(1600-1670) A Baroque painter of the seventeenth century, Giovanna Garzoni was one of the first woman artists to practice still life painting. She was likely influenced by the work of Jacopo Ligozzi and the painters of the Medici court. Even during her own lifetime her works were highly coveted and achieved high prices. Her work…

(1578 – 1630) The Milanese painter Fede Galizia was recognized as early as twelve years old as a prodigious artist. She was the daughter of a painter who presumably also taught her, and her acute attention to detail may be attributed to her father’s specialty in miniature art. She is known for her portrait work,…

Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576) known in English as Titian /ˈtɪʃən/ was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno (in Veneto), in the Republic of Venice. During his lifetime he was often called da Cadore,…

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli (Italian: [ˈsandro bottiˈtʃɛlli]; c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine school under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later as…

Sofonisba Anguissola was born in Cremona, Italy, in 1532, and became one of the first Renaissance women to receive an apprenticeship in the arts, hers was with painters Bernardino Campi and Bernardina Gatti. Her family lived near a famous 2nd century B.C. battle site and she was named after Sophonisba, a Carthaginian noblewoman who was…

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (April 6 or March 28, 1483 – April 6, 1520), better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together…

Michelangelo Merisi or Amerighi da Caravaggio (Italian pronunciation: [karaˈvaddʒo]; 29 September 1571? – 18 July 1610?) was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1592 (1595?) and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a…

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Italian pronunciation: [leoˈnardo da vˈvint[i]; April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519, Old Style) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has…