Alda Merini | Yesterday I suffered pain / Ieri ho sofferto il dolore..

Ieri ho sofferto il dolore,
non sapevo che avesse una faccia sanguigna
le labbra di metallo dure,
una mancanza netta d'orizzonti.

Yesterday I suffered pain,

I did not know it had a bloodied face,

hard lips of metal,

a total lack of horizons.

Edouard Hamman (Belgian painter, 1819-1888) - Disillusion, 1851

Richard Bergh | Nordic Summer Evening, 1899-1900

A man and a woman gaze pensively at a quiet evening landscape. The glassy water of the bay reflects the soft twilight.

The light falls on the pair from the left.

The woman is wearing a long white dress, while the man, his arms crossed and resting a foot on the balustrade, is dressed in a dark suit. Quietly, the couple contemplate Nature.

The landscape reflects the calmness of their mood - or is there something more going on under the surface?

Is there not a sense of psychological or erotic tension between the two?

Between human civilization and Nature there is a boundary, here represented by the balustrade, with its human-like openings. The rowing boat in the centre of the image, moored to a jetty, may have a symbolic meaning. Perhaps it stands for the ties of marriage, for the juxtaposition of security and liberty, or a longing to escape culture for a while.

Richard Bergh (Swedish painter, 1858-1919)

Sven Richard Bergh was born in Stockholm at the end of 1858. He was the son of the Johan Edvard Bergh, who formerly spent time as a lawyer before devoting his life to his landscape painting and becoming an art teacher. His mother was also an artist and so their son was introduced to art at a very early age.

The family were wealthy and mixed with the cultural elite of Stockholm. Bergh studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm.

He travelled on many occasions to France, often to escape the exacting academicism of that art establishment, where he visited the artist’s colony at Grez-sur-Loing just south of Fontainebleau. The colony was modelled on another famous Parisian artist colony at Barbizon, which was set up some thirty years earlier.

Pablo Neruda | Non t’amo come se fossi rosa di sale..

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

Non t’amo come se fossi rosa di sale, topazio

o freccia di garofani che propagano il fuoco:

t’amo come si amano certe cose oscure,

segretamente, tra l’ombra e l’anima.

Clemente Tafuri🎨 (Italian painter, 1903-1971)

Judith Leyster | Baroque Era painter

Judith Leyster (1609–1660) is the most famous female painter of the Dutch Golden Age.

Unlike many contemporary female artists, who concentrated on meticulously painting true-to-life flowers and insects, she ventured into more ambitious figure-based projects.

Competing with Frans Hals, Leyster chose remarkably similar themes: portraits, children playing, dancing musicians and a drinking actor.

She is also known for her innovative and evocative night scenes, in which she experimented with the subtle effects of light and dark.

Judith Leyster | Two Children with a Cat, 1629

Ivan Shishkin | Peredvizhniki Art movement

Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (Ива́н Ива́нович Ши́шкин; 25 January 1832 - 20 March 1898) was a Russian landscape painter closely associated with the Peredvizhniki movement - a group of Russian realist artists who formed an artists' cooperative in protest of academic restrictions; it evolved into the Society for Travelling Art Exhibitions in 1870.

Shishkin (1832-1898) was born in Yelabuga of Vyatka Governorate (today Republic of Tatarstan), and graduated from the Kazan gymnasium.

Then he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture for four years.

After that, he attended the Saint Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts from 1856-1860, and graduated with the highest honours and a gold medal.

Franco Rispoli (Italian, 1921-1989) | Genre painter

Franco Rispoli was an Italian painter🎨, known for painting in the Genre style🎨, scenes from everyday life, such as markets, domestic settings, interiors, parties, inn scenes and street scenes.

Franco Rispoli was born in Naples in 1921 and died in 1989.

Sandro Botticelli | Vita privata

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) non si sposò mai e, a quanto pare, espresse una forte avversione per l'idea del matrimonio.

Un aneddoto racconta che il suo mecenate Tommaso Soderini, morto nel 1485, gli suggerì di sposarsi, al che Botticelli rispose che pochi giorni prima aveva sognato di essersi sposato, si era svegliato "colpito dal dolore" e per il resto della notte aveva camminato per le strade per evitare che il sogno si ripresentasse se si fosse addormentato di nuovo.

Il racconto si conclude in modo criptico dicendo che Soderini capì "di non essere un terreno adatto per piantare viti".

Johan-Laurents Jensen (1800-1856)

Johan Laurentz Jensen, spesso indicato come JL Jensen (8 marzo 1800 - 26 marzo 1856), è stato un artista Danese specializzato in pittura floreale.

