Artist Bios

Rembrandt has come to personify a "golden age" of Dutch painting. He studied the great Italian Renaissance artists—Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian—but created a style all his own. Extraordinarily prolific, he produced about 400 paintings, 1,000 drawings, and 290 etchings of an astonishing range of subjects—animals, historical figures, portraits, landscapes, and Biblical and mythological scenes.

Among his many innovations, Rembrandt created the genre of tronie—a hybrid of portraiture and historical painting—by depicting the heads of models outfitted with antique necklaces, period clothes, turbans, or other exotic headwear. In his most mature work, he employed Caravaggio's chiaroscuro technique powerfully—along with broad, loose brush strokes and multiple layers of color and transparent glazes—to convey his subjects' rich, complex humanity. Rembrandt's use of color and light even influenced artists as seemingly far removed as Kandinsky, Modigliani, and other 20th-century Expressionists.

"Big George" founded what is now considered the High Renaissance style of painting in Venice, characterized by intense, glowing colors. Generally, his art conveys a mood rather than depicting familiar stories from history, mythology, or the Bible. His life remains as mysterious as his paintings. Scholars know that he went to Venice as a young man to study under Giovanni Bellini, but other details of his life present problems.

Certainly, Giorgione profoundly influenced Titian, who also studied under Bellini and served as Giorgione's assistant for a time. So closely does Titian's work resemble Giorgione's that scholars have difficulty attributing some paintings to one or the other. The enigmatic, moody quality of Giorgione's work and his poetic treatment of nature in paintings like The Tempest made him popular among the 19th-century Romantics.

At the height of his career, Botticelli was the hottest artist in Florence. He counted the rich, powerful Medici and Vespucci families among his patrons, and the Pope summoned him to Rome to help decorate the Sistine Chapel. Botticelli used soft colors, full illumination, and a low-relief style to depict classical gods and religious scenes. Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance artists, used the term "grace" to describe the overriding quality of Botticelli's work.

Late in his life, Botticelli departed from the grand scale of paintings like The Birth of Venus and La Primavera for smaller works with stylistically distorted figures and deeper colors. But in his old age he began to fall out of fashion, displaced by up-and-comers like Perugino and later by Michelangelo and Raphael. These artists used sweeter colors and emphasized recognizably human emotional content.

Hot-tempered, sharp-tongued, and pugnacious as a youth, Caravaggio ironically became the most influential religious painter of his time. By depicting saints with faces that he saw on the streets and emphasizing their everyday humanity, he provided the perfect art for a Roman Catholic Church battling back the popular uprising of the Reformation.

Caravaggio revolutionized painting with his tenebrism—a technique in which he illuminated figures out of dark shadows, giving a three-dimensional quality to the scene and heightening its drama. His bold, unapologetic realism and dramatic use of light became so popular that pockets of painters practicing "Caravaggism" popped up all over Europe after his death. Rembrandt, Rubens, Velazquez, and other 17th-century European artists owed their powerful contrasts between light and shadow to Caravaggio. Some critics have even found his influence in the way 20th-century cinematographers light their scenes.

Perhaps no one has painted less but influenced other artists more than Leonardo. Only 17 paintings definitely attributed to him survive, some of them unfinished. But he wrote extensively on representation and expression, and his ideas dominated artistic training in Europe well into the 20th century. For Leonardo, art and science were a seamless whole. Like his German contemporary, Albrecht Duerer, he studied physiognomy and proportion. He believed that painting required understanding how the physical world worked, especially the structure and function of the human body. He described in great detail how faces convey emotion—the particular look of the lips and teeth showing anger, for example.

Leonardo's The Adoration of the Magi influenced Rembrandt's composition in paintings with multiple figures. With its simple but powerful orchestration of the apostles and its depiction of character by gesture, The Last Supper served as a model for Rubens, Rembrandt, and other masters. Raphael learned about pyramidal composition from Virgin and Child with St. Anne and about portraiture from sketching Mona Lisa while the painting was in progress.

Was Manet an Impressionist or Realist? Certainly, the daring of Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe fired up the Impressionists. Although Manet befriended them (especially Monet), he never exhibited with them nor fully accepted their ideas or techniques.

Manet received extensive formal training under Thomas Couture, but he also created original techniques—most notably, his alla prima method. Rather than covering his canvas with dark paint and then layering on colors, Manet mixed colors on his palette or directly on the canvas. This allowed him to finish "at the first" sitting, as the Italian name implies. The method's speed appealed to the Impressionists, as did Manet's choice of modern, urban subjects. His arrangement of colors, in which he eliminated gradations of a particular color under the painting's light source, further paved the way for Impressionism and, later, modern art.

Despite the astounding beauty of his paintings, van Eyck influenced later artists more by his medium than his style. Although he did not invent oil painting as early art historians claimed, he did perfect the formulas and techniques that allowed him to produce naturalistic textures, light, and spatial effects with oil.

As in The Arnolfini Marriage, van Eyck often imbued everyday objects with religious symbolism—a habit that makes his work not only hard to interpret, but also hard to imitate. He saw all of nature, even the very light that illuminates his paintings, as a sign of divine presence.

The famous Ghent Altarpiece yields another van Eyck mystery: an inscription asserts that Hubert van Eyck (Jan's supposed brother) began the piece. Many scholars doubt the inscription's authenticity, however, and the precise relationship of the men and the degree to which they collaborated (if at all) has not been definitively answered.