PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: arts, visual

People known for
arts, visual
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Rembrandt: Self-Portrait
Dutch artist
Rembrandt was a Dutch Baroque painter and printmaker, one of the greatest storytellers in the history of art, possessing an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises....
Leonardo da Vinci: self-portrait
Italian artist, engineer, and scientist
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal....
Caravaggio: The Conversion of St. Paul (second version)
Italian painter
Caravaggio was a leading Italian painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works. While most other Italian...
Michelangelo
Italian artist
Michelangelo was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist...
William Blake
British writer and artist
William Blake was an English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such...
Pablo Picasso
Spanish artist
Pablo Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer. He was one of the greatest and most-influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges...
Venus of Urbino by Titian
Italian painter
Titian was the greatest Italian Renaissance painter of the Venetian school. He was recognized early in his own lifetime as a supremely talented painter, and his reputation has in the intervening centuries...
Edgar Degas
French artist
Edgar Degas was a French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was prominent in the Impressionist group and widely celebrated for his images of Parisian life. Degas’s principal subject was the human—especially...
Peter Paul Rubens: self-portrait
Flemish artist
Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting’s dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens...
Charles Baudelaire
French author
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and...
Diego Velázquez
Spanish painter
Diego Velázquez was the most important Spanish painter of the 17th century, a giant of Western art. Velázquez is universally acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest artists. The naturalistic style...
John Ruskin
English writer and artist
John Ruskin was an English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical...
Strozzi, Bernardo: portrait of Claudio Monteverdi
Italian composer and musician
Claudio Monteverdi was an Italian composer in the late Renaissance, the most important developer of the then new genre, the opera. He also did much to bring a “modern” secular spirit into church music....
Andrea Palladio: Villa Rotonda
Italian architect
Andrea Palladio was an Italian architect, regarded as the greatest architect of 16th-century northern Italy. His designs for palaces (palazzi) and villas, notably the Villa Rotonda (1550–51) near Vicenza,...
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Russian composer
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was the most popular Russian composer of all time. His music has always had great appeal for the general public in virtue of its tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies,...
Sir Christopher Wren, detail of an oil painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1711; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
English architect
Christopher Wren was a designer, astronomer, geometrician, and the greatest English architect of his time. Wren designed 53 London churches, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, as well as many secular buildings...
Bramante, Donato
Italian architect
Donato Bramante was an architect who introduced the High Renaissance style in architecture. His early works in Milan included the rectory of Sant’Ambrogio and the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In...
Johannes Vermeer: Girl with a Pearl Earring
Dutch painter
Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch artist who created paintings that are among the most beloved and revered images in the history of art. Although only about 36 of his paintings survive, these rare works are...
Giotto: Lamentation
Italian painter
Giotto was the most important Italian painter of the 14th century, whose works point to the innovations of the Renaissance style that developed a century later. For almost seven centuries, Giotto has been...
Louis Sullivan
American architect
Louis Sullivan was an American architect, regarded as the spiritual father of modern American architecture and identified with the aesthetics of early skyscraper design. His more than 100 works in collaboration...
Vincent van Gogh: Self-Portrait
Dutch painter
Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter, generally considered the greatest after Rembrandt van Rijn, and one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists. The striking color, emphatic brushwork, and contoured...
Burial of the Count de Orgaz
Spanish artist
El Greco was a master of Spanish painting, whose highly individual dramatic and expressionistic style met with the puzzlement of his contemporaries but gained newfound appreciation in the 20th century....
Le Corbusier
Swiss architect
Le Corbusier was an internationally influential Swiss architect and city planner, whose designs combine the functionalism of the modern movement with a bold sculptural expressionism. He belonged to the...
Tintoretto: Last Supper
Italian painter
Tintoretto was a great Italian Mannerist painter of the Venetian school and one of the most important artists of the late Renaissance. His paintings include Vulcan Surprising Venus and Mars (c. 1555),...
Sergey Prokofiev
Russian composer
Sergey Prokofiev was a 20th-century Russian (and Soviet) composer who wrote in a wide range of musical genres, including symphonies, concerti, film music, operas, ballets, and program pieces. Prokofiev...
Alfred Stieglitz: photograph of Georgia O'Keeffe
American painter
Georgia O’Keeffe was an American painter who was among the most influential figures in Modernism, best known for her large-format paintings of natural subjects, especially flowers and bones, and for her...
Mondrian, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1942.
Dutch painter
Piet Mondrian was a painter who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major exponent of the Dutch abstract art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”). In his mature...
