CONSTABLE, John

(b. 1776, East Bergholt, d. 1837, Hampstead) by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

Biography English painter, ranked with Turner as one of the greatest British landscape artists. Although he showed an early talent for art and began painting his native Suffolk scenery before he left school, his great originality matured slowly. He committed himself to a career as an artist only in 1799, when he joined the Royal Academy Schools, and it was not until 1829 that he was grudgingly made a full Academician, elected by a majority of only one vote. In 1816 he became financially secure on the death of his father and married Maria Bicknell after a seven-year courtship and in the face of strong opposition from her family. During the 1820s he began to win recognition: The Hay Wain (National Gallery, London, 1821) won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824 and Constable was admired by Delacroix and Bonington among others. His wife died in 1828, however, and the remaining years of his life were clouded by despondency. After spending some years working in the Picturesque tradition of landscape and the manner of Gainsborough. Constable developed his own original treatment from the attempt to render scenery more directly and realistically, carrying on but modifying in an individual way the tradition inherited from Ruisdael and the Dutch 17th-century landscape painters. Just as his contemporary William Wordsworth rejected what he called the 'poetic diction' of his predecessors, so Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-century landscape painters, who, he said, were always 'running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand'. Constable thought that 'No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world', and in a way that was then new he represented in paint the atmospheric effects of changing light in the open air, the movement of clouds across the sky, and his excited delight at these phenomena, stemming from a profound love of the country: 'The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork. I love such things. These scenes made me a painter.' He never went abroad, and his finest works are of the places he knew and loved best, particularly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived from 1821. To render the shifting flicker of light and weather he abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white or yellow, and the drama of storms with a rapid brush. Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio. For his most ambitious works - 'sixfooters' as he called them - he followed the unusual technical procedure of making a full-size oil sketch, and in the 20th century there has been a tendency to praise these even more highly than the finished works because of their freedom and freshness of brushwork. (The full-size sketch for The Hay Wain is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, which has the finest collection of Constable's work.) In England Constable had no real successor and the many imitators (who included his son Lionel, 1825-87) turned rather to the formal compositions than to the more direct sketches. In France, however, he was a major influence on Romantic painters such as Delacroix, on the members of the Barbizon School, and ultimately on the Impressionists.

GOYA Y LUCIENTES, Francisco de

(b. 1746, Fuendetodos, d. 1828, Bordeaux) by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

Biography Spanish painter (full name: Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes) and graphic artist. He was the most powerful and original European artist of his time, but his genius was slow in maturing and he was well into his thirties before he began producing work that set him apart from his contemporaries. Born at Fuendetodos in Aragon, the son of a gilder, he served his apprenticeship at Saragossa, then appears to have worked at Madrid for the court painter Francisco Bayeu. In about 1770 he went to Italy but he was back in Saragossa the next year. In 1773 he married Bayeu's sister, and by 1775 had settled at Madrid. Bayeu secured him employment making cartoons for the royal tapestry factory, and this took up most of his working time from 1775 to 1792. He made sixty-three cartoons (Prado, Madrid), the largest more than 6 m. wide. The subjects range from idyllic scenes to realistic incidents of everyday life, conceived throughout in a gay and romantic spirit and executed with Rococo decorative charm. During these years Goya also found time for portraits and religious works, and his status grew. He was elected to the Academy of San Fernando in 1780 and became assistant director of painting in 1785. In 1789 he was nominated a court painter to the new king, Charles IV. A more important turning-point in his career than any of these appointments, however, was the mysterious and traumatic illness he experienced in 1792. It left him stone deaf, and while convalescing in 1793 he painted a series of small pictures of 'fantasy and invention' in order, as he said, 'to occupy an imagination mortified by the contemplation of my sufferings'. This marks the beginning of his preoccupation with the morbid, bizarre, and menacing that was to be such a feature of his mature work. It was given vivid expression in the first of his great series of engravings, Los Caprichos (Caprices), issued in 1799. The set (executed c. 1793-98) consists of eighty-two plates in etching reinforced with aquatint, and their humour is constantly overshadowed by an element of nightmare. Technically revealing the influence of Rembrandt, they feature savagely satirical attacks on social customs and abuses of the Church, with elements of the macabre in scenes of witchcraft and diabolism. In 1795 Goya succeeded Bayeu as director of painting at the Academy of San Fernando and in 1799 he was appointed First Court Painter, producing his most famous portrait group, the Family of Charles IV (Prado), in the following year. The weaknesses of the royal family are revealed with unsparing realism, though evidently without deliberate satirical intent. Goya's early portraits had followed the manner of Mengs, but stimulated by the study of Velázquez's paintings in the royal collection he had developed a much more natural, lively, and personal style, showing increasing mastery of pose and expression, heightened by dramatic contrasts of light and shade. From about the same date as the royal group portrait are the celebrated pair of paintings the Clothed Maja and Naked Maja (Prado), whose erotic nature led Goya to besummoned before the Inquisition. Popular legend has it that they represent the Duchess of Alba, the beautiful widow whose relationship with Goya caused scandal in Madrid. Goya retained his appointment of court painter under Joseph Buonaparte during the French occupation of Spain (1808-14), but his activity as a painter of court and society decreased, and he was torn between his welcome for the regime as a liberal and his abhorrence as a patriot against foreign military rule. After the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814 Goya was exonerated from the charge of having 'accepted employment from the usurper' by claiming he had not worn the medal awarded him by the French, and he painted for the king the two famous scenes of the bloody uprising of the citizens of Madrid against the occupying forces - The Second of May, 1808 and The Third of May, 1808 (Prado). Equally dramatic, and even more savage and macabre, are the sixty-five etchings Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War, 1810-14) - nightmare scenes, depicting atrocities committed by both French and Spanish. Goya virtually retired from public life after 1815, working for himself and friends. He kept the title of court painter but was superseded in royal favour by Vicente López. Towards the end of 1819 he fell seriously ill for the second time (a remarkable self-portrait in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts shows him with the doctor who nursed him). He had just bought a country house in the outskirts of Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man); and it was here after his recovery in 1820 that he executed fourteen large murals, sometimes known as the Black Paintings, now in the Prado. Painted almost entirely in blacks, greys, and browns, they depict horrific scenes, such as Saturn Devouring One of His Sons,executed with an almost ferocious intensity and freedom of handling. In 1824 Goya obtained permission from Ferdinand VII to leave the country for reasons of health and settled at Bordeaux. He made two brief visits to Spain, on the first of which (1826) he officially resigned as court painter. In these last years he took up the new medium of lithography (in his series the Bulls of Bordeaux), while his paintings illustrate his progress towards a style which foreshadowed that of the Impressionists. Goya completed some 500 oil paintings and murals, about 300 etchings and lithographs, and many hundreds of drawings. He was exceptionally versatile and his work expresses a very wide range of emotion. His technical freedom and originality likewise are remarkable — his frescoes in San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid (1798). for example, were evidently executed with sponges. In his own day he was chiefly celebrated for his portraits, of which he painted more than 200; but his fame now rests equally on his other work.

