Claude Lorrain:

Claude Lorrain was a French painter of the seventeenth century. He is best known for being one of the greatest masters of ideal landscape painting, an art form that seeks to present nature even more beautiful and harmonious. While his works were tributes to the beauty of nature, they usually represented historical or mythical scenes. Originally, he drew from nature, but around the beginning of 1640, he started to make his compositions more Classical and monumental. Lorrain infused the tradition of idealized landscape painting with observed accuracy and created a new method of landscape painting; he worked outdoors, painting from detailed observation and blending classical idealism with naturalistic detail. He also emphasized the dramatic contrasts of light and shade, giving his paintings a powerful feeling of the ephemeral and eternal. Through these contributions to landscape painting, Lorrain laid the foundations for a historical landscape tradition that dominated French and English paintings for at least the next 150 years, becoming influential in his life as well as in England in the mid-eighteen to mid-nineteenth century.

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Hieronymus Bosch:

Hieronymus Bosch was a Netherland painter of the early 16th century. He was one of art’s first visionary geniuses, the first original thinker, and the first artist to visually express beings and realms unknown to human understanding. Instead of paintings that merely depicted reality, he painted equally convincing concrete and tangible shapes of the fear that had haunted people in the Middle Ages. And he was the first artist to succeed in doing so! He became famous for his apocalyptic representations of the powers of evil and was most celebrated for his rich details and symbolic narrative portrayals of the dance between Heaven and Hell as well as the age-old tales of morality and the eventual fate of sinners.

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Simone Martini:

Simone Martini was a Sienese (Italian) painter of the 14th century. He painted in books, on panel, and on walls and is recognized as one of the outstanding painters of the 14th century of Europe with his professional skill. Martini had a restless and innovative temperament, full of novelty and invention. He varied pitch and pace in his stories, creating works that varied in range and contrasted each other. An artist who observed the details of nature and used depth in his paintings, Martini also loved harmonious pure colours and the decorative style of the Gothic period. With these qualities, he created the perfect combination of the ideals of the Gothic age into his paintings.

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