Vita e formazione

Parallelamente ai suoi studi all'Accademia danese, divenne allievo di Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg e anche di Cladius Detlev Fritzsch.

Specializzato in pittura floreale, Jensen ha continuato la sua formazione a Parigi sotto i fratelli fiamminghi, Gérard e Cornelis van Spaendonck, e presso la fabbrica di porcellane di Sèvres, dove ha appreso l'arte della pittura floreale in miniatura.

Leopold von Stoll (1808-1889) | Still life of flowers painter

Leopold von Stoll was a flower painter of Dutch origin, who was primarily active in Austria.

Leopold von Stoll was born in 1808 in the Netherlands.

In 1828, he worked in Krakow and Warsaw.

From 1830-1834 lived in Saint Petersburg, where he held a job of a flower painter at the Imperial Botanical Garden.

In 1834, he came to Vienna and consequently gained there much popularity as a still-life (flower, fruits) artist.

From 1834-1869, he regularly participated in various exhibitions in that city (at the Academy of Fine Arts, the "Künstlerhaus", etc.).

Giovanni Carnovali, detto "Il Piccio"

Giovanni Carnovali (Montegrino Valtravaglia, 29 settembre 1804 - Coltaro, 5 luglio 1873) è stato un pittore Italiano.

Giovanni Carnovali, detto il Piccio, nato a Montegrino Valtravaglia (VA) il 29 settembre 1804, da una famiglia dalle umili origini, si trasferì in tenera età ad Albino, in provincia di Bergamo.

Herman Richir | Pittore accademico

Herman Jean Joseph Richir (1866-1942) è stato un pittore accademico Belga di scene allegoriche e mitologiche e ritrattista di grande talento.

Richir iniziò la sua carriera artistica all'Accademia d'Arte di Saint-Josse-ten-Noode/Sint-Joost-ten-Node, dove è stato formato dai rinomati insegnanti Gustave Joseph Biot e Charles Hermans.

Alla ricerca della perfezione artistica, nel 1884 si trasferisce all'Académie royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, dove affina ulteriormente le sue capacità sotto la tutela di Jean Francois Portaels.

Michele Cascella | Saint Germain en Laye, 1966

Michele Cascella🎨 (7 September 1892 - 31 August 1989) was an Italian artist🎨.

Primarily known for his oil paintings and watercolours, he also worked in ceramics, lithography, and textiles.

He exhibited regularly at the Venice Biennale from 1924 until 1942, and his works are owned by major museums in Italy and Europe, including Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris and Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome.

Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1793-1872) | Portrait / Genre painter

Margaret Sarah Carpenter (Salisbury 1793 - 13 November 1872 London), born Margaret Sarah Geddes, was a British painter🎨. Noted in her time, she mostly painted portraits in the manner of Sir Thomas Lawrence. She was a close friend of Richard Parkes Bonington.

• Early life

She was born in Salisbury, the daughter of Captain Alexander Geddes, who was of an Edinburgh family, and Harriet Easton. She was taught art by a local drawing-master. Her first art studies were made from the pictures at Longford Castle, belonging to Lord Radnor.

Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916)

Umberto Boccioni, (born October 19, 1882, Reggio di Calabria, Italy—died August 16, 1916, Verona), Italian painter, sculptor and theorist of the Futurist movement in art.

Boccioni was trained from 1898-1902 in the studio of the painter Giacomo Balla, where he learned to paint in the manner of the pointillists.

In 1907 he settled in Milan, where he gradually came under the influence of the poet Filippo Marinetti, who launched the Futurist movement, which glorified the dynamism of modern technology.

Boccioni adapted Marinetti’s literary theories to the visual arts and became the leading theoretician of Futurist art.

Tiziano Vecellio | Ecce Homo, 1570-1576

Dimension: Height: 100.5 cm.; Width: 100.8 cm.

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Provenance: Royal Collection (Real Monasterio de El Escorial, Madrid, Sala Prioral)

Current location: Museo Nacional del Prado

Christ shown to the People: Ecce Homo, 1570-1576 depicts a passage from the Gospel of Saint John (19, 4-5) which recounts how after Christ had been whipped and crowned with thorns:

"Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith unto them, Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him.

Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe.

And Pilate saith unto them: Behold the man"!

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | L'ombrelle, 1878

In this radiant painting, Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts the quintessential Impressionist subject of the fashionably attired Parisienne within a scene of abundantly flowering nature.