Self-Portrait
1771-75-Oil on canvas, 58 x 44 cm-Private collection

The Quail Shoot
1775-Oil on canvas, 290 x 226 cm-Museo del Prado, Madrid

DAVID, Jacques-Louis

(b. 1748, Paris, d. 1825, Bruxelles)

by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar Biography French painter, one of the central figures of Neoclassicism. He had his first training with Boucher, a distant relative, but Boucher realized that their temperaments were opposed and sent David to Vien. David went to Italy with the latter in 1776, Vien having been appointed director of the French Academy at Rome, David having won the Prix de Rome. In Italy David was able to indulge his bent for the antique and came into contact with the initiators of the new classical revival, including Gavin Hamilton. In 1780 he returned to Paris, and in the 1780s his position was firmly established as the embodiment of the social and moral reaction from the frivolity of the Rococo. His uncompromising subordination of colour to drawing and his economy of statement were in keeping with the new severity of taste. His themes gave expression to the new cult of the civic virtues of stoical self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, honesty, and austerity. Seldom have paintings so completely typified the sentiment of an age as David's The Oath of the Horatii (Louvre, Paris, 1784), Brutus and his Dead Sons (Louvre, 1789), and The Death of Socrates (Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1787). They were received with acclamation by critics and public alike. Reynolds compared the Socrates with Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Stanze, and after ten visits to the Salon described it as 'in every sense perfect'. David was in active sympathy with the Revolution; he served on various committees and voted for the execution of Louis XVI. His position was unchallenged as the painter of the Revolution. His three paintings of 'martyrs of the Revolution', though conceived as portraits, raised portraiture into the domain of universal tragedy. They were: The Death of Lepeletier (now known only from an engraving), The Death of Marat(Musées Royaux, Brussels, 1793), and The Death of Bora (Musée Calvet, Avignon, unfinished). After the fall of his friend Robespierre (1794), however, he was imprisoned, but was released on the plea of his wife, who had previously divorced him because of his Revolutionary sympathies (she was a royalist). They were remarried in 1796, and David's Intervention of the Sabine Women (Louvre, 1794-99), begun while he was in prison, is said to have been painted to honour her, its theme being one of love prevailing over conflict. It was also interpreted at the time, however, as a plea for conciliation in the civil strife that France suffered after the Revolution and it was the work that re-established David's fortunes and brought him to the attention of Napoleon, who appointed him his official painter. David became an ardent supporter of Napoleon and retained under him the dominant social and artistic position which he had previously held. Between 1802 and 1807 he painted a series of pictures glorifying the exploits of the Emperor, among them the enormous Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine (Louvre, 1805-07). These works show a change both in technique and in feeling from the earlier Republican works. The cold colours and severe composition of the heroic paintings gave place to a new feeling for pageantry which had something in common with Romantic painting, although he always remained opposed to the Romantic school. With the fall of Napoleon, David went into exile in Brussels, and his work weakened as the possibility of exerting a moral and social influence receded. (Until recently his late history paintings were generally scorned by critics, but their sensuous qualities are now winning them a more appreciative audience.) He continued to be an outstanding portraitist, but he never surpassed such earlier achievements as the great Napoleon Crossing the Alps (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 1800, one of four versions) or the coolly erotic Madame Récamier (Louvre, 1800). His work had a resounding influence on the development of French - and indeed European - painting, and his many pupils included Gérard, Gros, and Ingres. Portrait of François Buron 1769,Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm,Private collection

मिटटी के रंग

मिटटी के रंग

राष्ट्रीय सहारा - १५ अगस्त २०१०

को ३० मिनट का प्रोग्राम ११-३० पर ,

चित्रकला विभाग एम् एम् एच कालेज गाजियाबाद

के नए पुराने व् वर्तमान छात्र छात्राएं

डॉ.लाल रत्नाकर

के साथ.

REMBRANDT Harmenszoon van Rijn

(b. 1606, Leiden, d. 1669, Amsterdam)

by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

---

Biography

Rembrandt was born in Leiden on July 15, 1606- his full name Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. He was the son of a miller. Despite the fact that he came from a family of relatively modest means, his parents took great care with his education. Rembrandt began his studies at the Latin School, and at the age of 14 he was enrolled at the University of Leiden. The program did not interest him, and he soon left to study art - first with a local master, Jacob van Swanenburch, and then, in Amsterdam, with Pieter Lastman, known for his historical paintings. After six months, having mastered everything he had been taught, Rembrandt returned to Leiden, where he was soon so highly regarded that although barely 22 years old, he took his first pupils. One of his students was the famous artist Gerrit Dou.

Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in 1631; his marriage in 1634 to Saskia van Uylenburgh, the cousin of a successful art dealer, enhanced his career, bringing him in contact with wealthy patrons who eagerly commissioned portraits. An exceptionally fine example from this period is the Portrait of Nicolaes Ruts (1631, Frick Collection, New York City). In addition, Rembrandt's mythological and religious works were much in demand, and he painted numerous dramatic masterpieces such as The Blinding of Samson (1636, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt). Because of his renown as a teacher, his studio was filled with pupils, some of whom (such as Carel Fabritius) were already trained artists. In the 20th century, scholars have reattributed a number of his paintings to his associates; attributing and identifying Rembrandt's works is an active area of art scholarship.

In contrast to his successful public career, however, Rembrandt's family life was marked by misfortune. Between 1635 and 1641 Saskia gave birth to four children, but only the last, Titus, survived; her own death came in 1642- at the age of 30. Hendrickje Stoffels, engaged as his housekeeper about 1649, eventually became his common-law wife and was the model for many of his pictures. Despite Rembrandt's financial success as an artist, teacher, and art dealer, his penchant for ostentatious living forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1656. An inventory of his collection of art and antiquities, taken before an auction to pay his debts, showed the breadth of Rembrandt's interests: ancient sculpture, Flemish and Italian Renaissance paintings, Far Eastern art, contemporary Dutch works, weapons, and armor. Unfortunately, the results of the auction - including the sale of his house - were disappointing.

