Most important European painter?

[Comte Arnau]

Since polls are up to 40, I only include forty of those who are traditionally regarded as important or relevant in European art history. Obviously many are missing (Giotto, for instance, but I didn't want to include the 'initiator'), because I tried to more or less include the outstanding painters from the main European schools in a relatively balanced way. Sorry if your favourite is missing, you can always include him in the thread.

PS: I allow multiple voting here because I know people tend to vote for those from their area.

[Beorn]

Bob and his industrial spraying company. What would life be without them?

[Aemma]

I voted for Da Vinci (of course), Klimt, Picasso, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Monet, Watteau. I would have liked to have seen Renoir for he is one of my favourite Impressionists. I would have included Mary Stevenson Cassatt in the group of Impressionists as well. Despite having been born in the USA, she was in essence a "French Impressionist" and in most every other sense of the word, European to a very very large degree.

Hmmm...there's probably more I want to say here but this'll have to do for now.

Nice thread Ibex! :thumbs up

[Comte Arnau]

Merci for your reply, Aemma! Good taste. :)

Believe me, I hesitated about including Renoir or not. It's just I think there were already too many French painters in the poll, and I didn't want to insist on a specific movement either. As I said, I'm sure there are quite a few great ones missing there!

Thanks for the comment too.

[Ibericus]

Diego Velázquez. I prefer him over Picasso

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6e/De_overgave_van_breda_Velazquez.jpg/721px-De_overgave_van_breda_Velazquez.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez_017.jpg/702px-Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez_017.jpg

[Loddfafner]

I take it that the question of which painter is most important is not the same question as to which is my favorite, but that will not keep me from shamelessly conflating the two questions. I voted for:

Bosch. He introduced imagination to art and set a standard that few if any have managed to meet.

Caravaggio. He set a standard for expressiveness in his portraits and stood out from the insipid, generic crowd of the overrated Italian Renaissance.

Dürer. He was the peak of the greatest period of art history, that of the German Renaissance. The Dutch only refined the field.

[Fortis in Arduis]

I voted Rembrandt.

He is a painter's painter.

[Loddfafner]

I voted against the following, maybe because I am not refined enough to get them:

Blake: watery and repetitive.

Botticelli: exactly what I mean by the insipidity of the Italian Renaissance.

Cézanne: he brought out the dreariness in beautiful landscapes which is the opposite of what I expect out of artists. He inspired a whole generation of artists to paint as if sloppiness were a virtue.

Da Vinci: a great man but his paintings were overly composed and he missed the technical side of painting frescoes that would last.

Dalí: although is earlier works were almost as imaginative as those of Bosch, his later tendency to sign his name to doodles and dull prints to make money show just how far art had sunk.

David: itsch

Delacroix: more kitsch

Friedrich: kitsch, though I like what he represents

Gauguin: not exactly a "preservationist"

Matisse: just gaudy protoafrocentricity

Modigliani: obviously he loved the bottle more than any woman.

Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Velazquez: Catholic kitsch

Rubens: Catholic kitsch, though the roomful of work he painted in the Louvre almost makes up for the Baroque gaudiness.

Watteau: when I hiked the entire length of the Louvre, I nearly collapsed around the Watteaus.

[Aemma]

I voted against the following, maybe because I am not refined enough to get them:

Blake: watery and repetitive.

Botticelli: exactly what I mean by the insipidity of the Italian Renaissance.

Cézanne: he brought out the dreariness in beautiful landscapes which is the opposite of what I expect out of artists. He inspired a whole generation of artists to paint as if sloppiness were a virtue.

Da Vinci: a great man but his paintings were overly composed and he missed the technical side of painting frescoes that would last.

Dalí: although is earlier works were almost as imaginative as those of Bosch, his later tendency to sign his name to doodles and dull prints to make money show just how far art had sunk.

David: itsch

Delacroix: more kitsch

Friedrich: kitsch, though I like what he represents

Gauguin: not exactly a "preservationist"

Matisse: just gaudy protoafrocentricity

Modigliani: obviously he loved the bottle more than any woman.

Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Velazquez: Catholic kitsch

Rubens: Catholic kitsch, though the roomful of work he painted in the Louvre almost makes up for the Baroque gaudiness.

Watteau: when I hiked the entire length of the Louvre, I nearly collapsed around the Watteaus.

