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James Beck (art Historian)
James H. Beck (May 14, 1930 – May 26, 2007) was an American art history, art historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance. He was an outspoken critic of many high-profile restorations and re-attributions of artworks, and founded the pressure group ArtWatch International to campaign against irresponsible practices in the art world. Biography James Beck was born in 1930 in New Rochelle, New York, a short distance away (as he was known to boast) from Thomas Paine's former house in that city. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1952 he trained as a painter, firstly at New York University and then at the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze, Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. At Columbia University he undertook his doctoral dissertation, on the sculpture of Jacopo della Quercia, under the supervision of Rudolf Wittkower. Beck was granted a PhD in 1963 and he published his monograph on the sculptor in 1991. He remained on the art history faculty at Columbia for his entire life, ...
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Art History
Art history is the study of Work of art, artistic works made throughout human history. Among other topics, it studies art’s formal qualities, its impact on societies and cultures, and how artistic styles have changed throughout history. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today, art history examines broader aspects of visual culture, including the various visual and conceptual outcomes related to art. Art history is a broad discipline encompassing many branches. Some focus on specific time periods, while others concentrate on particular geographic regions, such as the Art of Europe, art of Art of Europe, Europe. Thematic categorizations include feminist art history, iconography, the analysis of symbols, and Design history, design history. Studying the history of art emerged as a means of documenting and critiquing artistic works, with influential historians and methods originating ...
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Turin
Turin ( , ; ; , then ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. The city is mainly on the western bank of the Po (river), River Po, below its Susa Valley, and is surrounded by the western Alpine arch and Superga hill. The population of the city proper is 856,745 as of 2025, while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 1.7 million inhabitants. The Turin metropolitan area is estimated by the OECD to have a population of 2.2 million. The city was historically a major European political centre. From 1563, it was the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, then of the Kingdom of Sardinia (1720–1861), Kingdom of Sardinia ruled by the House of Savoy, and the first capital of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1865. Turin is sometimes called "the cradle of Italian liberty" for having been the politi ...
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Alessandro Vezzosi
Alessandro Vezzosi is an Italian art critic, Leonardo scholar, artist, expert on interdisciplinary studies and creative museology, he is also the author of hundreds of exhibits, publications and conferences, in Italy and abroad (from the United States to Japan) on Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance, contemporary art and design. Amongst others, he was the first scholar from the Armand Hammer Centre for Leonardo Studies from the University of California in Los Angeles (1981), directed by Carlo Pedretti; he taught at the University of Progetto in Reggio Emilia; and he is honorary professor at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno of Florence.Accademici d'Onore
(in Italian). ''Accademia delle Arti del Disegno'', Florence. Accessed June 2013.
He began as an artist from 1964 to 1971 winning more than 80 prizes in painting competitions. In the ...
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Self-portrait Of Michelangelo
Self-portraits are Portrait painting, portraits artists make of themselves. Although self-portraits have been made since the earliest times, the practice of self-portraiture only gaining momentum in the Early Renaissance in the mid-15th century that artists can be frequently identified depicting themselves as either the main subject, or as important characters in their work. With better and cheaper mirrors, and the advent of the panel painting, panel portrait, many painters, sculptors and printmakers tried some form of self-portraiture. ''Portrait of a Man in a Turban'' by Jan van Eyck of 1433 may well be the earliest known panel self-portrait. He painted a separate portrait of his wife, and he belonged to the social group that had begun to commission portraits, already more common among wealthy Netherlanders than south of the Alps. The genre is venerable, but not until the Renaissance, with increased wealth and interest in the individual as a subject, did it become truly popular. ...
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Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (; March 28 or April 6, 1483April 6, 1520), now generally known in English as Raphael ( , ), was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. List of paintings by Raphael, His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Platonism in the Renaissance, Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. His father Giovanni Santi was court painter to the ruler of the small but highly cultured city of Urbino. He died when Raphael was eleven, and Raphael seems to have played a role in managing the family workshop from this point. He probably trained in the workshop of Pietro Perugino, and was described as a fully trained "master" by 1500. He worked in or for several cities in north Italy until in 1508 he moved to Rome at the invitation of Pope Julius II, to work on the Apostolic Palace at Vatican ...
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National Gallery, London
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of more than 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current director of the National Gallery is Gabriele Finaldi. The National Gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Its collection belongs to the government on behalf of the British public, and entry to the main collection is free of charge. Unlike comparable museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein in 1824. After that initial purchase, the gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, especially Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which now account for two-thirds o ...
