Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Knight of the Order of Santiago was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, and of the Spanish Golden Age.
Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio, known in English as Titian, was an Italian (Venetian) Renaissance painter of Lombard origin, considered the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno. During his lifetime he was often called da Cadore, 'from Cadore', taken from his native region.
The State Hermitage Museum is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It was founded in 1764 when Empress Catherine the Great acquired a collection of paintings from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The museum celebrates the anniversary of its founding each year on 7 December, Saint Catherine's Day. It has been open to the public since 1852. The Art Newspaper ranked the museum 10th in their list of the most visited art museums, with 2,812,913 visitors in 2022.
The Prado Museum, officially known as Museo Nacional del Prado, is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It is widely considered to house one of the world's finest collections of European art, dating from the 12th century to the early 20th century, based on the former Spanish royal collection, and the single best collection of Spanish art. Founded as a museum of paintings and sculpture in 1819, it also contains important collections of other types of works. The Prado Museum is one of the most visited sites in the world and is considered one of the greatest art museums in the world. The numerous works by Francisco Goya, the single most extensively represented artist, as well as by Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Diego Velázquez, are some of the highlights of the collection. Velázquez and his keen eye and sensibility were also responsible for bringing much of the museum's fine collection of Italian masters to Spain, now one of the largest outside of Italy.
The Galleria Borghese is an art gallery in Rome, Italy, housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana. At the outset, the gallery building was integrated with its gardens, but nowadays the Villa Borghese gardens are considered a separate tourist attraction. The Galleria Borghese houses a substantial part of the Borghese Collection of paintings, sculpture and antiquities, begun by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V. The building was constructed by the architect Flaminio Ponzio, developing sketches by Scipione Borghese himself, who used it as a villa suburbana, a country villa at the edge of Rome.
Paris Bordone was an Italian painter of the Venetian Renaissance who, despite training with Titian, maintained a strand of Mannerist complexity and provincial vigor.
The Rokeby Venus is a painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Completed between 1647 and 1651, and probably painted during the artist's visit to Italy, the work depicts the goddess Venus in a sensual pose, lying on a bed with her back facing the viewer, and looking into a mirror held by the Roman god of physical love, her son Cupid. The painting is in the National Gallery, London.
The Sleeping Venus, also known as the Dresden Venus, is a painting traditionally attributed to the Italian Renaissance painter Giorgione, although it has long been usually thought that Titian completed it after Giorgione's death in 1510. The landscape and sky are generally accepted to be mainly by Titian. In the 21st century, much scholarly opinion has shifted further, to see the nude figure of Venus as also painted by Titian, leaving Giorgione's contribution uncertain. It is in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden. After World War II, the painting was briefly in possession of the Soviet Union.
The Venus effect is a phenomenon in the psychology of perception, named after various paintings of Venus gazing into a mirror, such as Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, Titian's Venus with a Mirror, and Veronese's Venus with a Mirror. Viewers of such paintings have the impression that Venus is admiring her own reflection in the mirror. However the viewer sees the face of Venus in the mirror, and they are not directly behind her, therefore what Venus sees in the reflection cannot be the same as what the viewer sees. It would be more logical if the viewer were to conclude that Venus is looking at the reflection of the viewer, or in the case of the original setting, the reflection of the painter.
The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to Western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Diana and Callisto is a painting completed between 1556 and 1559 by the Italian late Renaissance artist Titian. It portrays the moment in which the goddess Diana discovers that her maid Callisto has become pregnant by Jupiter. The painting was jointly purchased by the National Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery for £45 million in March 2012. Along with its companion painting Diana and Actaeon it is displayed on an alternating basis between London and Edinburgh. There is a later version by Titian and his workshop in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The Death of Actaeon is a late work by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian, painted in oil on canvas from about 1559 to his death in 1576 and now in the National Gallery in London. It is very probably one of the two paintings the artist stated he had started and hopes to finish in a letter to their commissioner Philip II of Spain during June 1559. However, most of Titian's work on this painting possibly dates to the late 1560s, but with touches from the 1570s. Titian seems never to have resolved it to his satisfaction, and the painting apparently remained in his studio until his death in 1576. There has been considerable debate as to whether it is finished or not, as with other very late Titians, such as the Flaying of Marsyas, which unlike this has a signature, perhaps an indication of completion.
Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish artist and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands. He is considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens's highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of classical and Christian history. His unique and immensely popular Baroque style emphasized movement, colour, and sensuality, which followed the immediate, dramatic artistic style promoted in the Counter-Reformation. Rubens was a painter producing altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. He was also a prolific designer of cartoons for the Flemish tapestry workshops and of frontispieces for the publishers in Antwerp.
The Venetian painter Titian and his workshop made at least six versions of the same composition showing Danaë, painted between about 1544 and the 1560s. The scene is based on the mythological princess Danaë, as – very briefly – recounted by the Roman poet Ovid, and at greater length by Boccaccio. She was isolated in a bronze tower following a prophecy that her firstborn would eventually kill her father. Although aware of the consequences, Danaë was seduced and became pregnant by Zeus, who, inflamed by lust, descended from Mount Olympus to seduce her in the form of a shower of gold.
A Man with a Quilted Sleeve is a painting of about 1510 by the Venetian painter Titian in the National Gallery, London, measuring 81.2 by 66.3 centimetres. Though the quality of the painting has always been praised, there has been much discussion as to the identity of the sitter. It was long thought to be a portrait of Ariosto, then a self-portrait, but in 2017 is called Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo by the gallery, having also been called merely Portrait of a Man, the title used here, The Man with the Blue Sleeve, and no doubt other variants.
Salome, or possibly Judith with the Head of Holofernes, is an oil painting which is an early work by the Venetian painter of the late Renaissance, Titian. It is usually thought to represent Salome with the head of John the Baptist. It is usually dated to around 1515 and is now in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome. Like other paintings of this subject, it has sometimes been considered to represent Judith with the head of Holofernes, the other biblical incident found in art showing a female and a severed male head. Historically, the main figure has also been called Herodias, the mother of Salome.
The Fur or The Pelt, also called The Little Fur, or Helena Fourment in a Fur Robe, is a c. 1636–1638 portrait by Peter Paul Rubens of his second wife Helena Fourment getting out of her bath and wrapping her voluptuous body in a fur. It is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Perseus and Andromeda is a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Titian, now in the Wallace Collection in London. It was painted in 1554–1556 as part of a series of mythological paintings called "poesie" ("poetry") intended for King Philip II of Spain. The paintings took subjects from the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses, in this case Book IV, lines 663–752, and all featured female nudes.
In 1635, Peter Paul Rubens created Venus and Adonis, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He followed the mythological story in the Metamorphoses by Ovid, inspired from his love of classical literature and earlier depictions of this scene. This oil on canvas painting shows Venus accompanied by Cupid, embracing and pulling Adonis before he goes off to hunt. The artist uses specific colors, detail and strong contrast between light and dark to depict a dramatic and emotional scene. At the time Rubens created the painting, the mythological story of Venus and Adonis was popular in Renaissance and Baroque court art. Rubens was clearly inspired by the many existing depictions of this scene, in particular the famous Titian composition of the same name, of which there are numerous versions. This depicts the same moment of Adonis leaving Venus to hunt, despite her pleas to stay. He is killed later in the day.
