Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1559-1613 was an Italian painter and architect of the late Mannerist and early Baroque period, trained and active in his early career in Florence, and spending the last nine years of his life in Rome. Lodovico Cardi was born at Villa Castelvecchio di Cigoli, in Tuscany, whence the name by which he is commonly known. Initially, Cigoli trained in Florence under the fervid mannerist Alessandro Allori. Later, influenced by the most prominent of the Contra-Maniera painters, Santi di Tito, as well as by Barocci, Cigoli shed the shackles of mannerism and infused his later paintings with an expressionism often lacking from 16th century Florentine painting. For example, for the Roman patron, Massimo Massimi, he painted an Ecce Homo[1] (now in Palazzo Pitti). Supposedly unbenknownst to any of the painters, two other prominent contemporary painters, Passignano and Caravaggio, had been requested canvases on the same theme. It is unclear if they are completely independent. Cigoli's painting seems to have been made with knowledge of Caravaggio's canvas; however, while Cigoli's work lacks the power of Caravaggio's naturalism, the background shade and sparse foreground shows how much he was moving away from crowded Florentine historical paintings. This work was afterwards taken by Bonaparte to the Louvre, and was restored to Florence in 1815. One of his early paintings was of Cain slaying Abel. He then gained the employ of the Grand-Duke in some works for the Pitti Palace, where he painted a Venus and Satyr and a Sacrifice of Isaac. Other important pictures are St. Peter Healing the Lame Man in St Peter's; Conversion of St. Paul in the church of San Paolo fuori le Mura, and a Story of Psyche in a fresco incorporated in the decorative scheme of the Villa Borghese; a Martyrdom of Stephen, which earned him the name of the "Florentine Correggio", a Stigmata of St. Francis at Florence. Cigoli was made a Knight of Malta at the request of Pope Paul III. Cigoli, a close personal friend of Galileo Galilei, painted a last fresco in the dome of the Pauline chapel of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, depicting the Madonna standing upon a pock-marked lunar orb. This is the first extant example of Galileo's discoveries about the physical nature of the moon (as he himself drew it in Sidereus Nuncius) having penetrated the visual arts practice of his day. Until this image, the moon in pictures of the Virgin had always been mythical and smooth, perfectly spherical as described by Platonic & Ptolemaic tradition.   Related Paintings of CIGOLI :. | Ecce Homo f | songe de hacob | The Sacrifice of Isaac | Joseph and Potiphar's Wife | St Francis Receives the Stigmata |
Related Artists:
Kate Elizabeth Bunce
English Pre-Raphaelite Painter, 1856-1927
Balthasar Anton Dunker
German, 1746-1807
Henrietta Rae
(30 December 1859 - 26 January 1928) was a prominent English painter of the later Victorian era. Born in Hammersmith, London, she was the youngest of seven children of a civil servant; her mother was musically talented, a former student of Felix Mendelssohn. An uncle, Charles Rae, was an artist and a student of George Cruikshank. Rae began studying art at age thirteen; she was educated at the Queen Square School of Art, Heatherley's School of Art (she was its first female pupil), and the British Museum. She reportedly had to apply to the Royal Academy schools at least five times before she was accepted though she eventually gained a seven-year scholarship. Her teachers there included Frank Bernard Dicksee, William Powell Frith, and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema; the last of these had the strongest influence on Rae's later work. She became a frequent exhibitor at the annual Royal Academy shows, beginning in 1881. She gained recognition and success early in her career, specializing in classical, allegorical, and literary subjects, often treated in a grand style and scale; her Psyche at the Throne of Venus (1894) measured 12 feet by 7 feet (305 by 193 cm) and contained 13 figures. Other paintings in the same classical vein include her Ariadne (1885), Eurydice (1886), Zephyrus and Flora (1888), Apollo and Daphne (1895), Diana and Calisto (1899), and Hylas and the Water Nymphs (1910) among many more.