Italian painter, sculptor, architect, designer, theorist, engineer and scientist. He was the founding father of what is called the High Renaissance style and exercised an enormous influence on contemporary and later artists. His writings on art helped establish the ideals of representation and expression that were to dominate European academies for the next 400 years. The standards he set in figure draughtsmanship, handling of space, depiction of light and shade, representation of landscape, evocation of character and techniques of narrative radically transformed the range of art. A number of his inventions in architecture and in various fields of decoration entered the general currency of 16th-century design.
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The Silk Road, a term that first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, refers to that network of caravan tracks traversing Central and West Asia, used to carry trade goods between the East and West from approximately the second century B.C. to the fifteenth century A.D. These tracks were neither a single road nor was silk the only commodity that was carried across them. The termini of the “Road” were said to be Rome in the West and Chang’ an in the East.
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Art which is based on images of mass consumer culture. It is principally associated with the USA and Britain in the 1960s. The term originated in the discussions of the Independent Group c.1955. The originator of the phrase is disputed, but the British critic Lawrence Alloway later recalled ‘sometime between the winter of 1954–5 and 1957 the phrase gained currency in conversation’; the first appearance in print recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is of September 1957. Initially Alloway used the term (and also the expression ‘Pop culture’) to refer to ‘the products of the mass media’, rather than to ‘works of art that draw upon popular culture’, but by the early 1960s the phrase was being used as a label for such art. Comic books, advertisements, packaging, and images from television and the cinema were all part of the iconography of the movement.
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The Renaissance Garden in England
Gardens, City Life, and Culture: A World Tour (Dumbarton Oaks Studies in Garden and Landscape History)
The Renaissance garden was Italian in origin. It had two distinct phases, the first running through the Quattrocento and whose defining work was the great architect Leon Battista Alberti ’s De Re Aedificatoria ( 1451 ), the second signalled by the work of another major architect, Donato Bramante , in his orchestration of the papal Villa Belvedere in 1503 – 4 (see Vatican Gardens ). The garden in its Renaissance phase was over by c.1540 when one which can be categorized as mannerist was under way. The principles of the Renaissance garden revolution, however, were to take a century and more to cross Europe and reach its outer fringes like England and Scandinavia.
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Most ancient Greek pottery forms were made primarily for local use and are found almost exclusively near where they were produced. Local coarse wares, used primarily in the household, are ubiquitous. A few fine wares, such as Corinthian and Attic, were widely distributed in the Mediterranean at different times and are exceptions. The Etruscans, in particular, were fond of painted Attic pottery for their graves. The provenances of vases sent abroad provide valuable evidence for trade routes. Transport amphorae, the most important of the undecorated vases, are often found in shipwrecks and provide the most useful information.
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Awareness of Classical Greek sculpture (ca. 480–330 B.C.) was for many centuries based upon ancient literary texts describing works of art and statues produced during the Roman Empire that were identified as copies or originals of ancient Greek sculpture. Direct knowledge of Classical sculpture based upon examples found in Greece only began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when works like the sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens and the Temple of Apollo at Bassae were brought to the attention of scholars, at times overturning the picture that they had formed indirectly of Greek art. Since that time archaeological investigation has produced a more complete picture of Classical Greek sculpture, a picture that is still developing.
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School of Fontainebleau (Masters of Graphic Art)
Term that encompasses work in a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, stuccowork and printmaking, produced from the 1530s to the first decade of the 17th century in France. It evokes an unreal and poetic world of elegant, elongated figures, often in mythological settings, as well as incorporating rich, intricate ornamentation with a characteristic type of strapwork. The phrase was first used by Adam von Bartsch in Le Peintre-graveur (21 vols, Vienna, 1803 – 21 ), referring to a group of etchings and engravings, some of which were undoubtedly made at Fontainebleau.
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News that recently shakes art lovers is Exhuming Leonardo’s Corpse… Scientists hope to exhume the remains of Leonardo da Vinci so they can reconstruct his face to discover whether the Mona Lisa is a disguised self-portrait.
How do you feel about this???
I really don’t agree with this… Maybe some things should be better to let it go and focus on something else… Feel free to comment this news… 
The Flemish Primitives: The Masterpieces
Painting, graphic art, and sculpture produced in an area similar in size to that of modern Belgium and Luxembourg, formerly known as the Southern Netherlands. Flemish art assumed a major role in the history of European art during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. The largest county in the Southern Netherlands was Flanders and the term Flanders may be used to refer to the whole of the Southern Netherlands, just as Holland has often given its name to the whole of the Northern Netherlands.
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The leading American museum devoted to the modern tradition in the visual arts. At its founding in 1929, New York’s MoMA represented an original concept in the notion of a “museum,” since almost none then collected modern art. Only the Washington, D.C., establishment founded by Duncan Phillips preceded MoMA in specializing in the recent past. However, the Phillips Collection (as it is now known) includes a small old master collection as well as significant representation of impressionism and other nineteenth-century tendencies. By contrast, from the beginning MoMA focused exclusively on the work of postimpressionists, particularly Cézanne, and their artistic descendants. (To this day, however, the Phillips Collection boasts a much finer representation of early American modernism.) MoMA also led the way in presenting photography, film, and design within an art museum context.
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The Silk Road, a term that first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, refers to that network of caravan tracks traversing Central and West Asia, used to carry trade goods between the East and West from approximately the second century B.C. to the fifteenth century A.D. These tracks were neither a single road nor was silk the only commodity that was carried across them. The termini of the “Road” were said to be Rome in the West and Chang’ an in the East.
