Lomuntad, Alfreda J.

BSIT 4-3

RENAISSANCE PERIOD
Giovanni Bellini

Giovanni Bellini, (born c. 1430, Venice [Italy]—died 1516, Venice), Italian painter who,
in his work, reflected the increasing interest of the Venetian artistic milieu in the
stylistic innovations and concerns of the Renaissance. Although the paintings for the hall of the
Great Council in Venice, considered his greatest works, were destroyed by fire in 1577, a large
number of altarpieces (such as that in the church of Saints Giovanni e Paolo in Venice) and
other extant works show a steady evolution from purely religious, narrative emphasis to a new
naturalism of setting and landscape.
 In The Agony in the Garden (1465), the horizon moves up, and a deep, wide landscape
encloses the figures, to play an equal part in expressing the drama of the scene. As with the
dramatis personae, the elaborately linear structure of the landscape provides much of the
expression, but an even greater part is played by the colours of the dawn, in their full brilliance
and in the reflected light within the shadow. This is the first of a great series of Venetian
landscape scenes that was to develop continuously for a century or more. To a city surrounded
by water, the emotional value of landscape was now fully revealed. A comparison with
Mantegna’s treatment of the same subject matter reveals the subtle yet fundamental differences
in the styles of the two masters.
It portrays Christ kneeling on the Mount of Olives in prayer, with his
disciples Peter, James and John sleeping near to him. The picture is closely related to the similar
work by Bellini's brother-in-law, Andrea Mantegna, also in the National Gallery. It is likely that
both derived from a drawing by Bellini's father, Jacopo. In Bellini's version, the treatment of
dawn light has a more important role in giving the scene a quasi-unearthly atmosphere.

VICTORIAN PERIOD
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (French: [ɑ̃ʁi emil bənwɑ matis]; 31 December 1869 – 3
November 1954) was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original
draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a
painter.
Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to
define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the
twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Along with
Picasso, Matisse helped to define and influence radical contemporary art in the 20th century.
Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was being hailed as an
upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of
colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him
recognition as a leading figure in modern art.

Woman with a Hat (La femme au chapeau) is a painting by Henri Matisse. An oil on canvas, it
depicts Matisse's wife, Amelie. It was painted in 1905 and exhibited at the Salon
d'Automne during the fall of the same year, along with works by André Derain, Maurice de
Vlaminck and several other artists known as "Fauves".
Critic Louis Vauxcelles, in comparing the paintings of Matisse and his associates with
a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them, used with the phrase
"Donatello chez les fauves..."(Donatello among the wild beasts). His comment was printed on 17
October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Woman with a
Hat was at the center of the controversy that led to the term Fauvism. It was also a painting that
marked a stylistic shift in the work of Matisse from the Divisionist brushstrokes of his earlier
work to a more expressive style. Its loose brushwork and "unfinished" quality shocking viewers
as much as its vivid, non-naturalistic colors.