These problems in no way affected Rembrandt's work; if anything, his artistry increased. Some of the great paintings from this period are The Jewish Bride (1665), The Syndics of the Cloth Guild (1661, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Bathsheba (1654, Louvre, Paris), Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph (1656, Staatliche Gemäldegalerie, Kassel, Germany), and a self-portrait (1658, Frick Collection). His personal life, however, continued to be marred by sorrow. His beloved Hendrickje died in 1663, and his son, Titus, in 1668- only 27 years of age. Eleven months later, on October 4, 1669, Rembrandt died in Amsterdam.

SENIORITY LIST AS ON 01-07-2011-DRAWING & PAINTING

SENIORITY LIST AS ON 01-07-2011

DRAWING & PAINTING

SL. Name of the teachers Dateof Name of the Deg. Seni.

No. Birth College PG/D Yr.Mon

1. Dr.(Smt.) Asha Anand     18-01-50  INCMRT     PG      38-09
2. Dr.(Smt.) Deep Shikha 06-12-53 NAS MRT PG 34-09
3. Dr.Ram Sabda Singh 01-07-50 JVJ SRE PG 33-08
4. Dr. (Smt.) Nisha Sharma 05-01-55 JKP MZN PG 33-06
5. Dr.(Smt.) Meena Kumar 01-01-55 DJC BRT D 33-04
( Subject to the decision of the Supreme Court)
6. Sh. Subodh Misra 20-08-50 SDC MZN D 31-05
7. Dr. Neelima Gupta 12-12-58 INC MRT PG 30-06
8. Dr.(Km.) Madhu Jain 30-04-60 MLJ SRE PG (SF) 28-06
9. Dr.(Smt.) Usha Kiran 07-09-57 MTC MRT PG 27-10
10. Dr. Nupur Sharma 16-12-57 NAS MRT PG 24-03
11. Dr. Akhilesh Sharma 05-06-58 NAS MRT PG 23-08
12. Smt. Geeta Rana 21-10-65 DJC BRT D 23-04
13. Mrs. Alka Tiwari 30-06-63 GDG MDN D 21-04
14. Dr. (Mrs.) Neetu Vashisth 26-12-69 KKJ KTL D 20-04
15. Dr. Nisha Gupta 04-01-61 JKP MZN PG 19-00
16. Dr.Kiran Pradeep Kaushik 14-06-65 KLM MRT PG 19-00
17. Dr. Lal Ratnakar 12-08-57 MMH GZB PG 18-09
18. Dr. Jyotsna 30-08-65 KLM MRT PG 14-03
19. Sh.Ved Pal Singh 07-06-68 DAV MZN PG (SF) 11-06
20. Dr. Hemant Kumar Rai 08-06-61 MMH GZB PG 11-05
21. Dr. Mahesh Kumar 12-08-74 JVJ SRE PG 10-01
22. Mrs. Anju Chaudhary 13-08-72 JAV BRT D 09-10
23. Dr. Archana Rani 30-11-72 RGC MRT PG 09-10
24. Sh. Amrit Lal 02-03-72 MTC MRT PG 09-09
25. Dr. (Km.) Alka Chadha 02-05-73 RGC MRT PG 09-09
26. Dr. (Smt.) Vandana Verma 01-07-76 JKP MZN PG 09-09
27. Sh. Basant Kumar 19-06-71 SDC MZN D 09-03
28. Rishika Pandey 11-04-76 GDG MDN D 09-00
29. Dr. Madhu Vajpai 05-04-57 MTC MRT PG 08-11

El Greco

GRECO, El

Spanish painter of Greek origin (b. 1541, Candia, d. 1614, Toledo)

by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

Biography

Cretan-born painter, sculptor, and architect who settled in Spain and is regarded as the first great genius of the Spanish School. He was known as El Greco (the Greek), but his real name was Domenikos Theotokopoulos; and it was thus that he signed his paintings throughout his life, always in Greek characters, and sometimes followed by Kres (Cretan).

Little is known of his youth, and only a few works survive by him in the Byzantine tradition of icon painting, notably the Dormition of the Virgin discovered in 1983 (Church of the Koimesis tis Theotokou, Syros). In 1566 he is referred to in a Cretan document as a master painter; soon afterwards he went to Venice (Crete was then a Venetian possession), then in 1570 moved to Rome. The miniaturist Giulio Clovio, whom he met there, described him as a pupil of Titian, but of all the Venetian painters Tintoretto influenced him most (e.g. Christ Healing the Blind, c. 1570), and Michelangelo's impact on his development was also important (e.g. Pietà, c. 1572, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Among the surviving works of his Italian period are two paintings of the Purification of the Temple (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), a much-repeated theme, and the portrait of Giulio Clovio (Museo di Capodimonte. Naples). By 1577 he was at Toledo, where he remained until his death, and it was there that he matured his characteristic style in which figures elongated into flame-like forms and usually painted in cold, eerie, bluish colours express intense religious feeling. The commission that took him to Toledo — the high altarpiece of the church of S. Domingo el Antiguo - was gained through Diego de Castilla, Dean of Canons at Toledo Cathedral, whom El Greco had met in Rome. The central part of the altarpiece, a 4-m. high canvas of The Assumption of the Virgin (Art Institute of Chicago, 1577), was easily his biggest work to date, but he carried off the dynamic composition triumphantly. A succession of great altarpieces followed throughout his career, the two most famous being El Espolio (Christ Stripped of His Garments) (Toledo Cathedral, 1577-79) and The Burial of Count Orgaz (S. Tome, Toledo. 1586-88). These two mighty works convey the awesomeness of great spiritual events with a sense of mystic rapture, and in his late work El Greco went even further in freeing his figures from earth-bound restrictions: The Adoration of the Shepherds (Prado, Madrid, 1612-14), painted for his own tomb, is a prime example.

