Curated category
16th-century Italian painters
- Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da Vinci left behind 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, and almost none of it was written the way you would expect.
- MichelangeloMichelangelo carved one of his most famous works, the Pietà, before he turned 30, then sculpted David before the same milestone.
- TitianIn 1590, the painter and art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo called Titian "the sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of…
- TintorettoTintoretto placed an inscription over his studio door that announced his entire ambition in seven words: Il disegno di Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano.
- Francesco PrimaticcioFrancesco Primaticcio was born in Bologna on the 30th of April 1504. He began his artistic education under the watchful eye of Giulio Romano in Mantua.
- RaphaelRaphael died on the 6th of April 1520, which was, by some accounts, his 37th birthday. Four cardinals dressed in purple carried his body through Rome.
- Filippino LippiFilippino Lippi was born probably in 1457 at Prato, Tuscany, under circumstances that would have seemed to doom him before he ever picked up a brush.
- Niccolò dell'AbbateNiccolò dell'Abbate entered the world in Modena during 1509 or 1512. His father worked as a violinist, placing music at the center of his childhood home.
- Rosso FiorentinoGiovanni Battista di Jacopo was born on the 8th of March 1495 in Florence. His red hair gave him the nickname Rosso Fiorentino, which means Florentine…
- Paolo VeronesePaolo Veronese stood before the Venetian Holy Inquisition on the 18th of July 1573 and told his interrogators that painters take the same liberties as poets…
- Sandro BotticelliSandro Botticelli was buried, as he had requested, at the foot of a tomb in the Ognissanti Church in Florence. The woman in that tomb was Simonetta Vespucci…
- CaravaggioCaravaggio died on the 18th of July 1610 in Porto Ercole, near Grosseto in Tuscany, alone and on the run, with three paintings in his possession intended as…
- Jacopo de' BarbariNo one knows the exact year Jacopo de' Barbari was born, but contemporaries described him as a Venetian. Albrecht Dürer called him "van Venedig geporn,"…
- Giorgio VasariGiorgio Vasari coined a word that historians still reach for five centuries later. Writing about Giotto's fresh way of painting, he called it a rinascita, a…
- Andrea MantegnaAndrea Mantegna was born around 1431 in Isola di Carturo, a small settlement near Padua, the son of a carpenter named Biagio.
- Benvenuto CelliniBenvenuto Cellini was born in Florence on the 3rd of November 1500, and by the time he died there on the 13th of February 1571, he had killed at least four…
- Sofonisba AnguissolaSofonisba Anguissola died in Palermo in 1629, almost certainly in her mid-to-late nineties, having outlived two husbands, a queen, and a king.
- Giulio ClovioGiulio Clovio was born in 1498 within the village of Grižane, located in the Kingdom of Croatia. His family background remains a point of historical interest…