Painted in 1878 at the height of Impressionism, the variegated brushwork consisting of thick and swirling impasto and small dabs of spontaneous and audaciously applied paint, make L'ombrelle one of the artist's most experimental works of the latter part of that decade.

Marie Bashkirtseff | A meeting, 1884

When A Meeting was exhibited at the 1884 Salon of Paris, it was acclaimed by both the public and the press. But this success did not satisfy Marie Bashkirtseff at all, who was outraged that she did not receive a medal.

She wrote in her Journal:

"I am exceedingly indignant [...] because, after all, works that are really rather poor have received prizes"

and also

"There is nothing more to be done. I am a worthless creature, humiliated, finished".

Confident of her own talent, she denounces what seemed to her to be an injustice, but also expresses a fear: the fear of being forgotten. Marie was then only twenty-five years old, and knew already that she was condemned to die from tuberculosis; she died on 31 October that same year.

Edouard Vuillard | Young woman at the wind, 1899

Édouard Vuillard, in full Jean-Édouard Vuillard, (born November 11, 1868, Cuiseaux, France - died June 21, 1940, La Baule), French painter, printmaker, and decorator who was a member of the Nabis group of painters in the 1890s.

He is particularly known for his depictions of intimate interior scenes.

Vuillard studied art from 1886-1888 at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

In 1889 he joined a group of art students that included Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Paul Sérusier, Ker-Xavier Roussel, and Félix Vallotton.

They called themselves the Nabis (Hebrew for “Prophets”), and they drew their inspiration from the Synthetist paintings of Paul Gauguin’s Pont-Aven period.

Aime-Nicolas Morot | Le bon Samaritain, 1880

Author: Aimé-Nicolas Morot (French painter, 1850-1913);

Title: The Good Samaritan;

Medium: oil on canvas;

Dimensions: Height: 268.5 cm - Width: 198 cm;

Current location: Musée du Petit Palais, Paris.

Born into a modest, actively Republican family, Aimé Morot pursued an exemplary career after receiving an academic training in the studio of Alexandre Cabanel.

Winner of the Prix de Rome in 1873, he used his stay at the Medici Villa as an opportunity to explore the Roman countryside on horseback.

Edgar Degas | Conversation, 1882-1885

During the mid-1880s, Degas repeatedly explored the motif of two or three women leaning on a wooden railing - at the racetrack, on a pleasure boat, or before a landscape - absorbed in casual conversation..

"Degas was clearly intrigued by the visual possibilities of this moment of female intimacy", Jill DeVonyar and Richard Kendall have written, "making half a dozen variants of the composition with a range of outfits, headgear, and backgrounds" (op. cit., 2007, p. 66).

Renoir | Port de Marseille, le Fort Saint-Jean, 1906

In the early 1880s Pierre-Auguste Renoir made his first forays abroad; he had previously traveled no further from Paris than Normandy. The years of 1881-1884 however saw Renoir in a variety of disparate locations including Algeria, Italy and the French Riviera.

It was on these journeys that he stepped away from rendering purely figure-based compositions, rather creating an interesting series of landscapes to record his new surroundings.

There is no doubt that these travels deeply affected Renoir and his art, and indeed he would return repeatedly to the South of France, eventually choosing to settle permanently in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the early 1900s.

Caravaggio | The Lute Player / Suonatore di Liuto, 1595-1596

The Lute Player is an early work by Caravaggio, who sought above all to convey the reality and solidity of the surrounding world. We can already see the elements of the artist's style which were to have such a widespread influence on other artists.

The figure of a young boy dressed in a white shirt stands out clearly against the dark background.

The sharp sidelighting and the falling shadows give the objects an almost tangible volume and weight.

Caravaggio was interested in the uniqueness of the surrounding world, and there are markedly individual features not only in the youth's face but also in the objects which make up the still life: the damaged pear, the crack in the lute, the crumpled pages of the music.

The melody written on those pages is that of a then fashionable song by Jacques Arcadelt, "You know that I love you".

Caravaggio | The Lute Player | The Hermitage version, 1595-1596

Guido Reni(?) | Portrait of Beatrice Cenci, 1599

Author: Guido Reni (Italian Baroque painter, 1575-1642)

Medium: Oil canvas

Dimensions: 64,5 x 49 cm

Current location: Palazzo Barberini, Rome

A long historical tradition has identified Beatrice Cenci in this portrait.

The young parricide, who was processed and beheaded in Rome in 1599, is immortalized in prison by Guido Reni a few instants before being killed.