Bernard Berenson (June 26, 1865 – October 6, 1959) was an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. His book The Drawings of the Florentine Painters was an international success. His wife Mary is thought to have had a large hand in some of the writings.
Berenson was a major figure in the attribution of Old Masters, at a time when these were attracting new interest by American collectors, and his judgments were widely respected in the art world.
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark (13 July 1903 – 21 May 1983) was a British art historian, museum director and broadcaster. His expertise covered a wide range of artists and periods, but he is particularly associated with Italian Renaissance art, most of all that of Leonardo da Vinci. After running two art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts from the 1950s to the 1970s, the largest and best known being the Civilisation series in 1969.
The son of rich parents, Clark was introduced to the arts at an early age. Among his early influences were the writings of John Ruskin, which instilled in him the belief that everyone should have access to great art. After coming under the influence of the art experts Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, Clark was appointed director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford aged twenty-seven, and three years later he was put in charge of Britain's National Gallery. His twelve years there saw the gallery transformed to make it accessible and inviting to a wider public. During the Second World War, when the collection was moved from London for safe keeping, Clark made the building available for a series of daily concerts which proved a celebrated morale booster during the Blitz.
Portrait of a Woman is a c.1475 tempera and oil on panel painting by Antonio or Piero del Pollaiuolo. It has been in the Uffizi in Florence since 1861. Since 1861 it has been misattributed to Piero della Francesca, a young Leonardo da Vinci and Cosimo Rosselli.
It forms part of a group of profile portraits of women which also includes one in Milan, one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and another at the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Berenson attributes the more accomplished works in the group to Antonio and the others (along with the weaker sections of the better works) to Piero. Other art historians attribute them all to Piero on the grounds that Vasari mentions Antonio only as an engraver and sculptor and not as a painter. A third group attributes all the profiles to Piero and other mythological, action and battle scenes among the Pollaiolo oeuvre to Antonio.
The Caravaggisti (or the "Caravagesques"; singular: "Caravaggista") were stylistic followers of the late 16th-century Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. His influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from Mannerism was profound. Caravaggio never established a workshop as most other painters did, and thus had no school to spread his techniques. Nor did he ever set out his underlying philosophical approach to art, the psychological realism which can only be deduced from his surviving work. But it can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera, Bernini, and Rembrandt. Famous while he lived, Caravaggio himself was forgotten almost immediately after his death. Many of his paintings were re-ascribed to his followers, such as The Taking of Christ, which was attributed to the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst until 1990.
Only in the 20th century was Caravaggio's importance to the development of Western art rediscovered. In the 1920s Roberto Longhi once more placed him in the European tradition: "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed without him. And the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different". The influential Bernard Berenson stated: "With the exception of Michelangelo, no other Italian painter exercised so great an influence."
Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee is a 1633 oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt van Rijn. It is classified as a history painting and ranks among the largest and earliest of Rembrandt's works. Purchased by art historian Bernard Berenson for Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1898 (not 1869 as previously noted, correcting an error based on historical records), it was displayed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston until its theft in 1990; its whereabouts remain unknown. The painting vividly portrays the biblical miracle in which Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee, as recounted in the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Mark. Notably, it is Rembrandt's only known seascape, distinguishing it within his oeuvre.