Posts in Category: 15th Century
Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico, c 1395–February 18, 1455, was an Italian painter and Dominican friar of the Early Renaissance. Born Guido di Pietro in the Mugello region near Florence, he is first documented as a painter in 1417 and later took the name Fra Giovanni after entering the Dominican convent of San Domenico at Fiesole.
His early training is not securely documented, though he probably worked as a manuscript illuminator. He collaborated with his brother Benedetto and employed assistants including Benozzo Gozzoli; Zanobi Strozzi was among the painters closely associated with his workshop. Fra Angelico worked principally in Fiesole, Florence, Orvieto, and Rome, producing altarpieces and fresco cycles for Dominican institutions and for Popes Eugene IV and Nicholas V.
Major groups of his work remain at the Museo Nazionale di San Marco in Florence and in the Niccoline Chapel in Vatican City. Other principal collections include the Uffizi Galleries, Museo Nacional del Prado, Musée du Louvre, National Gallery in London, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Detroit Institute of Arts.
Filippo Lippi
Filippo Lippi (c 1406–1469) was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. Born in Florence, he entered the Carmelite monastery of Santa Maria del Carmine as a child and became a friar, while developing as an artist amid the innovations of Masaccio and his circle.
Lippi combined sculptural figures and convincing spatial settings with graceful line, luminous color and an increasingly intimate treatment of sacred subjects. He worked for the Medici and other prominent patrons in Florence and Prato, where his fresco cycle in the cathedral choir is among his major achievements.
His later paintings, especially his representations of the Madonna and Child, helped shape Florentine art in the second half of the fifteenth century. Lippi was the father of the painter Filippino Lippi and an important influence on Sandro Botticelli. He died at Spoleto in 1469.
Martin Schongauer
Martin Schongauer, German artist, ca. 1435/50–1491
Andrea Mantegna
Andrea Mantegna, c 1431 – September 13, 1506, was an Italian Renaissance painter, draftsman, and printmaker. He was born near Padua and trained in the workshop of Francesco Squarcione.
Mantegna developed a highly sculptural style shaped by classical antiquity, linear perspective, and sharply defined forms. In 1460 he became court painter to the Gonzaga family in Mantua, where he created the Camera degli Sposi and later worked on The Triumphs of Caesar.
He married Nicolosia Bellini, daughter of Jacopo Bellini and sister of Giovanni Bellini, linking him to one of Venice’s leading artistic families. His paintings, drawings, and prints had a broad influence on Renaissance art in Italy and northern Europe.