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Madonna Of The Pinks
The ''Madonna of the Pinks'' (c. 1506 – 1507, ) is an early devotional painting usually attributed to Italian Renaissance master Raphael. It is painted in oils on highly toxic yew wood, a first for a Raphael, and now hangs in the National Gallery, London. Subject matter The painting depicts a youthful Virgin Mary playing with the Christ child and handing him carnations. (The Italian title, ''La Madonna dei garofani'' actually means The Madonna of the Carnation.) These flowers, whose botanical name is ''dianthus'' (Greek for ‘flower of God’), are a premonition of Christ's Passion – according to Christian legend the flower first appeared when the Virgin wept at the Crucifixion. The event takes place in a dimly lit domestic setting influenced by Netherlandish art. The composition is based closely on the '' Benois Madonna'' by Leonardo da Vinci, although the colour scheme of blues and greens that link the Virgin with the landscape is Raphael's own. Through the arched window ...
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Duccio
Duccio di Buoninsegna ( , ; – ), commonly known as just Duccio, was an Italian painter active in Siena, Tuscany, in the late 13th and early 14th century. He was hired throughout his life to complete many important works in government and religious buildings around Italy. Duccio is considered one of the greatest Italian painters of the Middle Ages,Duccio
''Encyclopedia Britannica''.
and is credited with creating the painting styles of Trecento Gothic art, Gothic style and the Sienese school.


Biography

Although much is still unconfirmed about Duccio and his life, there is more documentation of him and his life than of other Italian painters of his time. It is known that he was born and died in the city of Siena, and was also mostly active in the surrounding region of Tuscany. Other details of his early life and family are as un ...
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Madonna And Child (Duccio)
''Madonna and Child'' was painted by one of the most influential artists of the late 13th and early 14th century, Duccio di Buoninsegna. This iconic image of the Madonna and Child, seen throughout the history of western art, holds significant value in terms of stylistic innovations of religious subject matter that would continue to evolve for centuries. Description and influences Comparing the compact size of this work of 11×8 inches to larger, more illustrious altarpieces and large scale frescoes, the ''Madonna and Child'' is understood to be an intimate, devotional image. Some evocations of this understanding come from the burnt edges on the bottom of the original engaged frame caused by burning candles that likely would have sat just beneath.Christiansen, Keith. "The Metropolitan's Duccio." Apollo (London, England) 165.(2007): 40–47. Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 18 Apr. 2012. Looking past the abrupt simplicity of the image, one can begin to understand the changes Du ...
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Metropolitan Museum Of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of largest art museums, largest art museum in the Americas. With 5.36 million visitors in 2023, it is the List of most-visited museums in the United States, most-visited museum in the United States and the List of most-visited art museums, fifth-most visited art museum in the world. In 2000, its permanent collection had over two million works; it currently lists a total of 1.5 million works. The collection is divided into 17 curatorial departments. The Met Fifth Avenue, The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile, New York, Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's list of largest art museums, largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately building ...
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Sistine Chapel Ceiling
The Sistine Chapel ceiling (), painted in fresco by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512, is a cornerstone work of High Renaissance Renaissance art, art. The Sistine Chapel is the large papal chapel built within the Vatican City, Vatican between 1477 and 1480 by Pope Sixtus IV, for whom the chapel is named. The ceiling was painted at the commission of Pope Julius II. The ceiling's various painted elements form part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel. Prior to Michelangelo's contribution, the walls were painted by several leading artists of the late 15th century including Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Pietro Perugino. After the ceiling was painted, Raphael created Raphael Cartoons, a set of large tapestries (1515–1516) to cover the lower portion of the wall. Michelangelo returned to the chapel to create ''The Last Judgment (Michelangelo), The Last Judgment'', a large wall fresco situated behind the altar. The chapel's decoration illustrates m ...
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Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6March 147518February 1564), known mononymously as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, his work was inspired by models from classical antiquity and had a lasting influence on Western art. Michelangelo's creative abilities and mastery in a range of artistic arenas define him as an archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and elder contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci. Given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences, Michelangelo is one of the best-documented artists of the 16th century. He was lauded by contemporary biographers as the most accomplished artist of his era. Michelangelo achieved fame early. Two of his best-known works, the ''Pietà (Michelangelo), Pietà'' and ''David (Michelangelo), David'', were sculpted before the age of 30. Although he did not consider himself a painter, Michelangelo created ...
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