FRANCISCO DE PAULA JOSE DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES


1746-1828

Goya was born in the small village of Fuendetodos near Saragossa in 1746. Upon leaving school he was apprenticed to a local artist. In 1763 he went to Madrid and failed to gain entry into the Academy but continued to study at the studio of the court painter Francisco Bayeu, whose sister, Josefa, Goya married in 1773. After a trip to Italy to study the Renaissance masters, Goya returned to Spain and began to build a successful career as a portrait painter. In 1786 he was appointed court painter to the king, Charles 111 and his successor Charles 1V.

Goya’s life and art changed dramatically in1792 after suffering a mysterious and traumatic illness, which left him deaf. Whilst recovering Goya’s friendship with the recently widowed Duchess of Alba grew causing a great scandal in Spanish society. His work took a darker tone, he slowly turned away from society portraiture and his paintings became much more personal, dealing with the morbid, the bizarre and the menacing. A prime subject matter of this period was the war in Spain after Napoleon’s invasion and the ousting of the Spanish royal family. Dark times continued for Goya, his wife died in 1812, and after the restoration of the king in 1814, he was called in front of the Inquisition to answer charges of obscenity. This was followed by another serious illness in 1819. All this led to Goyas retreat from public life and he devoted himself to his sombre black paintings (pinturas negras) full of demons, the grotesque and mis-shapen people. He eventually retired to Bordeaux and died there in 1828,

ALESSANDRO DI MARIANO DI VANNI FILIPEPI


SANDRO BOTTICELLI or IL BOTTICELLO

(The Little Barrel)

Italian painter of the Florentine School during the Early Renaissance, he was born in March 1445 and died in May 1510.

Details of Botticelli’s life are sparse; most of what we know about him comes from the writing of Vasari, the chronicler of Italian Renaissance art. He initially trained as a goldsmith with his brother Antonio, but by 1462 he was an apprentice painter in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi. By 1470 Botticelli had his own studio workshop and had acquired the patronage of the Medici family the rulers of Florence. He produced work for them in numerous churches across Florence and Umbria as well as paintings for their private palaces. In 1481 he was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus 5th and commissioned to paint three frescos in the Sistine Chapel. On his return to Florence, which at this time was under the influence of a humanist philosophy called Neo-Platonism, Botticelli created some of his best-known works including Primavera and the Birth of Venus.

Political turmoil then hit Florence in the 1490s, a combination of an invading French army, the fall of the Medici Family and the rise and fall of Savonarola. It seems the Botticelli produced little work during this period and the work that he did create form 1500 onwards show a greater religious piety and a return to an older style of his predecessors.