Born in Scotland, worked much of his career in Rome, he mentored Benjamin West, worked with Piranesi, and bought Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks.
history of painting
A journey from the southern shore of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc, travelling east to the Zugspitze, highest mountain in Germany.
In chiaroscuro, for enlightenment, at the centre of family and friends at dinner, and in special safety lamps carried underground by coal miners.
the personification of vigilance, Mary Magdalen, in shadowplay, held by Florence Nightingale ‘the lady of the lamp’, and associated with overwork and tiredness.
Cursed to be confined to weaving images on her loom and forbidden from looking directly at the outside world, she breaks that to look at Sir Lancelot.
Paintings in which he helped set the thumbs up and down sign, and painted himself making a sculpture he had previously painted in a painting as a sculpture.
From an early painting of the blind Michelangelo to that of a nude courtesan before a Greek court, vision and visual fidelity was his recurrent theme.
How some landscape painters blurred the view to paint, while others have depicted motion blur, depth of field effects, or an edge hierarchy. Links to each article in the series.
Artists who flocked to the Prado in Madrid often visited Granada, where the towers of the Alhambra rise to compete with the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada.
Shackles of the night, in a well, as a rope ladder how Romeo meets Juliet, trussing up a robber, or hanging John Brown, the abolitionist.
The Eclectic Light Company 