (now an Angelico museum), a Sylvestrine monastry which was taken over by his Order in 1436. He and his assistants painted about fifty frescos in the friary (c.1438-45) that are at once the expression of and a guide to the spiritual life of the community. Many of the frescos are in the friars’ cells and were intended as aids to devotion; with their immaculate coloring, their economy in drawing and composition, and their freedom from the accidents of time and place, they attain a sense of blissful serenity.

Featured Artist at the e.Gallery this week is a 19th Century artist of the Symbolist movement, Odilon Redon [French, 1840-1916] Link: http://fineart.elib.com/fineart.php?dir=Alphabetical/Redon_Odilon

Odilon Redon (1840-1916), was a French painter and graphic artist, one of the outstanding figures of Symbolism.