PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: arts, visual
Dutch artist
Rembrandt, Dutch Baroque painter and printmaker, one of the greatest storytellers in the history of art, possessing an exceptional ability to render people in their various moods and dramatic guises. Rembrandt...
Italian artist, engineer, and scientist
Leonardo da Vinci, (Italian: “Leonardo from Vinci”) Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the...
Italian painter
Caravaggio, leading Italian painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works. While most other Italian artists...
Italian artist
Michelangelo, Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist...
British writer and artist
William Blake, English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such as Visions...
Spanish artist
Pablo Picasso, Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most-influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque)...
Italian painter
Titian, the greatest Italian Renaissance painter of the Venetian school. He was recognized early in his own lifetime as a supremely talented painter, and his reputation has in the intervening centuries...
French artist
Edgar Degas, French painter, sculptor, and printmaker who was prominent in the Impressionist group and widely celebrated for his images of Parisian life. Degas’s principal subject was the human—especially...
Flemish artist
Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting’s dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps...
French author
Charles Baudelaire, French poet, translator, and literary and art critic whose reputation rests primarily on Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which was perhaps the most important and influential...
Spanish painter
Diego Velázquez, the most important Spanish painter of the 17th century, a giant of Western art. Velázquez is universally acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest artists. The naturalistic style in...
English writer and artist
John Ruskin, English critic of art, architecture, and society who was a gifted painter, a distinctive prose stylist, and an important example of the Victorian Sage, or Prophet: a writer of polemical prose...
Italian composer and musician
Claudio Monteverdi, Italian composer in the late Renaissance, the most important developer of the then new genre, the opera. He also did much to bring a “modern” secular spirit into church music. Monteverdi,...
Italian architect
Andrea Palladio, Italian architect, regarded as the greatest architect of 16th-century northern Italy. His designs for palaces (palazzi) and villas, notably the Villa Rotonda (1550–51) near Vicenza, and...
Russian composer
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the most popular Russian composer of all time. His music has always had great appeal for the general public in virtue of its tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies,...
English architect
Christopher Wren, designer, astronomer, geometrician, and the greatest English architect of his time. Wren designed 53 London churches, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, as well as many secular buildings...
Italian architect
Donato Bramante, architect who introduced the High Renaissance style in architecture. His early works in Milan included the rectory of Sant’Ambrogio and the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In Rome,...
Dutch painter
Johannes Vermeer, Dutch artist who created paintings that are among the most beloved and revered images in the history of art. Although only about 36 of his paintings survive, these rare works are among...
Italian painter
Giotto, the most important Italian painter of the 14th century, whose works point to the innovations of the Renaissance style that developed a century later. For almost seven centuries Giotto has been...
American architect
Louis Sullivan, American architect, regarded as the spiritual father of modern American architecture and identified with the aesthetics of early skyscraper design. His more than 100 works in collaboration...
Dutch painter
Vincent van Gogh, Dutch painter, generally considered the greatest after Rembrandt van Rijn, and one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists. The striking colour, emphatic brushwork, and contoured forms...
Spanish artist
El Greco, master of Spanish painting, whose highly individual dramatic and expressionistic style met with the puzzlement of his contemporaries but gained newfound appreciation in the 20th century. He also...
Swiss architect
Le Corbusier, internationally influential Swiss architect and city planner, whose designs combine the functionalism of the modern movement with a bold sculptural expressionism. He belonged to the first...
Italian painter
Tintoretto, great Italian Mannerist painter of the Venetian school and one of the most important artists of the late Renaissance. His paintings include Vulcan Surprising Venus and Mars (c. 1555), the Mannerist...
Russian composer
Sergey Prokofiev, 20th-century Russian (and Soviet) composer who wrote in a wide range of musical genres, including symphonies, concerti, film music, operas, ballets, and program pieces. Prokofiev (Prokofjev...
American painter
Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter who was among the most influential figures in Modernism, best known for her large-format paintings of natural subjects, especially flowers and bones, and for her depictions...