LOL I guess haters are gonna hate! :P

[stellar]

Caravaggio, Manet and Van Gogh are the three I consider the most outstanding and authentic. I love the work of Van Gogh most.

[Eldritch]

Perhaps the poll could be divided up into different periods in art, especially since what we're after is objective "importance", rather than personal preference? Just a suggestion.

Anyway, I don't know squat about the visual arts. Show me a painting, and I can tell you whether I like it or not, and maybe grasp at some kind of understandable explanation why, or why not. That's about it for me.

Goya's paintings are magnificent imo, so I voted for him. Although he's probably not the most important painter ever.

[Vasconcelos]

Easy one, it's Bacon.
You can eat it, but not the others.

[Comte Arnau]

I voted against the following, maybe because I am not refined enough to get them:

Blake: watery and repetitive.

Botticelli: exactly what I mean by the insipidity of the Italian Renaissance.

Cézanne: he brought out the dreariness in beautiful landscapes which is the opposite of what I expect out of artists. He inspired a whole generation of artists to paint as if sloppiness were a virtue.

Da Vinci: a great man but his paintings were overly composed and he missed the technical side of painting frescoes that would last.

Dalí: although is earlier works were almost as imaginative as those of Bosch, his later tendency to sign his name to doodles and dull prints to make money show just how far art had sunk.

David: itsch

Delacroix: more kitsch

Friedrich: kitsch, though I like what he represents

Gauguin: not exactly a "preservationist"

Matisse: just gaudy protoafrocentricity

Modigliani: obviously he loved the bottle more than any woman.

Raphael, Titian, El Greco, Velazquez: Catholic kitsch

Rubens: Catholic kitsch, though the roomful of work he painted in the Louvre almost makes up for the Baroque gaudiness.

Watteau: when I hiked the entire length of the Louvre, I nearly collapsed around the Watteaus.

While I don't share all of your appreciations, I enjoyed reading it. :) Great comments.


Perhaps the poll could be divided up into different periods in art, especially since what we're after is objective "importance", rather than personal preference? Just a suggestion.

Anyway, I don't know squat about the visual arts. Show me a painting, and I can tell you whether I like it or not, and maybe grasp at some kind of understandable explanation why, or why not. That's about it for me.

Goya's paintings are magnificent imo, so I voted for him. Although he's probably not the most important painter ever.

The problem is, most of the people in the poll are important somehow. That is why it's ultimately a subjective thing, as it's always when the word 'important' is used. :)

Goya is certainly outstanding, even if the Colossus is apparently not his. It's like three painters in one, advanced to his time and so influential for painters a century later. I don't think he's any inch inferior to Velazquez and Picasso, the Spanish podium. Good choice. :thumb001:

[antonio]

How the hell can a mentally insane unable to sell a single picture in his whole live to a single human being but his brother be ruining the supremacy of Spanish painters? It's really unfair.

[Tony]

I like more Paolo Uccello and his way of mixin' fairy atmospheres with an early perspective.

[Foxy]

I like to paint and I can say that I adore Botticelli's style. His importance can be understood if you know the mecenatism of the Medicean Court, becouse his works are pieces of philosophy of the Renaissance.
I think that Da Vinci was very important in the studies of anatomy and prospective, but Michelangelo remains for me The Master in absolute.
Anyway every artist has his importance. Caravaggio studied the light and introduced realism, the Fiamming artists learnt how to make oil paintings (and I appreciate them very much for that becouse I use oil too :thumb001: ). The impressionists studied the light and the movement. I also adore Gauguin...
So, it is pretty hard to decide.
I'd say that considering his geniality, Da Vinci worths the primate but today his style is old fashioned and the art must go on...

[Foxy]

Botticelli: exactly what I mean by the insipidity of the Italian Renaissance.