El Greco excelled also as a portraitist, mainly of ecclesiastics (Felix Paravicino, Boston Museum, 1609) or gentlemen, although one of his most beautiful works is a portrait of a lady (Art Gallery & Museums Kelvingrove, Glasgow, c. 1577-80), traditionally identified as a likeness of Jeronima de las Cuevas, his common-law wife. He also painted two views of Toledo (Metropolitan Museum, New York, and Museo del Greco, Toledo), both late works, and a mythological painting, Laocoön(National Gallery of Art, Washington, c. 1610), that is unique in his oeuvre. The unusual choice of subject is perhaps explained by the local tradition that Toledo had been founded by descendants of the Trojans.

El Greco also designed complete altar compositions, working as architect and sculptor as well as painter, for instance at the Hospital de la Caridad, Illescas (1603). Pacheco, who visited El Greco in 1611, refers to him as a writer on painting, sculpture, and architecture. He had a proud temperament, conceiving of himself as an artist-philosopher rather than a craftsman, and had a lavish lifestyle, although he had little success in securing the royal patronage he desired and seems to have had some financial difficulties near the end of his life.

His workshop turned out a great many replicas of his paintings, but his work was so personal that his influence was slight, his only followers of note being his son Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos and Luis Tristan. Interest in his art revived at the end of the 19th century and with the development of Expressionism in the 20th century he came into his own. The strangeness of his art has inspired various theories, for example that he was mad or suffered from astigmatism, but his rapturous paintings make complete sense as an expression of the religious fervour of his adopted country.

RUBENS, Pieter Pauwel

by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

RUBENS, Pieter Pauwel

(b. 1577, Siegen, d. 1640, Antwerpen)

Biography

Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting's dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. His work is a fusion of the traditions of Flemish realism with the classical tendencies of the Italian Renaissance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps best known for his religious and mythological compositions.

Early life

Although Rubens' father, Jan, was born a Roman Catholic, his name had appeared on a list of Calvinists as early as 1566. This accounted for the Rubens family's exile to Germany, where Peter Paul was born. Jan Rubens became a diplomatic agent and adviser to the Protestant princess Anna of Saxony (d. 1577), second wife of William the Silent, who led the resistance to Spanish rule of the Netherlands. An unfortunate pregnancy revealed the intimate extent of the relationship between this princess of the house of Orange-Nassau and Rubens' father. She obtained clemency from her husband for Jan, but he and his family were placed under house arrest at Siegen, a Nassau stronghold in Westphalia. The Rubens children were grounded in the classics by their exiled father, who was a doctor of both civil and canon law. Jan died in 1587, after he had been allowed to go to the German city of Cologne. Rubens' mother then took her four surviving children to Antwerp, where Jan had been an alderman.

Antwerp training

At the age of 10, Peter Paul was sent with his brother Philip to a Latin school in Antwerp. In 1590, shortage of money and the need to provide a dowry for his sister Blandina forced Rubens' mother to break off his formal education and send him as a page to the Countess of Lalaing. Soon tired of courtly life, Rubens was allowed to become a painter. He was sent first to his kinsman Tobias Verhaecht, a minor painter of Mannerist landscapes. Having quickly learned the rudiments of his profession, he was apprenticed for four years to an abler master, Adam van Noort, and subsequently to Otto van Veen, one of the most distinguished of the Antwerp Romanists, a group of Flemish artists who had gone to Rome to study the art of antiquity and the Italian Renaissance.

Italian period

In May 1600, with two years' seniority as a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, Rubens set out with Deodatus del Monte, his constant traveling companion and first pupil, for the visual and spiritual adventure of Italy. He was offered employment by Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, which duchy held one of the largest and finest collections outside the Vatican of works by Italian artists. During the eight years that Rubens was to call Vincenzo his lord, he had unmatched opportunities for fulfilling his expressed intention "to study at close quarters the works of the ancient and modern masters. . . ."

Rubens was sent to Rome (1601-02) by the duke to paint copies of pictures and to live under the protection of Cardinal Montalto. There, through Flemish connections, he obtained his first public commission, to paint three altarpieces for the crypt chapel of St Helena in Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. In Rome the Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci and his assistants were at work in the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese. Their bold scale in drawing and working methods decidedly influenced the young Rubens. He assimilated Venetian colour, light, and loose application of paint first through the works of Tintoretto, then through those of Veronese, long before he could penetrate the inward meaning of Titian's art. Rubens' copies, and his reworking of drawings, offer the most complete survey of the achievement of 16^th-century Italian art in a markedly personal revision.

In 1603 he was entrusted with his first diplomatic mission, to take costly presents from Mantua to Philip III and the Spanish court. This mission gave him a first view of the royal collections in Madrid. His resourcefulness and tact in dealing with the temperamental regular Mantuan representative to the Spanish court raised him in the duke's estimation and helped prepare him for future diplomatic missions.

The only major works he executed for Mantua were the three pictures finished in 1605 for the Jesuit Church of SS. Trinità: The Baptism of Christ (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp), The Transfiguration (Fine Arts Museum, Nancy), and The Gonzaga Family in Adoration of the Most Holy Trinity (Ducal Palace, Mantua). In the same year he completed the Circumcision for the high altar of the Jesuit Church of Sant' Ambrogio in Genoa. Portraits of court beauties by Rubens were commissioned by the duke for the Gonzaga Gallery, of which Rubens was curator.

Toward the end of 1605, Rubens obtained leave from the Duke of Mantua to continue his studies in Rome. There he shared a house with his brother Philip, then librarian to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, a member of one of Rome's most wealthy and powerful families. Daily contact with Philip, a brilliant student of the famed Flemish humanist and classical scholar Justus Lipsius, added zest to his personal discovery of the antique world.

In the summer of 1607 Rubens was asked to accompany the Gonzaga court to the Italian seaside resort of San Pier d'Arena, where he continued to paint with splendour portraits of the Genoese aristocracy. Chronic arrears in payment of his salary, and an ambition to establish himself as an international, rather than just a Mantuan, artist, motivated him to accept other patronage. He received the backing of the wealthy Genoese banker to the papacy, Monsignor Jacopo Serra, who was instrumental in obtaining for him the coveted commission for the painting over the high altar of the Roman Church of Santa Maria in Vallicella. He concurrently painted the altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds for the Oratorian Order in Fermo.

In October 1608 his brother summoned him to their mother's deathbed in Antwerp, but she died before he could reach her. Italy had become Rubens's spiritual home (he usually signed himself Pietro Pauolo') and he considered returning for good, but his success in Antwerp was so immediate and great that he remained there, and in spite of his extensive travels later in his career he never saw Italy again.

