Renaissance In Italy

Fra Angelico: Fra Angelico, whose real name was Guido di Pietro, was born sometime between 1395 and 1400 in Vicchio, a small town near Florence. For a long time, there was a bit of an uncertainty over his birth-date – the exact day is still not known, but he was thought to have been born earlier than the aforementioned dates – and the fine details of his life still remain shrouded. Fra Angelico lived in the early years of the Renaissance, when, unlike later during the High Renaissance, artists hadn’t yet achieved the elevated status where every notable personal trait …

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1. If people knew how hard I worked to achieve my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all. 2. I dare affirm that any artist… who has nothing singular, eccentric, or at least reputed to be so, in his person, will never become a superior talent. 3. Whenever a great painter… does a work which appears to be false and lying, that falsity is very true. 4. Poets and painters have the power to dare, I mean to dare to do whatever they may approve of… 5. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set …

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Personal Life Born on 8th March 1566 (1560 or 1561, according to some historians), Don Carlo Gesualdo was the second son of the aristocratic Neapolitan couple Fabrizio Gesualdo and Girolama Borromeo. They were rich landowners, owning a palace in Naples and two castles respectively in Gesualdo village near Naples and in their ancestral town of Venosa. Don Carlo, who was musically inclined since boyhood, is said to have studied under the brilliant Italian composer, Pomponio Nenna. He began composing conservative madrigals and sacred works, publishing a well-harmonized motet (an unaccompanied choral composition with sacred lyrics) in 1585, but later on, …

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The Renaissance, also known as the Age of Humanism, was one of the most astonishingly productive and creative epochs of European History. For the first time ever, individual artists took centre-stage by the sheer dint of their personalities and genius, and opened up whole new vistas of painting, sculpture and architecture. The significant events of the period – and there were plenty of those in terms of political disorder, conflicts, epidemics, etc. – had surprisingly little adverse affect on these artists, and in fact, often courted and welcomed by both warring factions, they moved about with flamboyant impunity. One such …

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One of the most important Florentine painters before Cimabue and in his own way quite on par with the later Michelangelo, Coppo di Marcovaldo is also one of the earliest of the Italian Renaissance artists about whom there is clear-cut known information. He was an artist of the Byzantine tradition. This art, originally centered in the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, around the Orthodox Church, consisted of Christian-themed painted icons, texts, sculptures, woven fabrics, frescoes and mosaics that were executed in a highly sophisticated and rational manner. Many of the Byzantine artists had been invited for their splendid skills …

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