Oil paintingOil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of the world. The advantages of oil for painting images include "greater flexibility, richer and denser colour, the use of layers, and a wider range from light to dark". But the process is slower, especially when one layer of paint needs to be allowed to dry before another is applied.
MantuaMantua (ˈmæntjuə ; Mantova ˈmantova; Lombard and Mantua) is a city and comune in Lombardy, Italy, and capital of the province of the same name. In 2016, Mantua was designated as the Italian Capital of Culture. In 2017, it was named as the European Capital of Gastronomy, included in the Eastern Lombardy District (together with the cities of Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona). In 2008, Mantua's centro storico (old town) and Sabbioneta were declared by UNESCO to be a World Heritage Site.
Venetian paintingVenetian painting was a major force in Italian Renaissance painting and beyond. Beginning with the work of Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516) and his brother Gentile Bellini (c. 1429–1507) and their workshops, the major artists of the Venetian school included Giorgione (c. 1477–1510), Titian (c. 1489–1576), Tintoretto (1518–1594), Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) and Jacopo Bassano (1510–1592) and his sons. Considered to give primacy to colour over line, the tradition of the Venetian school contrasted with the Mannerism prevalent in the rest of Italy.
Francis I of FranceFrancis I (François I^er; Francoys; 12 September 1494 – 31 March 1547) was King of France from 1515 until his death in 1547. He was the son of Charles, Count of Angoulême, and Louise of Savoy. He succeeded his first cousin once removed and father-in-law Louis XII, who died without a legitimate son. A prodigious patron of the arts, he promoted the emergent French Renaissance by attracting many Italian artists to work for him, including Leonardo da Vinci, who brought the Mona Lisa, which Francis had acquired.
CaravaggioMichelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio, known as simply Caravaggio (,kærə'vædʒiəʊ, US-'va:dʒ(i)əʊ, mikeˈlandʒelo meˈriːzi da (k)karaˈvaddʒo; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610), was an Italian painter active in Rome for most of his artistic life. During the final four years of his life he moved between Naples, Malta, and Sicily until his death. His paintings have been characterized by art critics as combining a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.
National GalleryThe National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, in Trafalgar Square since 1838, it houses a collection of over 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 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Leonardo da VinciLeonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 14522 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he also became known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology.
Sebastiano del PiomboSebastiano del Piombo (sebaˈstjaːno del ˈpjombo; 1485 – 21 June 1547) was an Italian painter of the High Renaissance and early Mannerist periods famous as the only major artist of the period to combine the colouring of the Venetian school in which he was trained with the monumental forms of the Roman school. He belongs both to the painting school of his native city, Venice, where he made significant contributions before he left for Rome in 1511, and that of Rome, where he stayed for the rest of his life, and whose style he thoroughly adopted.
VermilionVermilion (sometimes vermillion) is a color family and pigment most often used between antiquity and the 19th century from the powdered mineral cinnabar (a form of mercury sulfide). It is synonymous with red orange, which often takes a modern form, but is 11% brighter (at full brightness). Used first in English in the 13th century, the word vermilion came from the Old French word vermeillon, which was derived from vermeil, from the Latin vermiculus the diminutive of the Latin word vermis for worm.
Lead-tin yellowLead-tin yellow is a yellow pigment, of historical importance in oil painting, sometimes called the "Yellow of the Old Masters" because of the frequency with which it was used by those famous painters. The name lead-tin yellow is a modern label. During the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries when it was in widest use, it was known by a variety of names. In Italy, it was giallorino or giallolino. In other countries of Europe, it was massicot, genuli (Spanish), Plygal (German), general (English) or mechim (Portuguese).