If you are so expert of the Italian Renaissance, explain me these paintings:

http://lucabagatin.ilcannocchiale.it/mediamanager/sys.user/12736/primavera%20botticelli.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/La_nascita_di_Venere_(Botticelli).jpg

Solution:

1) The Spring (philosophical meaning)
The ambientation should be Cyprus, or better, Aphrodite's garden, with Mercury as guardian.
Venus/Aphrodite rapresents the moral virtues of the humanity, the Three Graces the operative phase of the virtues, Mercury rapresents the reason that must lead the man and the triad Zephirus, Cloris and Flora the regenarative power of the Nature.
It seems that the painting suggestion is that the spiritual love, the reason and the graces (Beauty, voluptas and chastity) can elevate the man to a mystic ascent. The complete man, the man of the Renaissance, is the man who is led by the reason, the beauty and the spiritual love. The allusion to Flora should mean that the place in which this happens is in Florence, in the enlighted medicean court.
The other figures allude to other Italian cities:
1) Mercury/reason: Milan
2)Cupidus/Love: Rome
3)the Three Graces: Neaples, Genoa and Pisa
4)Maya: Mantova
5)Venus/the Beauty: Venice
6) Borea: Bozen

It is an allusion to the qualities that a sovreign must have to lead a country and also a gift for the De Medici family.

I let you the second to interprete.

[Don]

http://www.pasapues.es/aragonesasi/goya03.jpg
http://data.quenta.org/goya-saturn-son.jpg
http://www.poetryresourcepage.com/images/goya5.jpg
http://blogs.eluniversal.com.mx/imagenes/maja-desnuda-goya.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YBJQi5JvltU/TM3akhIsGdI/AAAAAAAAAHs/UruBKM6EPMQ/s1600/2_mayo_18087.jpg
http://gardenofpraise.com/images/osorio.jpg
http://www.abcgallery.com/G/goya/goya42.JPG

Only a genious among the geniuses can paint this in his time.

http://www.peatom.info/images/2009/02/21/corral_de_locos1.revista.jpg

[antonio]

If I was timely remembered Boticelli paintings I would also voted for him. I remember these paintings from an old enciclopedia I used to read when i was a child and looked me amazing. Another nice one is one of a mortal female being chased by dogs and people, I suppose a mytological episode.

Pd. I like to draw (I do it rarely but fairy well) . I know it lacks color dimension but it's way cheaper (bic ball pen...:D).

[Foxy]

If I was timely remembered Boticelli paintings I would also voted for him. I remember these paintings from an old enciclopedia I used to read when i was a child and looked me amazing. Another nice one is one of a mortal female being chased by dogs and people, I suppose a mytological episode.

Pd. I like to draw (I do it rarely but fairy well) . I know it lacks color dimension but it's way cheaper (bic ball pen...:D).

I adore this Botticelli's painting too

Apelle's calumny
http://artmasko.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/calunnia-di-apelle.jpg

The truth is naked on the left, and nobody looks at her. People drag Apelle, followed by Calumny - figured as a beautiful and innatural woman- in front of the judgment, who is suggested by Ignorance and Suspect. Pallor is next to them. Perfidy and Cheat drag Apelle. Penitence close the stream, in a black dress and sad expression, just before the Truth, who watches the Sky, as to indicate the only source of true justice.
It rapresents all the limits of the good government and of the humanity in general.
When I went to school, my school mates were also very amused by this painting.

Btw, I think you meant this painting:

Nastagio degli Onesti or also The Banquet
http://gabrielelaporta.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/800px-sandro_botticelli_0751.jpg

The woman eaten by dogs refused the raider, who loved her. He felt in depression until he meditated to kill her. This painting was a wedding gift and means that love must be spiritual and corporal.
The scene is not from mythology but from one of the 100 tales wrote by Boccaccio in his "Decameron".
The Decameron (The 10 Days) tells about 7 girls and 3 guys that to escape the plague of Florence go in a villa and decide to spend time in ballets and banquets, but also praying. On evening, anyway, they have to tell for ten days a tale, for a total of 100 tales.
Every day the argument of the novel changes.
It is one of the most famous books of the Italian literature.

[Loddfafner]

I am still not convinced about Botticelli. There is something, well, bot-like about such allegories. As for the differences in the spirit of Northern and Southern Renaissance art, I keep thinking of a passage in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain where his character, Naphta, describes a 14th century sculpture:


All works of art whose function it is to express the soul and the emotions... are always so ugly as to be beautiful, and so beautiful as to be ugly. That is a law. Their beauty is not fleshly beauty, which is merely insipid -- but the beauty of the spirit. Moreover, physical beauty is an abstraction... only the inner beauty, the beauty of religious expression, has any actuality.

