Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers

St. Barbara is opposite St. Sixtus. Her body is in left profile, towards the Virgin, while her head, turned over her left shoulder towards the spectator, appears almost in full...

I have seen a quantity of things here--churches, palaces, statues, fountains, and pictures; and my brain is at this moment like a portfolio of an architect, or a print-shop, or...

Two-thirds of the price of the picture, 655 _duccati di camera_, had already been paid by the Cardinal de' Medici; and, in the following year, that part of the picture which Rap...

As we have said, Velasquez was Court Chamberlain, and it was he who was charged with the preparation of the lodgings of the King in the trip that Philip IV. made to Irun to deli...

At the distance from which we examine it, the work of the hand disappears, but it is easy to guess that it is excellent and directed with full confidence by a mind broken into g...

The portrait of Beatrice at the Colonna Palace is most admirable as a work of art: it was taken by Guido during her confinement in prison. But it is most interesting as a just r...

Botticelli lived in a generation of naturalists, and he might have been a mere naturalist among them. There are traces enough in his work of that alert sense of outward things w...

She is represented as seated in an arm-chair, holding in one hand a book of music, and with her left arm resting on a marble table on which are placed a globe and several volume...

and so on, in lines not be matched for hasty and dreadful suggestion. Swiftness and stealth, the ambush, the averted face and the sudden stab, are the standing elements of murde...

_La Gioconda_ is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the _Melancholia_ of Dürer is comp...

Finally, in the eleventh group, in the centre, very near the upper part of the picture, between the two companies of the blessed, and seated upon the clouds, the sovereign Judge...

And did he study such merely from broken stones and pieces of coal, from twigs and weeds in his painting-room? Vain idea! these were but the _memoria technica_, that served to c...

We know the various portraits of the children of Charles I. disseminated in the museums and palaces of Europe; we have seen and admired the picture in Dresden, those at Windsor,...

The centre of the picture is occupied by the Virgin Mary, who is lifted up, or rather who is surrounded by a wreath of angels and souls of the blessed: for she has no need of an...

Quick! to array the spring in ball costume, Watteau's heavens and earth, quick. _Gelosi!_ A bergomask laugh shall be the laughter, animation, and action, and movement of the pie...

He has long fair hair confined beneath a black cap; his smooth-shaven face is rather thin. He wears a rich costume, a pourpoint of cerise silk with puffed sleeves, and, over thi...

The first of the series represents the signing of the marriage contract. The scene, as the artist is careful to signify by the ostentatious coronets on the furniture and accesso...

In very ordinary language and in its action common to all schools, chiaroscuro is the art of rendering the atmosphere visible, and painting an object enveloped with air. Its aim...

The likenesses of the donors are given with inimitable life and fidelity. They show the careful hand of Jan van Eyck, but already approach that limit within which the imitation...

Lastly, for the Soldan himself. In a modern work, you would assuredly have had him staring at St. Francis with his eyebrows up, or frowning thunderously at the Magi, with them b...

At the end of this text I have provided some links to Internet sites which have more information about some of the artists, some of which may have color images similar to the on...

Finally, is it necessary to speak of the date of the _Primavera_? This would occasion a long discussion if the space were accorded me. Let it suffice to say that the biography w...