Return to Antwerp

Soon after his mother's death Rubens was "bound with golden fetters" to the service of the Spanish Habsburg regents of Flanders. The house that he built for himself, the pride of Antwerp, was filled with paintings, statuary, cameos, coins, and jewels from Renaissance and ancient Roman Italy. He built a private pantheon to house his antiquities. His biggest commission in Flanders was for the decoration of the Jesuit Church St Charles Borromeo in Antwerp (a building he may also have had a hand in designing). He was also the master decorator for its interior and provided oil sketches as designs for the ceiling paintings, on which he was assisted by his most talented pupil, Anthony Van Dyck, and others. Almost all his work there was destroyed by fire in 1718.

Settling permanently in Flanders, Rubens in October 1609 married Isabella, daughter of Jan Brant, a leading Antwerp humanist. He became not only the court portraitist but a major religious painter. His Baroque altarpieces of The Raising of the Cross (1610) for St. Walburga's in Antwerp and the Descent from the Cross (1611-14) for Antwerp Cathedral established Rubens as the leading painter of Flanders. Because of his prestige, he was allowed to live in Antwerp, rather than in Brussels, where the Flemish court was based. Rubens' international reputation spread partly because of the large number of works produced in his workshop, which came to employ a great number of assistants and apprentices. Many of the large-scale pictures that issued from his studio were in fact painted by these assistants, though the underlying design and certain key areas of paint were done by Rubens himself. To present models of prospective large-scale paintings to clients, Rubens might also sketch out the design beforehand in tones of brown, gray, and white on a small prepared wooden panel only inches high.

The demand for Rubens's work was extraordinary, and he was able to meet it only because he ran an extremely efficient studio. It is not known how many pupils or assistants he had because as court painter he was exempt from registering them with the guild. The idea of his running a sort of picture factory has been exaggerated, but even a man of his seemingly inexhaustible intellectual and physical stamina (he habitually rose at 4 a.m.) could not carry out all the work involved in his massive output with his own hands. Rubens both collaborated with established artists ('Velvet' Brueghel, van Dyck, Jordaens, Daniel Seghers, Snyders, and others) and retouched pictures by pupils, the degree of his intervention being reflected in the price. Generally his assistants did much of the work between the initial oil sketch and the master's finishing touches. Modern taste has tended to admire these sketches and his drawings (in which his personal touch is evident in every stroke of brush, chalk, or pen) more than the large-scale works, but Rubens himself would surely have found this attitude hard to comprehend, for the sheer scale and grandeur of the finished paintings gives them an extra, symphonic dimension.

Among Rubens' major works from the second decade of the century are the religious paintings The Last Judgment (c. 1616; Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and Christ on the Cross (1620; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels) and the mythological paintings Battle of the Amazons (c. 1618; Alte Pinakothek) and Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (c. 1617-18; Alte Pinakothek). His pictures of wild animals culminated in the Hippopotamus Hunt (c. 1615-16; Alte Pinakothek) and similarhunting scenes.

Diplomatic career

In the period between 1621 and 1630, Rubens was increasingly used as a diplomat by the Spanish Habsburg rulers. His contact with the leading political and intellectual figures of Europe, as well as his gracious manner, made him the ideal political agent. Furthermore, as a painter, he could often act as a covert diplomat or observer. His first important diplomatic functions were in connection with the attempt of Spain to renegotiate the Twelve Years' Truce (1609-21) between the Habsburg-controlled area of Flanders and the Dutch Republic to the north. Rubens became an adviser to Archduchess Isabella, the regent of Flanders and daughter of the Habsburg ruler of Spain, Philip II. On her behalf Rubens tried to intercede with the Dutch, but war soon broke out again in the Netherlands between the Protestant Dutch and the Catholic Flemish and continued for the rest of Rubens' life.

Early in 1622 Rubens was summoned to Paris by Marie de Médicis, the widow of Henry IV and mother of the reigning king of France, Louis XIII. This Florentine princess, whose wedding by proxy Rubens had attended in Florence in 1600, commissioned him to paint two series of paintings for two long galleries in her newly constructed Luxembourg Palace. One cycle of 21 pictures representing episodes from Marie's life now hangs in the Louvre Museum, while the other proposed series of pictures, dealing with the life of Henry IV, was never completed. After six weeks of discussion and arrangements, Rubens returned to Antwerp, where he worked for two years on this, his most artistically important secular commission. He returned to Paris in 1625 to install the Marie de Médicis pictures.

In 1628 Rubens traveled to Madrid, where he tried to lay the groundwork for peace negotiations between Spain and England. There he was made an envoy by King Philip IV and sent on a special peace mission to Charles I of England in 1629. It is to Rubens' personal diplomacy that the peace treaty of 1630 between England and Spain can largely be attributed. In reward for his services he was knighted and given an honorary degree by Cambridge University. Charles I also commissioned him to decorate the ceiling of the royal Banqueting House (1619-22) designed by the court architect Inigo Jones as a part of Whitehall Palace. Finished in 1634, the nine huge panels allegorize the reign of James I, the father of Charles I.

Late years in Flanders

On his return to Flanders in 1630, Rubens was rewarded by the archduchess with exemption from further diplomatic missions. The peace Rubens had worked for nearly 10 years to achieve, however, did not last, and for most of the next 20 years Europe continued to be embroiled in the Thirty Years' War.

Having been a widower for four years, Rubens in 1630 married the 16-year-old Hélèna Fourment, whose charms recur frequently in such late figure paintings as The Garden of Love (1634; Prado Museum, Madrid), The Three Graces (c. 1638-40; Prado), and The Judgment of Paris (1638-39; Prado), as well as in Hélèna Fourment with Fur Cloak (c. 1638-40; Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna) and other portraits. Rubens bought the château of Elewijt in 1635, and in his last years he spent much time there depicting the rural life and scenery outside of Antwerp in such paintings as The Kermesse (c. 1636-38; Louvre Museum, Paris). His long-established interest in landscape painting reached its grandest and most emotionally romantic expression in such late works as Landscape with a Rainbow (c. 1634; The Hermitage, St. Petersburg) and Chateau de Steen (c. 1635-37; National Gallery, London). Rubens' major commission during these last years, however, was to provide for King Philip IV of Spain (the brother of the infante Ferdinand, who had succeeded Archduchess Isabella as regent of Flanders) models for about 120 scenes from the writings of the Roman poet Ovid and other classical authors to decorate the Torre de la Parada, the royal hunting lodge near Madrid. Rubens died at Antwerp in 1640 when gout, which had for months troubled his painting arm, reached his heart.

