Titian or (Italian) Tiziano Vecellio (c.1489–1576), Italian painter, born in Pieve di Cadore (Veneto); he trained in the Venetian studio of Giovanni Bellini and subsequently worked on the external decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi as an assistant to Giorgione, whose style he emulated so exactly that some paintings (e.g. Concert champêtre, Louvre) could be by either artist.
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Brunelleschi, Filippo, or Filippo di Ser Brunellesco (1377–1446), Italian architect and engineer, born in Florence, the son of a notary. He trained as a goldsmith and sculptor, and in 1401 he entered the competition for the bronze baptistery doors, which Ghiberti won. Brunelleschi came to architecture as a builder and construction engineer with an acute sense of practical issues and of the mathematics of natural optics; he was less interested than his successors (e.g. Alberti) in the revival of ancient Roman architecture. In or shortly before 1413, Brunelleschi invented a method of giving a naturalistic impression of depth in flat pictures and made two paintings of city views (the first showed the baptistery and the second the Palazzo Vecchio) to demonstrate how well the method worked; it is not known what the method was. See perspective.
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Abu Simbel, site south of Aswan, on the western bank of the Nile River in what was Nubia (now near Egypt’s border with Sudan). It has two rock-cut temples from the nineteenth dynasty reign of Ramesses II. First noted in European literature by Johann Burckhardt in 1819, Abu Simbel has since become one of the most famous of monuments in the Nile Valley. Following the decision to build a new High Dam at Aswan in the early 1960s, the temples were dismantled and relocated in 1968 on the desert plateau 64 meters (about 200 feet) above and 180 meters (600 feet) west of their original site.
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During Winckelmann’s time in Rome another sculpture came to rival
—or even to surpass—the Laocoön in his esteem; indeed, he frequently
mentions the Apollo Belvedere alongside the Laocoön as contrasting
but equally compelling examples of beauty. While the Laocoön has
retained its high reputation, the Apollo has fallen from favour. In The
Nude (1956), one of the most widely read books on art of the twentieth
century, the art historian Kenneth Clark (1903–83) confessed himself
mystified that so learned a connoisseur as Winckelmann could admire
the Apollo, which for Clark displayed ‘weak structure and slack surfaces
which, to the aesthetic of pure sensibility, annul its other qualities’; in
no other famous work, Clark thought, ‘are idea and execution more
distressingly divorced’.
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Brunelleschi, Filippo, or Filippo di Ser Brunellesco (1377–1446), Italian architect and engineer, born in Florence, the son of a notary. He trained as a goldsmith and sculptor, and in 1401 he entered the competition for the bronze baptistery doors, which Ghiberti won. Brunelleschi came to architecture as a builder and construction engineer with an acute sense of practical issues and of the mathematics of natural optics; he was less interested than his successors (e.g. Alberti) in the revival of ancient Roman architecture. In or shortly before 1413, Brunelleschi invented a method of giving a naturalistic impression of depth in flat pictures and made two paintings of city views (the first showed the baptistery and the second the Palazzo Vecchio) to demonstrate how well the method worked; it is not known what the method was. See perspective.
