Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site
Main
Page This family-friendly site celebrates Italian culture for the enjoyment of children and
adults. Site-Overview
Head of an Angel by Verrocchio.
See my Angels in Italian Art Page. And
visit my Rome Paintings Page, Florence
Costumes, Venice Art - Canaletto Pages. Judith (detail) by Titian,
one of the artists you can read about in the Illustrated Biographies
I've prepared with text by Amy Steedman. The
Etruscans were renowned for their bronzes. There are many museums
in Italy dedicated to these early inhabitants of Italy, to various art
styles, and to history. Bellini's
portrait of Venice' Doge Leonardo Loredano reproduced from the 'Vasari
Site' .
Leonardo's
portrait of Ginevra Benci, also from the Vasari site, is can also be
found at the 'Web Gallery of
Art'. This is a wonderful online art
gallery that allows you to:
Palazzo
Vernier dei Leoni, home of Ms. Guggenheim's collection. Ms. Guggenheim in a painting by Courmes, and in
Venice. There is a wonderful website for
the 'Guggenheim Museum in
Venice'. Architecture
is an Italian art often brushed over when the splendor of Italian
painting and sculpture is everywhere in Italy. But a professor of
architecture at the University of Virginia has put together a wonderful
online archive for his students and the world at large: Italian Renaissance and Baroque
architecture. These
two sculptures of boys are from the Florence school. They are
currently in the National Gallery in London, and can be seen
on-line.
I've created free art prints
you can download and print on a color printer. They make wonderful
framed reminders of the beauty of Italy. Click on one of the
samples to view that series. Visit my H.F. Ullman page that
features the beautiful and affordable art books by this specialty
publisher. They also print wonderful Italian cooking and culture books
that are the best you can find for very reasonable prices. Museums
and an On-Line Gallery Illustrated
Artist Biographies There are some
staggering statistics about Italy and art. For example, Italy is
home to 80% of UNESCO's heritage sites, and 60% of all the art in the world is
in Italy. The knowledge of Italian art and artists by your average Italian is
often better than that of students of art from any other country.
It's as if it were in the Italian blood, and every town seems to be able
to lay claim to some famous artist. There is a site that has all of the museums in
Italy listed with links, etc. and you can search for one by subject or
by region: Musei Online. The link I put keeps becoming
obsolete, so just Google it. You'll also find some links to museums on my Rome,
Florence
and Venice
pages. And the
Vatican Museums on-line exhibits. If you're a desk-chair admirer of Italian art, there is a wonderful
on-line gallery, the Web Gallery of Art. Click on this logo
to visit it. But be sure to come back here. There's lots
more below. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has these online
timelines of Italian art.
Florence and Central Italy 1600-1800
Venice
and Northern Italy 1600-1800
Rome
and Southern Italy 1600-1800 I took care of two small children when studying Italian in
Florence. Their family was shocked when they learned I had taken
the children to a church to look at paintings and sculptures before our
usual trip to the park to play. The children loved it however, and
often begged to look at more churches. The experience taught me that many Italians take their artistic patrimony for
granted, rarely visiting
their many museums and churches, leaving them instead for the tourists. A few years back, the President of Italy initiated and fronted a
campaign to get more Italians into museums, including advice on how to
behave and not behave in museums. The oddest piece of advice I
noticed was for families not to have picnics in the museums. Was
this really a widespread problem, needing to be mentioned in a national
television campaign? I wonder... If you're interested in
gaining ground on the subject and avoiding embarrassment when the
subject comes up while traveling in Italy, I've illustrated
biographies of some of the most famous Italian artists. The
biographies are by Amy Steedman. To learn more about Ms. Steedman
and to link to the illustrated biographies, click here. There is a very famous book that was published in 1550, during the
Renaissance, by Giorgio Vasari, often called Vasari's Lives, but
the full title of which is The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters,
Sculptors and Architects. Some enterprising person has made a wonderful site representing Vasari's
Lives which shows a photograph of each work of art Vasari mentions,
and then states where it can be found today. Click here to link to a beautiful representation of the
title page of the original book. Then click on the page to enter
the site. To go to the artist sections, click on Lives at
the bottom of the page. I won't link you directly to the artist pages because the journey is
so pleasurable. This site is a wonderful preparation for the
museums and sites you may visit when in Italy. And if you are a
student of art, it is a wonderful education! For
free
e-book editions of the Vasari books, visit Project Gutenberg, the
Internet's grand-daddy of all free e-book sites. And for links to free
e-book editions of two books by art expert Bernhard Berenson on Venetian
and Florentine Renaissance art visit
my review of those books at my Italophile Book Reviews site. Peggy Guggenheim's
collection of early 20th century art in Venice is very famous and
popular with artistically-minded tourists. The museum has a
wonderful website that describes the collection and the history
of how it was put together by Ms. Guggenheim. Click here, to visit their site. If
you'd like to read some personal remembrances of Ms. Guggenheim by a
long-time friend, journalist John Phillips, you can download and read the essay
for free from an e-book site. Click
here to arrive at their Free Page, then scroll down to the
essay entitled Peggy, and click on the highlighted line: Read
the essay in Adobe Acrobat PDF. It is full of lots of personal tidbits
to make you feel as if you knew the heiress personally. If
you need help with e-books, try my free Lessons on E-text and E-book
downloading and reading, available from the main
page of this site. London's National Gallery of Art offers an on-line tour of 15th
century Italian sculpture. The Hermitage
Museum of St. Petersburg, Russia has their Italian sculpture
on-line. It's a modest collection, but they link through to their
Italian paintings, so there is lots to see. And there is a very complete site with information and images of 1200
years of Italian sculpture. The link is not always on-line,
but if you catch it working, it's a treat. I'm always amazed at the prices charged for nice, frameable prints of
Italy. My economical nature, combined with frustrated artistic
ambitions, pushed me to create some free art prints you can download
and print out on a color printer. I've applied a simulated wax coating to free images of Italy, and
come up with six series of prints, post-card sized. You can always
enlarge them if you wish, but remember, you use more colored ink
printing a large image. I've placed them in MS-Word documents so they are ready to
print. You can also download the image itself, as always, by using
the right mouse button. They look best when printed on matte photo
paper, and are beautiful framed in groups. A sample from each series appears in the left column of this page,
linking to the various series galleries. Or you can link to the
galleries by clicking on the gallery title below. Farm
- 5 images Florence
- 4 images Rome
- 6 images Sunflower
- 4 images Venice
- 6 images Village
- 5 images You can see what's available at Amazon.com in terms of art books
using this search tool.
Just enter 'Book' in the 'Search'
category, and 'Renaissance' for example (or an artist's name) in the
'Keywords' field.
Then click on the 'Go' button to see the full
list of books available, with comments and prices. Here are DVD biographies by A&E of Michelangelo and DaVinci at
Amazon.com.
Here are some coffee table books on Italian Art from Amazon.com.
Visit my Coloring Pages for images of
Italian Art for children to color
Visit my Majolica and Porcelain page
Visit my art pages: Angels in Italian Art
Italian
Art and Architecture, Prints, Museums, Books...
Introduction
Museums and an On-Line Gallery
Illustrated Biographies of Artists
Vasari's Lives
The Guggenheim Collection
Italian Sculpture
Free Art Prints
Art Books