Achievement

Rubens was one of the most methodically assimilative and most prodigiously productive of Western artists. His abundant energy fired him to study and emulate the masters both of antiquity and of the 16^th century in Rome, Venice, and Parma. His warmth of nature made him responsive to the artistic revolutions being worked by living artists, and robust powers of comprehension nourished his limitless resource in invention. He was able to infuse his own astounding vitality equally into religious and mythological paintings, portraits, and landscapes. He organized his complex compositions in vivid, dynamic designs in which limitations of form and contour are discounted in favour of a constant flow of movement. Rubens' voluptuous women may not be to the taste of modern viewers but are related to the full and opulent forms that were the ideal of womanhood during the Baroque period.

The larger the scale of the undertaking the more congenial it was to Rubens' spirit. The success of his public performance as master of the greatest studio organization in Europe since Raphael's in Rome has obscured for many the personal intensity of his vision as evinced in such works as his oil sketch for All Saints (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and in his deeply felt study for the head of St John in the Antwerp cathedral Descent from the Cross, as well as in portraits of his family and friends and in his treatment of the mood and grandeur of landscape. Rubens' most immediate influence was on Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, and other painters in Flanders, but artists at almost every period have responded to the force of his genius. He is a central figure in the history of Western art.

Rubens' own deepest love as a painter, consummated by his second visit to Spain, was for the poetry, the control of glowing colour, and the sheer mastery in handling of oil paint that distinguish the art of Titian. In these qualities Rubens himself became supreme, whether with the brilliant play of fine brushes over the white reflecting surface of a small panel, or with masterful gestures often more than six feet long, sweeping a richly loaded brush across a huge canvas. Rubens's influence in 17th-century Flanders was overwhelming, and it was spread elsewhere in Europe by his journeys abroad and by pictures exported from his workshop, and also through the numerous engravings he commissioned of his work. In later centuries, his influence has also been immense, perhaps most noticeably in France, where Watteau, Delacroix, and Renoir were among his greatest admirers. Because of the unrivalled variety of his work, artists as different in temperament as these three could respond to it with equal enthusiasm.

Religious paintings (until 1616)

by Pieter Pauwel RUBENS

The Deposition,1602
Oil on canvas, 180 x 137 cm,Galleria Borghese, Rome

The Gonzaga Family Worshipping the Holy Trinity
1604-05
Oil on canvas, 430 x 700 cm
Palazzo Ducale, Mantua

Uchchhisht-Umarao Singh Jatav

DYCK, Sir Anthony van

(b. 1599, Antwerpen, d. 1641, London) by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar

Biography Sir Anthony van Dyck was a Flemish painter who was one of the most important and prolific portraitists of the 17th century. He is also considered to be one of the most brilliant colorists in the history of art. Van Dyck was born on March 22, 1599, in Antwerp, son of a rich silk merchant, and his precocious artistic talent was already obvious at age 11, when he was apprenticed to the Flemish historical painter Hendrik van Balen. He was admitted to the Antwerp guild of painters in 1618, before his 19th birthday. He spent the next two years as a member of the workshop of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp. Van Dyck's work during this period is in the lush, exuberant style of Rubens, and several paintings attributed to Rubens have since been ascribed to van Dyck. From 1620 to 1627 van Dyck traveled in Italy, where he was in great demand as a portraitist and where he developed his maturing style. He toned down the Flemish robustness of his early work to concentrate on a more dignified, elegant manner. In his portraits of Italian aristocrats—men on prancing horses, ladies in black gowns—he created idealized figures with proud, erect stances, slender figures, and the famous expressive “van Dyck” hands. Influenced by the great Venetian painters Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Giovanni Bellini, he adopted colors of great richness and jewel-like purity. No other painter of the age surpassed van Dyck at portraying the shimmering whites of satin, the smooth blues of silk, or the rich crimsons of velvet. He was the quintessential painter of aristocracy, and was particularly successful in Genoa. There he showed himself capable of creating brilliantly accurate likenesses of his subjects, while he also developed a repertoire of portrait types that served him well in his later work at the court of Charles I of England. Back in Antwerp from 1627 to 1632, van Dyck worked as a portraitist and a painter of church pictures. In 1632 he settled in London as chief court painter to King Charles I, who knighted him shortly after his arrival. Van Dyck painted most of the English aristocracy of the time, and his style became lighter and more luminous, with thinner paint and more sparkling highlights in gold and silver. At the same time, his portraits occasionally showed a certain hastiness or superficiality as he hurried to satisfy his flood of commissions. In 1635 van Dyck painted his masterpiece, Charles I in Hunting Dress (Louvre, Paris), a standing figure emphasizing the haughty grace of the monarch. Van Dyck was one of the most influential 17th-century painters. He set a new style for Flemish art and founded the English school of painting; the portraitists Sir Joshua Reynolds and ThomasGainsborough of that school were his artistic heirs. He died in London on December 9, 1641. Portrait Portrait of a Man in Armour with Red Scarf 1625-27 Oil on canvas, 90 x 70 cm Gemäldegalerie, Dresden Portrait of a Member of the Balbi Family c. 1625 Oil on canvas, 132,7 x 120 cm Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Portrait of Nicolaes van der Borght 1620s Oil on canvas, 201 x 141 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Self-Portrait 1622-23 Oil on canvas, 117 x 94 cm The Hermitage, St. Petersburg