Dutch painter
Piet Mondrian, painter who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art and a major exponent of the Dutch abstract art movement known as De Stijl (“The Style”). In his mature paintings,...
French painter
Nicolas Poussin, French painter and draftsman who founded the French Classical tradition. He spent virtually all of his working life in Rome, where he specialized in history paintings—depicting scenes...
French artist
Paul Cézanne, French painter, one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art movements, especially...
Russian composer
Igor Stravinsky, Russian-born composer whose work had a revolutionary impact on musical thought and sensibility just before and after World War I, and whose compositions remained a touchstone of modernism...
French artist
Henri Matisse, artist often regarded as the most important French painter of the 20th century. He was the leader of the Fauvist movement about 1900, and he pursued the expressiveness of colour throughout...
British artist
Henry Moore, English sculptor whose organically shaped, abstract, bronze and stone figures constitute the major 20th-century manifestation of the humanist tradition in sculpture. Much of his work is monumental,...
German artist
Albrecht Dürer, painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German Renaissance artist. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits,...
American architect
Daniel Burnham, American architect and urban planner whose impact on the American city was substantial. He was instrumental in the development of the skyscraper and was noted for his highly successful...
Italian painter and architect
Raphael, master painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican. His work is admired for its clarity of...
Italian artist
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Italian artist who was perhaps the greatest sculptor of the 17th century and an outstanding architect as well. Bernini created the Baroque style of sculpture and developed it to such...
French artist
Honoré Daumier, prolific French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor especially renowned for his cartoons and drawings satirizing 19th-century French politics and society. His paintings, though hardly known...
Italian architect
Francesco Borromini, Italian architect who was a chief formulator of Baroque architectural style. Borromini (he changed his name from Castelli about 1627) secured a reputation throughout Europe with his...
French artist
Camille Pissarro, painter and printmaker who was a key figure in the history of Impressionism. Pissarro was the only artist to show his work in all eight Impressionist group exhibitions; throughout his...
Italian artist
Andrea Mantegna, painter and engraver, the first fully Renaissance artist of northern Italy. His best known surviving work is the Camera degli Sposi (“Room of the Bride and Groom”), or Camera Picta (“Painted...
French painter
Claude Monet, French painter who was the initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. In his mature works, Monet developed his method of producing repeated studies of the same...
Italian architect and author
Leon Battista Alberti, Italian humanist, architect, and principal initiator of Renaissance art theory. In his personality, works, and breadth of learning, he is considered the prototype of the Renaissance...
French painter
J.-A.-D. Ingres, painter and icon of cultural conservatism in 19th-century France. Ingres became the principal proponent of French Neoclassical painting after the death of his mentor, Jacques-Louis David....
Russian-born artist
Wassily Kandinsky, Russian-born artist, one of the first creators of pure abstraction in modern painting. After successful avant-garde exhibitions, he founded the influential Munich group Der Blaue Reiter...
English artist
William Hogarth, the first great English-born artist to attract admiration abroad, best known for his moral and satirical engravings and paintings—e.g., A Rake’s Progress (eight scenes,1733). His attempts...
Swiss-German artist
Paul Klee, Swiss-German painter and draftsman who was one of the foremost artists of the 20th century. Klee’s mother, née Ida Maria Frick of Basel, and his German-born father, Hans Klee, were both trained...
Italian painter
Fra Angelico, (Italian: “Angelic Brother”) Italian painter, one of the greatest 15th-century painters, whose works within the framework of the early Renaissance style embody a serene religious attitude...
Italian painter
Sandro Botticelli, one of the greatest painters of the Florentine Renaissance. His The Birth of Venus and La Primavera are often said to epitomize for modern viewers the spirit of the Renaissance. Botticelli’s...
Italian sculptor
Donatello, master of sculpture in both marble and bronze, one of the greatest of all Italian Renaissance artists. A good deal is known about Donatello’s life and career, but little is known about his character...
French painter
Jacques-Louis David, the most celebrated French artist of his day and a principal exponent of the late 18th-century Neoclassical reaction against the Rococo style. David won wide acclaim with his huge...