Nicolas Poussin: Adoration of the Golden Calf
French painter
Nicolas Poussin was a French painter and draftsman who founded the French Classical tradition. He spent virtually all of his working life in Rome, where he specialized in history paintings—depicting scenes...
Paul Cézanne
French artist
Paul Cézanne was a French painter, one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially...
Igor Stravinsky
Russian composer
Igor Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer whose work had a revolutionary impact on musical thought and sensibility just before and after World War I, and whose compositions remained a touchstone of modernism...
French artist Henri Matisse
French artist
Henri Matisse was an artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of the Fauvist movement about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of color throughout...
Raphael: The Grand Duke's Madonna
Italian painter and architect
Raphael was a master painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican. His School of Athens in the Stanza...
Henry Moore
British artist
Henry Moore was an English sculptor whose organically shaped, abstract, bronze and stone figures constitute the major 20th-century manifestation of the humanist tradition in sculpture. Much of his work...
Albrecht Dürer: Self-Portrait in Furred Coat
German artist
Albrecht Dürer was a 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,...
Daniel H. Burnham.
American architect
Daniel Burnham was an American architect and urban planner whose impact on the American city was substantial. He was instrumental in the development of the skyscraper and was noted for his highly successful...
Claude Monet: Self-portrait in a Beret
French painter
Claude Monet was a French painter who became the initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. In his mature works, Monet developed his method of producing repeated studies of...
Lorenzo Bernini: Apollo and Daphne
Italian artist
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian artist who was perhaps the greatest sculptor of the 17th century and an outstanding architect as well. Bernini created the Baroque style of sculpture and developed it...
Honoré Daumier
French artist
Honoré Daumier was a prolific French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor especially renowned for his cartoons and drawings satirizing 19th-century French politics and society. His paintings, though hardly...
Rome: Piazza Navona
Italian architect
Francesco Borromini was an Italian architect who was a chief formulator of Baroque architectural style. Borromini (he changed his name from Castelli about 1627) secured a reputation throughout Europe with...
Camille Pissarro: Self-Portrait
French artist
Camille Pissarro was a painter and printmaker who was a key figure in the history of Impressionism. Pissarro was the only artist to show his work in all eight Impressionist group exhibitions; throughout...
Arrival of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, fresco by Andrea Mantegna, completed 1474; in the Camera degli Sposi, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, Italy.
Italian artist
Andrea Mantegna was a painter and engraver, the first fully Renaissance artist of northern Italy. His best known surviving work is the Camera degli Sposi (“Room of the Bride and Groom”), or Camera Picta...
Leon Battista Alberti
Italian architect and author
Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian humanist, architect, and principal initiator of Renaissance art theory. In his personality, works, and breadth of learning, he is considered the prototype of the Renaissance...
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: Self-portrait
French painter
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a painter and icon of cultural conservatism in 19th-century France. Ingres became the principal proponent of French Neoclassical painting after the death of his mentor,...
Wassily Kandinsky: Painting with Green Center
Russian-born artist
Wassily Kandinsky was a Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue...
The Painter and His Pug, self-portrait by William Hogarth, oil on canvas, 1745; in the Tate Gallery, London.
English artist
William Hogarth was the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad, best known for his moral and satirical engravings and paintings—e.g., A Rake’s Progress (eight scenes,1733). His attempts...
How heat transfers from one object to another
Swiss-German artist
Paul Klee was a Swiss-German painter and draftsman who was one of the foremost artists of the 20th century. Klee’s mother, née Ida Maria Frick of Basel, and his German-born father, Hans Klee, were both...
Fra Angelico: Madonna of Humility
Italian painter
Fra Angelico was an Italian painter, one of the greatest 15th-century painters, whose works within the framework of the early Renaissance style embody a serene religious attitude and reflect a strong Classical...
Sandro Botticelli: Birth of Venus
Italian painter
Sandro Botticelli was one of the greatest painters of the Florentine Renaissance. His The Birth of Venus and La Primavera are often said to epitomize for modern viewers the spirit of the Renaissance. Botticelli’s...
Donatello: David
Italian sculptor
Donatello was a master of sculpture in both marble and bronze, one of the greatest of all Italian Renaissance artists. A good deal is known about Donatello’s life and career, but little is known about...
Jacques-Louis David: Napoleon Crossing the Alps
French painter
Jacques-Louis David was the most celebrated French artist of his day and a principal exponent of the late 18th-century Neoclassical reaction against the Rococo style. David won wide acclaim with his huge...