DÜRER, Albrecht

(b. 1471, Nürnberg, d. 1528, Nürnberg)

by-Dr.Lal Ratnakar Biography Painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), retain a more Gothic flavour than the rest of his work. Education and early career Dürer was the second son of the goldsmith Albrecht Dürer the Elder, who had left Hungary to settle in Nuremberg in 1455, and of Barbara Holper, who had been born there. Dürer began his training as a draughtsman in the goldsmith's workshop of his father. His precocious skill is evidenced by a remarkable self-portrait done in 1484, when he was 13 years old (Albertina, Vienna), and by a Madonna with Musical Angels, done in 1485, which is already a finished work of art in the late Gothic style. In 1486, Dürer's father arranged for his apprenticeship to the painter and woodcut illustrator Michael Wohlgemut, whose portraitDürer would paint in 1516. After three years in Wohlgemuth's workshop, he left for a period of travel. In 1490 Dürer completed his earliest known painting, a portrait of his father (Uffizi, Florence) that heralds the familiar characteristic style of the mature master. Dürer's years as a journeyman probably took the young artist to the Netherlands, to Alsace, and to Basle, Switzerland, where he completed his first authenticated woodcut, a picture of St Jerome Curing the Lion(Kunstmuseum, Basle). During 1493 or 1494 Dürer was in Strasbourg for a short time, returning again to Basle to design several book illustrations. An early masterpiece from this period is a self-portrait with a thistle painted on parchment in 1493 (Louvre, Paris). First journey to Italy At the end of May 1494, Dürer returned to Nuremberg, where he soon married Agnes Frey, the daughter of a merchant. In the autumn of 1494 Dürer seems to have undertaken his first journey to Italy, where he remained until the spring of 1495. A number of bold landscape watercolours dealing with subjects from the Alps of the southern Tirol were made on this journey and are among Dürer's most beautiful creations. Depicting segments of landscape scenery cleverly chosen for their compositional values, they are painted with broad strokes, in places roughly sketched in, with an amazing harmonization of detail. Dürer used predominantly unmixed, cool, sombre colours, which, despite his failure to contrast light and dark adequately, still suggest depth and atmosphere. The trip to Italy had a strong effect on Dürer; direct and indirect echoes of Italian art are apparent in most of his drawings, paintings, and graphics of the following decade. While in Venice and perhaps also before he went to Italy, Dürer saw engravings by masters from central Italy. He was most influenced by the Florentine Antonio Pollaiuolo, with his sinuous, energetic line studies of the human body in motion, and by the Venetian Andrea Mantegna,. an artist greatly preoccupied with classical themes and with precise linear articulation of the human figure. Dürer's secular, allegorical, and frequently self-enamoured paintings of this period are often either adaptations of Italian models or entirely independent creations that breathe the free spirit of the new age of the Renaissance. Dürer adapted the figure of Hercules from Pollaiuolo's The Rape of Deianira for a painting of Hercules and the Birds of Stymphalis (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg). A purely mythological painting in the Renaissance tradition, the Hercules is exceptional among Dürer's works. The centre panel from the Dresden Altarpiece, which Dürer painted in about 1498, is stylistically similar to the Hercules and betrays influences of Mantegna. In most of Dürer's free adaptations the additional influence of the more lyrical, older painter Giovanni Bellini, with whom Dürer had become acquainted in Venice, can be seen. The most striking painting illustrating Dürer's growth toward the Renaissance spirit is a self-portrait, painted in 1498 (Prado, Madrid). Here Dürer sought to convey, in the representation of his own person, the aristocratic ideal of the Renaissance. He liked the way he looked as a handsome, fashionably attired young man, confronting life rather conceitedly. In place of the conventional, neutral, monochromatic background, he depicts an interior, with a window opening on the right. Through the window can be seen a tiny landscape of mountains and a distant sea, a detail that is distinctly reminiscent of contemporary Venetian and Florentine paintings. The focus on his own figure in the interior distinguishes his world from the vast perspective of the distant scene, another world to which the artist feels himself linked. Italian influences were slower to take hold in Dürer's graphics than in his drawings and paintings. Strong late Gothic elements dominate the visionary woodcuts of his Apocalypse series (the Revelation of St John), published in 1498. The woodcuts in this series display emphatic expression, rich emotion, and crowded, frequently overcrowded, compositions. The same tradition influences the earliest woodcuts of Dürer's Large Passion series, also from about 1498. Nevertheless, the fact that Dürer was adopting a more modern conception, a conception inspired by classicism and humanism, is indicative of his basically Italian orientation. The woodcuts Samson and the Lion (c. 1498) and Hercules and many prints from the woodcut series The Life of the Virgin (c. 1500-10) have a distinct Italian flavour. Many of Dürer's copper engravings are in the same Italian mode. Some examples of them that may be cited are Fortune (c. 1502), The Four Witches (1497), The Sea Monster (c. 1498), Adam and Eve (1504), and The Large Horse (1505). Dürer's graphics eventually influenced the art of the Italian Renaissance that had originally inspired his own efforts. His painterly style, however, continued to vacillate between Gothic and Italian Renaissance until about 1500. Then his restless striving finally found definite direction. He seems clearly to be on firm ground in the penetrating half-length portraits of Oswolt Krel (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), in theportraits of three members of the aristocratic Tucher family of Nuremberg - all dated 1499 - and in the Portrait of a Young Man of 1500 (Alte Pinakothek). In 1500 Dürer painted another self-portrait (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) that is a flattering,Christlike portrayal. During this period of consolidation in Dürer's style, the Italian elements of his art were strengthened by his contact with Jacopo de' Barbari, a minor Venetian painter and graphic artist who was seeking a geometric solution to the rendering of human proportions; it is perhaps due to his influence that Dürer began, around 1500, to grapple with the problem of human proportions in true Renaissance fashion. Initially, the most concentrated result of his efforts was the great engravingAdam and Eve (1504) in which he sought to bring the mystery of human beauty to an intellectually calculated ideal form. In all aspects Dürer's art was becoming strongly classical. One of his most significant classical endeavours is his painting Altar of the Three Kings (1504), which was executed with the help of pupils. Although the composition, with its five separate pictures, has an Italian character, Dürer's intellect and imagination went beyond direct dependence on Italian art. From this maturity of style comes the bold, natural, relaxed conception of the centre panel, The Adoration of the Magi (Uffizi), and the ingenious and unconventional realism of the side panels, once believed to belong to this altarpiece, one of which depicts the Drummer and Piper and the other Job and His Wife (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne). However, the side panels belong to the Jabach altarpiece, the cenral panel of which is lost. Second journey to Italy In the autumn of 1505, Dürer made a second journey to Italy, where he remained until the winter of 1507. Once again he spent most of his time in Venice. Of the Venetian artists, Dürer now most admired Giovanni Bellini, the leading master of Venetian early Renaissance painting, who, in his later works, completed the transition to the High Renaissance. Dürer's pictures of men and women from this Venetian period reflect the sweet, soft portrait types