Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni di Filipepi, more popularly known as Sandro Boticelli was one of the more notable painter of the Florentine school during the Early Renaissance. Boticelli was born on March 1, 1445 in Florence, Italy. His nickname, “Il Boticelli” or “Little Barrel” was given to him by his brother, Giovanni. Little has been known about the early life of Boticelli. But history records indicated that he may have become an apprentice when he was about fourteen years old, quite an early…

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was a notable Italian artist known to be the first great representative of the Baroque style. Caravaggio, despite the widely acclaimed artistry during his time, led quite an enigmatic and fascinating lifestyle that seemed to be a puzzle to many. He was famous and very influential when he lived but somehow was almost forgotten completely for many centuries until his artistic influences in the development of Modern Art was again rediscovered. Caravaggio was born i…

Paul Cezanne was a noted French painter considered as one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists. He was known to have led the way for the transition of Impressionism in the 19th Century to the styles the has been developing in the early 20th Century. He was one of the painters who challenged the conventional values of painting in the 19th Century which insisted on personal expression and integrity of the painting itself. Although his own works were discredited by the public for most of his …

Willem de Kooning is one of the noted modern artists whose work became prominent in the post World War II era. He was, first and foremost, known as an abstract expressionist painter, a style of which is usually characterized by an impression of spontaneity and that of an unplanned work. De Kooning was born on April 24, 1904 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Early YearsKooning grew up with his mother, Cornelia Nobel, with whom divorced De Kooning’s father, Leendert de Kooning when he was just five y…

Francisco Goya is a notable Spanish painter and printmaker. Goya has been regarded as the last in the line of the Old Masters and the first among the modern painters. In fact, Goya is considered by other artists as the Father of Modern Art, whose works became models for the works of other famous artists such as Manet and Picasso. Early YearsFrancisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes was born on March 30, 1746 in Fuendetodos, Spain. His parents were Jose Benito de Goya y Franque and Gracia de Lucientes y…

Johanns Vermeer was a noted Dutch painter who specialized in the Dutch Baroque style. He was famous for his art works of domestic interior scenes depicting ordinary life. A painter with a relatively few artworks credited to him, he was for some time forgotten for nearly 200 year. It was an 1866 art critic who revived his reputation as an art master by publishing an essay that attributed 66 paintings to him. And through that, he was acknowledged as one of the greatest painters ever to come out of…

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a famous Dutch Post-impressionist artist whose paintings and drawings have become some of the most popular and most expensive works of art in the world today. His use of color as the chief mode of expression has led him to create some of the most beautiful paintings, the mix of color and dramatic content of his works display his genius as an artist. Van Gogh’s posthumous success despite the tragic life he led seems to be in line with the lives of other great artists t…