[Joe McCarthy]

I'm a fan of Neoclassicism, and thus admire Jacques-Louis David.

http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/his/CoreArt/art/resourcesb/dav_soc.jpg

The Death of Socrates

http://www.lib-art.com/imgpainting/5/0/8905-the-oath-of-the-horatii-jacques-louis-david.jpg

The Oath of the Horatii

When it comes to art though I probably strongly dislike some artists more than I strongly like them. Among the people on this list, Goya gets low marks for his pacifism, and of course Picasso for his role in debauching art in general. It's to be noted that both were Spanish.

In general the 'great' artists of the last two centuries have been subversive, both to the art establishment and the political order. This can even be said of David to some extent.

[Foxy]

I am afraid this list lacks a great painter of the German Romanticism, a painter that I simply adore...

Caspar David Friedrich. He expresses my humors very well.

http://www.helnwein-museum.com/stc/ghpicts/gh1559.jpg
http://www.sexualfables.com/images/Caspar_David_Friedrich_Wanderer.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_VwkNnvdGE6k/TIXyLIodxgI/AAAAAAAAAk4/gOE6znNmMEY/s1600/Friedrich_Cloister_Cemetery_in_the_Snow_1817-19.jpg

[Comte Arnau]

As for the differences in the spirit of Northern and Southern Renaissance art,

I wouldn't say there is a Northern/Southern divide in European painting. Many Spanish painters preferred Flemish style to Italian Renaissance for a long while, for instance. Influence going from Italy northwards was also constant, just like painters moving to and fro all over Europe.


I am afraid this list lacks a great painter of the German Romanticism, a painter that I simply adore...

Caspar David Friedrich.

I wouldn't have allowed myself to not include my favourite German painter. Search him more thoroughly. ;)

[Foxy]

I wouldn't have allowed myself to not include my favourite German painter. Search him more thoroughly. ;)

I think German Romanticism has a strong Southern vibe. Indeed it is a sort of germanic renaissance. That's maybe why Caspar D. Friedrich is so appreciated by Southern Europeans.

[antonio]

I'm a fan of Neoclassicism, and thus admire Jacques-Louis David.


I voted David too.


When it comes to art though I probably strongly dislike some artists more than I strongly like them. Among the people on this list, Goya gets low marks for his pacifism,


Goya probably is not a pacifist ar heart: you're missing the actual circunstances of a Spaniard of that time. Any culturized Spaniard (starting from Bourbon's court) of that time had a profound fascination for France culture (I'm not talking only about Ilustration, but France culture in general, including Ancient Regime, the French culture for centuries, Ilustration and Revolution were only comtemporarities)...go figure how an Aragonese (secular ties with SouthFrance-Aquitania) could felt. In fact, Goya (seeking refuge from late Inquisition, but, I guess, not only) choosed Bordeaux to pass his last times.


and of course Picasso for his role in debauching art in general. It's to be noted that both were Spanish.


To my knowledge Picasso has nothing to do with expressionism (well, besides Gernika: a command/suggester work) or "things" like Bacon...I cant blame him for being the great paint genious of the XXth (if not more). His art is by not means degenerate and oppressive one but full of vital genious.



In general the 'great' artists of the last two centuries have been subversive, both to the art establishment and the political order. This can even be said of David to some extent.

Maybe that's just a critics and historicians bias. I would not trust them so much. :coffee:


Some others Spanish paints (just to reinforce our hegemony):

Ps. Needless to say masterpieces like 2nd and 3rd excuse completelly our mid and late XIXth lack of painting innovations.

http://www.mnac.cat/getBinary?id=000000003186&typ=1

http://bases.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/juanaloca_pradilla.jpg

http://jorgesalazar.info/imagenes/la-odalisca.jpg

[Hess]

There is no one painter that is more important than the rest. Every painter on that list made an important contribution to European Art in his own respect.

[Gálvez]

I would have included Mary Stevenson Cassatt in the group of Impressionists as well. Despite having been born in the USA, she was in essence a "French Impressionist" and in most every other sense of the word, European to a very very large degree.

I think she would actually agree with what you said... although we should add that she was a little "Hispanicised" too :P

"For I really feel as if it was intended I should be a Spaniard and quite a mistake I was born in America" - Mary Cassatt

Her Costumbrist paintings about the Spanish life of the XIX century are quite interesting, even though they belong to the epoque when she was still "maturing" her style (I think she was not into Impressionism at the time).

[radek]

friends, i love Dalì!!! :)))