Gabriele d’Annunzio | Aprile

Socchiusa è la finestra, sul giardino.

Un'ora passa lenta, sonnolenta,

ed ella, ch'era attenta, s'addormenta

a quella voce che già si lamenta,

che si lamenta in fondo a quel giardino.

Non è che voce d'acque su la pietra:

e quante volte, quante volte udita !

William Brymner | In the orchard spring, 1892

Salvatore Quasimodo: "19 gennaio, 1944"

Ti leggo dolci versi d'un antico,

e le parole nate fra le vigne,

le tende, in riva ai fiumi delle terre

dell'est, come ora ricadono lugubri

e desolate in questa profondissima

notte di guerra, in cui nessuno corre

il cielo degli angeli di morte,

Pablo Picasso | Guernica, 1937 | Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

Wisława Szymborska | Ogni caso / Could have, 1972

Poteva accadere.

Doveva accadere.

È accaduto prima. Dopo.

Più vicino. Più lontano.

È accaduto non a te.

Ti sei salvato perché eri il primo.

Ti sei salvato perché eri l’ultimo.

Rene Magritte

Patrizia Cavalli | La primavera / The spring

You arrive like this, as always,

To spread the suspicion of paradise,

And before I open the window

I know you from the gentler light,

From the dust that hangs in the air,

From the bird’s obsessive performance,

Charles Courtney Curran | Summer, 1906

Salvatore Quasimodo | Dammi il mio Giorno / Grant me my Day

Dammi il mio giorno;

ch’io mi cerchi ancora

un volto d’anni sopito

che un cavo d’acque

riporti in trasparenza,

e ch’io pianga amore di me stesso.

Antonio Nunziante | Cometa

Jane DeDecker | The Women's Suffrage

By Jane DeDecker / The concept of this proposed women’s monument was inspired by a letter from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Lucretia Mott in which she wrote about the power of words and deeds:

"Every word we utter, every act we perform, waft unto innumerable circles, beyond".

I wanted to capture the collective energy from all women who have made this happen, as well as acknowledge that we still need to keep moving as we strive for equality.

When a water droplet impacts a body of water it pushes waves outward and rebounds upward as a smaller droplet. This droplet, called the daughter droplet - gains height - then falls back to the water in what is called a coalescent cascade.

This describes the height, breadth, and lasting impact of the Suffragists’ work.

Mitsuru Ichikawa, 1983 | Magic Realism painter

Mitsuru Ichikawa 市川光鶴 is a Japanese painter, born in Nagoya-shi, Aichi Prefecture.

She has been aspiring to be a painter since he was a child, and has been exhibiting mainly at group public exhibitions.

He completed the oil painting course at Musashino Art University Graduate School of Art and Design.

Currently is an associate member of the Independent Art Association.

Nikolai Sverchkov | Equine painter

Nikolai Yegorovich Sverchkov / Николай Егорович Сверчков (1817-1898) was a Russian painter who specialized in genre and hunting scenes with horses.

He was also a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.

His father was an Imperial groom and coachman. As a child, he worked with his father and began drawing animals.

Impressed with his work, his parents arranged for him to take lessons at the Imperial Academy of Arts with the battle painter, Alexander Sauerweid, from 1827 to 1829.

Bella, Chagall's Eternal Muse

"In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of LOVE" - Marc Chagall

The love story between Bella Rosenfeld (1889-1944) and Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was a profound, almost mystical connection that began in 1909 in Saint Petersburg.

Bella, a 19-year-old from a wealthy Jewish family, crossed paths with Chagall, a 26-year-old aspiring artist still in art school.

Their love was instantaneous, a moment both would later describe as love at first sight.

Bella, who would go on to become a writer, was captivated by Chagall’s deep blue eyes, describing them as if they had “fallen straight from the sky” and floated independently.

Marc Chagall | Les Amoureux, 1928

"Corot painted 3.000 canvases, 10.000 of which have been sold in America"..!

The strong market for Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's (French painter, 1796-1875) works and his relatively easy-to-imitate late painting style resulted in a huge production of Corot forgeries between 1870 and 1939.

René Huyghe (French writer on the history, psychology and philosophy of art, curator at the Louvre's department of paintings (from 1930), a professor at the Collège de France director of the Musée Jacquemart-André, a member of the Académie Française, 1906-1997) famously quipped that "Corot painted three thousand canvases, ten thousand of which have been sold in America".

Walter Crane | Precursor of Art Nouveau

Walter Crane (1845-1915) was an English artist and book illustrator.

Together with William Morris, Walter Crane was a leader in the Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts artistic movements

.

Walter Crane is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the later 19th century.

Crane's work featured some of the more colourful and detailed beginnings of the child-in-the-garden motifs that would characterize many nursery rhymes and children's stories for decades to come.

Eugenio Montale | Accade

Accade

che le affinità d'anima non giungano

ai gesti e alle parole ma rimangano

effuse come un magnetismo. Ѐ raro

ma accade.

