(March 17 or August 17, 1578 COctober 4, 1660) was an Italian Baroque painter. Born at Bologna, his father was a silk merchant who intended to instruct his son in the same trade; but by age twelve, Albani became an apprentice under the competent mannerist painter Denis Calvaert, where he met Guido Reni. Soon he followed Reni to the so-called "Academy" run by the Carracci family: Annibale, Agostino, and Ludovico. This studio fostered the careers of many painters of the Bolognese school, including Domenichino, Massari, Viola, Lanfranco, Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi, Pietro Faccini, Remigio Cantagallina, and Reni. In the year 1600, Albani moved to Rome to work in the fresco decoration of the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese, being completed by the studio of Annibale Carracci. Rome, under Clement VIII Aldobrandini (1592-1605) was exhibiting some degree of administrative stability and renewed artistic patronage. While pope Clement was born from a Florentine family residing in Urbino, his family was allied by marriage to the Emilia-Romagna and the Farnese, since Ranuccio I Farnese, Duke of Parma had married Margherita Aldobrandini. Parma, like Bologna, are part of the Region of Emilia-Romagna. Thus it was not surprise that Cardinal Odoarde Farnese, Ranuccio's brother, chose the Carraccis from Bologna for patronage, thereby establishing Bolognese predominance of Roman fresco painting for nearly two decades.  Related Paintings of Francesco Albani :. | The Holy Family | Adonis Led by Cupids to Venus, detail | The Cupids Disarmed | The Holy Family | Diana and Actaeon |
Related Artists:
Vasa,Gustav Eriksson
1496-1560
NUVOLONE, Panfilo
Italian painter, Lombard school (1581-1651) After studying with Giovanni Battista Trotti, he moved to Milan, where he is recorded in 1610. The influence of Trotti and of late Cremonese Mannerism is evident in his first known work, SS Nicholas and Costanza Adoring a Miraculous Image of the Virgin (1607; Can?nica d'Adda, S Giovanni Evangelista). In his paintings of scenes from the Life of Samson (1610-14; Milan, S Angelo, Cappella Sansoni) Nuvolone moved away from Trotti, exaggerating the size of the figures and defining form with an academic clarity reminiscent of the contemporary art of Camillo Procaccini. There followed, shortly after the work in S Angelo, frescoes of the Coronation of the Virgin and other scenes in the presbytery of S Maria della Passione in Milan, and, in 1614, a lunette of the Angel Announcing to Mary her Approaching Death for S Domenico, Cremona (Cremona, Mus. Civ. Ala Ponzone). In 1620 he painted the Coronation of the Virgin for the Swiss parish church in Milan (in situ). Still tied stylistically to the earlier work in S Maria della Passione, this demonstrates the difficulty Nuvolone experienced in breaking with the late Mannerism of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Giuseppe Meda (d 1599) and Ambrogio Figino and in adapting to new trends in 17th-century Milanese painting. His Virgin and Child with Two Saints (1624; Milan, S Eustorgio), featuring stiff figures and inflated Mannerist drapery with its metallic folds, indicates continued contact with Procaccini. In the same year he was employed in the decoration of the Collegiata di Appiano Gentile, where he painted two scenes from the Life of St Stephen and a Virgin and Child with SS Anthony and Victor. He continued to produce a vast number of repetitive religious works, yet these are less interesting than his still-life paintings, generally of fruit stands with peaches and grapes presented symmetrically against dark backgrounds.
Luca Signorelli
Crtona 1441-1523 .Italian painter of the Umbrian school, who probably studied with Piero della Francesca. He worked in Cortona, where some of his paintings have remained. Subsequently he worked in the Cathedral of Perugia, in Volterra, and at Monte Oliveto before undertaking (1499) the decoration of the Cappella Nuova in the Orvieto Cathedral. There he represented the apocalyptic series of the Story of the Anti-Christ, the End of the World, the Resurrection of the Bodies, Paradise, and the Inferno, as well as figurations from antique poems and the Divine Comedy. The infernal scenes are remarkable for their imaginative evocation of fiends and tortures of Hell. Michelangelo was influenced by his powerful treatment of anatomy and the vivid realism he used for dramatic ends. Signorelli's paintings in the Vatican, where he went in 1508, were later sacrificed to make way for some of Raphael's work.