Piero della Francesca was an Italian painter of the early Renaissance. To contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting is characterized by its serene humanism, its use of geometric forms and perspective. His most famous work is the cycle of frescoes The History of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in the Tuscan town of Arezzo.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti or Ambruogio Laurati was an Italian painter of the Sienese school. He was active from approximately 1317 to 1348. He painted The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Sala dei Nove in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico. His elder brother was the painter Pietro Lorenzetti.
Pietro Lorenzetti or Pietro Laurati was an Italian painter, active between c. 1306 and 1345. Together with his younger brother Ambrogio, he introduced naturalism into Sienese art. In their artistry and experiments with three-dimensional and spatial arrangements, the brothers foreshadowed the art of the Renaissance.
Meyer Schapiro was a Lithuanian-born American art historian who developed new art historical methodologies that incorporated an interdisciplinary approach to the study of works. An expert on early Christian, Medieval and modern art, he explored periods and movements with an eye toward their works' social, political and material constructions.
Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy, was a British art historian. Pope-Hennessy was director of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1967 and 1973, and director of the British Museum between 1974 and 1976. He was a scholar of Italian Renaissance art. Many of his writings, including the tripartite Introduction to Italian Sculpture, and his magnum opus, Donatello: Sculptor, are regarded as classics in the field.
John Kirk Train Varnedoe was an American art historian, the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) from 1988 to 2001, Professor of the History of Art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Professor of Fine Arts at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts.
Sam Hunter was an American historian of modern art. He was emeritus professor of Art History at Princeton University and an Art Historian, Author, Museum Director, Professor and Curator.
Pierre Max Rosenberg is a French art historian, curator, and professor. Rosenberg is the honorary president and director of the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and since 1995, he has held the 23rd seat of the Académie Française. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge in 1987.
Hans Kauffmann was a German art historian.
St. Francis in Ecstasy is a painting by Italian Renaissance master Giovanni Bellini, started in 1475 and completed around 1480. Bellini depicted the religious figure of St. Francis of Assisi in a landscape. In 1852, the painting was listed on June 19 at Christie's. It was part of the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures exhibition. In 1915, Henry Clay Frick bought the painting for $170,000, and it remains in the Frick Collection, in New York City.
Eugenio Garin was an Italian philosopher and Renaissance historian. He was recognised as an authority on the cultural history of the Renaissance. Born at Rieti, Garin studied philosophy at the University of Florence, graduating in 1929, and after a period as professor of philosophy at the liceo scientifico Stanislao Cannizzaro in Palermo and the University of Cagliari, Garin began teaching at his alma mater in 1949 until 1974, then moving to the Scuola Normale di Pisa until his retirement in 1984. The Graduate School of Historical Studies at San Marino was inaugurated with a public lecture by Eugenio Garin on 30 September 1989. Garin was an elected member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also was the editor of the journals Rinascimento and Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana.
John Kinder Gowran Shearman was an English art historian who also taught in America. He was a specialist in Italian Renaissance painting, described by his colleague James S. Ackerman as "the leading scholar of Italian Renaissance painting", who published several influential works, but whose expected major book on Quattrocento painting, for the Penguin/Yale History of Art series, never appeared. However, what is widely acknowledged as his most influential book, on the concept of Mannerism, published in 1967, is still in print.
Giotto di Bondone, known mononymously as Giotto and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence". Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years".
Madonna of humility refers to artistic portrayals of the Virgin Mary which depict her sitting on the ground, or upon a low cushion. She may be holding the Christ Child in her lap. The term Virgin of humility is also used to refer to this motive of depiction. The iconography originated in the 14th century, and was most common in that and the following century.
The Petites Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry is an illuminated book of hours commissioned by John, Duke of Berry between 1375 and 1385–90. It is known for its ornate miniature leaves and border decorations.
Jan Białostocki was a Polish historian. He is considered to be one of the most renowned Polish art historians of the 20th century.
Irving Lavin was an art historian of Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern painting, sculpture, and architecture. His wide-ranging contributions centered primarily on the correlation between form and meaning in the visual arts.
Helen F. North (1922-2012) was an American classical scholar and an expert on Greek and Roman literature.
Richard Offner was an Austrian-American art historian dedicated to the study of Florentine paintings from the Renaissance.