especially favoured by Bellini. One of Dürer's most impressive small paintings of this period, a compressed half-length composition of the Young Jesus with the Doctors of 1506, harks back to Bellini's free adaptation of Mantegna's Presentation in the Temple. Dürer's work is a virtuoso performance that shows mastery and close attention to detail. In the painting the inscription on the scrap of paper out of the book held by the old man in the foreground reads, "Opus quinque dierum" ("the work of five days"). Dürer thus must have executed this painstaking display of artistry, which required detailed drawings, in no more than five days. Of even greater artistic merit than this quickly executed work are the half-length portraits of young men and women painted between 1505 and 1507, which seem to be entirely in the style of Bellini. In these paintings there is a flexibility of the subject, combined with a warmth and liveliness of expression and a genuinely artistic technique, that Dürer otherwise rarely attained. In 1506, in Venice, Dürer completed his great altarpiece The Feast of the Rose Garlands for the funeral chapel of the Germans in the church of St Bartholomew. Later that same year Dürer made a brief visit to Bologna before returning to Venice for a final three months. The extent to which Dürer considered Italy to be his artistic and personal home is revealed by the frequently quoted words found in his last letter from Venice (dated October 1506) to Willibald Pirckheimer, his long-time humanist friend, anticipating his imminent return to Germany: "O, how cold I will be away from the sun; here I am a gentleman, at home a parasite." Development after the second Italian trip By February 1507 at the latest, Dürer was back in Nuremberg, where two years later he acquired an impressive house (which still stands and is preserved as a museum). It is clear that the artistic impressions gained from his Italian trips continued to influence Dürer to employ classical principles in creating largely original compositions. Among the paintings belonging to the period after his second return from Italy are Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand (1508) and Adoration of the Trinity (1511), which are both crowd scenes. Drawings from this period recall Mantegna and betray Dürer's striving for classical perfection of form through sweeping lines of firmly modeled and simple drapery. Even greater simplicity and grandeur characterize the diptych of Adam and Eve (1507; Prado), in which the two figures stand calmly in relaxed classical poses against dark, almost bare, backgrounds. Between 1507 and 1513 Dürer completed a Passion series in copperplate engravings, and between 1509 and 1511 he produced the Small Passion in woodcuts. Both of these works are characterized by their tendency toward spaciousness and serenity. During 1513 and 1514 Dürer created the greatest of his copperplate engravings: the Knight, Death and Devil, St Jerome in His Study, and Melencolia I - all of approximately the same size. The extensive, complex, and often contradictory literature concerning these three engravings deals largely with their enigmatic, allusive, iconographic details. Although repeatedly contested, it probably must be accepted that the engravings were intended to be interpreted together. There is general agreement, however, that Dürer, in these three master engravings, wished to raise his artistic intensity to the highest level, which he succeeded in doing. Finished form and richness of conception and mood merge into a whole of classical perfection. To the same period belongs Dürer's most expressive portrait drawing - one of his mother. Service to Maximilian I While in Nuremberg in 1512, the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I enlisted Dürer into his service, and Dürer continued to work mainly for the emperor until 1519. He collaborated with several of the greatest German artists of the day on a set of marginal drawings for the emperor's prayer book. He also completed a number of etchings in iron (between 1515 and 1518) that demonstrate his mastery of the medium and his freedom of imagination. In contrast to these pleasing improvisations are the monumental woodcuts, overloaded with panegyrics, made for Maximilian. In these somewhat stupendous, ornate woodcuts, Dürer had to strain to adapt his creative imagination to his client's mentality, which was foreign to him. Besides a number of formal show pieces - a painting entitled Lucretia (1518; Alte Pinakothek), and two portraits of the emperor (c. 1519) - during this decade Dürer produced a number of more informal paintings of considerably greater charm. He also traveled. In the fall of 1517 he stayed in Bamberg. In the summer of 1518 he went to Augsburg where he met Martin Luther, who had in the previous year circulated his Ninety-five Theses denouncing the sale of papal indulgences. Dürer later became a devoted follower of Luther. Dürer had achieved an international reputation as an artist by 1515, when he exchanged works with the illustrious High Renaissance painter Raphael. Final journey to the Netherlands In July 1520 Dürer embarked with his wife on a journey through the Netherlands. In Aachen, at the October 23 coronation of the emperor Charles V, successor to Maximilian I (who had died in 1519), Dürer met and presented several etchings to the mystical and dramatic Matthias Grünewald, who stood second only to Dürer in contemporary German art. Dürer returned to Antwerp by way of Nijmegen and Cologne, remaining there until the summer of 1521. He had maintained close relations with the leaders of the Netherlands school of painting. In December 1520 Dürer visited Zeeland and in April 1521 traveled to Bruges and Ghent, where he saw the works of the 15th-century Flemish masters Jan and Hubert van Eyck,Rogier van der Weyden, and Hugo van der Goes, as well as the Michelangelo Madonna. Dürer's sketchbook of the Netherlands journey contains immensely detailed and realistic drawings. Some paintings that were created either during the journey or about the same time seem spiritually akin to the Netherlands school - for example, the St Anne with the Virgin and Child (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City), a half-length picture of St Jerome (1521; Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon), and the small portrait of Bernhard von Resten, previously Bernard van Orley (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden). Final works By July, the travelers were back in Nuremberg, but Dürer's health had started to decline. He devoted his remaining years mostly to theoretical and scientific writings and illustrations, although several well-known character portraits and some important portrait engravings and woodcuts also date from this period. One of Dürer's greatest paintings, the so-called Four Holy Men (St John, St Peter, St Paul, and St Mark), was done in 1526. This work marks his final and certainly highest achievement as a painter. His delight in his own virtuosity no longer stifled the ideal of a spaciousness that is simple, yet deeply expressive. Dürer died in 1528 and was buried in the churchyard of Johanniskirchhof in Nuremberg. That he was one of his country's most influential artists is manifest in the impressive number of pupils and imitators that he had. Even Dutch and Italian artists did not disdain to imitate Dürer's graphics occasionally. The extent to which Dürer was internationally celebrated is apparent in the literary testimony of the Florentine artist Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), in whose Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors, the importance of Albrecht Dürer, the "truly great painter and creator of the most beautiful copper engravings," is repeatedly stressed. Like most notable Italian artists, Dürer probably felt himself to be an "artist-prince," and his self-portraits seem incontestably to show a man sure of his own genius. Portrait of Barbara Dürer 1490 Oil on pine panel, 47 x 38 cm Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg Portrait of Dürer's Father 1490 Oil on panel, 48 x 40 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence Self-portrait at 22 1493 Oil on linen, transferred from vellum, 57 x 45 cm Musée du Louvre, Paris