Daniel Gerhartz | Home

Claude Monet | Alice Hoschedé au jardin, 1881

Monet's magnificent depiction of his garden at Vétheuil exemplifies the visual splendor of Impressionism at its height.

Monet painted this work in 1881 as a new chapter of his life was unfolding, and this picture expresses the exuberance and renewed passion of the artist during this important period.

Seated among the flowers is Alice Hoschedé, the artist's thirty-seven year old lover and the wife of his close friend and patron Ernst Hoschedé.

The composition is lavished with all of the hallmarks of a great Impressionist composition, with its vivid color palette, intermingling of the natural elements and interplay of light and shadow.

Claude Monet | Alice Hoschedé au jardin, 1881

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Fragments and studies

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was fascinated by hats and their infinite array of trimmings.

To quote the model-turned-painter Suzanne Valadon: "Renoir particularly loved women's hats... he never ceased buying lots of hats".

The millinery trade was a thriving industry in Paris during the second half of the 19th century.

When the vogue for hats reached its peak, Paris was home to about 1,000 milliners.

Since hats represented the most variable accessory in a wardrobe, even women with moderate means owned several.

In this kaleidoscopic sketch, Renoir lavished his attention on the hats, while the heads are no more individualized than mannequins.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Study of Heads, 1890 | Barnes Foundation

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | At the Milliner's, 1878

At the Milliner's is an oil on canvas artwork by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French Impressionist painter, 1841-1919), created in 1878.

This work is a product of the Impressionism movement, measuring 32.9 x 24.8 cm and is part of the collection of the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

At the Milliner's exhibits the quintessential Impressionist technique with its loose brushwork and the interplay of light and color, rather than intricate detail.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir | At the Milliner's, 1878 | Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum

Giuseppe De Palma, 2001 | Portrait painter

Giuseppe De Palma is an Italian painter born in Puglia and established in Florence.

Giuseppe De Palma currently is a advanced painting student at the Florence Academy of Art.

His works are inspired by the narrative component of works from the past, a sort of storytelling capable of making painting a communicable language with a social function.

In 2023, Giuseppe de Palma, winner of the first prize of the competition organized by the ARC Scholarship Competition, was awarded the Brian Yoder (Founder of the Art Renewal Center, 1961-2021) Memorial Scholarship.

Paulo Coelho: "Ciò che ci ferisce, ci cura anche"

• "Dicono che durante la nostra vita abbiamo due grandi amori. Uno con il quale ti sposerai o vivrai per sempre, può essere il padre o la madre dei tuoi figli: con questa persona otterrai la massima comprensione per stare il resto della tua vita insieme.

E dicono che c’è un secondo grande amore, una persona che perderai per sempre. Qualcuno con cui sei nato collegato, così collegato, che le forze della chimica scappano dalla ragione e ti impediranno sempre di raggiungere un finale felice. Fino a che un giorno smetterai di provarci, ti arrenderai e cercherai un’altra persona che finirai per incontrare.

Abdullah Evindar

Luigi Pirandello | La Maschera, 1890

Io non ti prego, o vuoto cranio umano,

che il gran nodo mi voglia distrigar.

Follie d 'Amleto! Io sto co 'l Lenau: è vano

de la vita la Morte interrogar.

A che avventarti questa malacia

che in van mi rode, in stolidi perché?

Non vo ‘ sapere a qual mai uom tu sia

appartenuto - ora, appartieni a me.

Sir Thomas Lawrence | John Philip Kemble as Hamlet, 1801 | Tate

Henri Chapu | Mercure inventant le caducée, 1861

Henri Chapu's Mercure inventant le caducée (Mercury inventing the caduceus) was executed for la Villa Médicis in Rome in 1861.

The caduceus (from Ancient Greek: κηρύκειον kērū́keion "herald's wand, or staff") is the staff carried by Hermes in Greek mythology and consequently by Hermes Trismegistus in Greco-Egyptian mythology.

The same staff was borne by other heralds like Iris, the messenger of Hera. The short staff is entwined by two serpents, sometimes surmounted by wings. In Roman iconography, it was depicted being carried in the left hand of Mercury, the messenger of the gods.

Some accounts assert that the oldest imagery of the caduceus is rooted in Mesopotamia with the Sumerian god Ningishzida; his symbol, a staff with two snakes intertwined around it, dates back to 4000 BC to 3000 BC.

Henri Chapu | Mercure inventant le caducée, 1861 | Musée d'Orsay

Cenacolo di Leonardo: "Uno di voi mi tradirà" / "One of you will betray me"!

The Last Supper, painted between 1494 and the beginning of 1498, is considered perhaps the most important mural painting in the world, "a beautiful and marvelous thing", as Giorgio Vasari wrote in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, in which he speaks of Leonardo and describes the Last Supper.

Painter, architect, sculptor, engineer, inventor, mathematician, anatomist and writer, Leonardo da Vinci embodied the ideal of the many-sided man dreamed of by the Italian Renaissance.

Leonardo da Vinci | The Last Supper, 1494-1498 (detail) | Church and Dominican Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie