title: Lili Marleen

text: Dietrich sang "Lili Marlene" in her television special "An Evening with Marlene Dietrich", which aired on the BBC in the UK and on CBS in the US in 1973, and was featured on four of her six original albums. She also recorded and performed it in both the original German version and the English adaptation. Both versions have appeared on many compilation albums worldwide, several of them titled after the song. After 5 shows in Japan, between 15 and 25 December 1974, two singles of the song were released by both EMI and MCA Records in 1975. The MCA Records release (D-1284) peaked #93 in the Oricon charts and spend three weeks there, and sold a total of 8,000 copies, this version has "Falling in Love Again" as a B-side. The EMI release (EMR-10761) peaked #42 in the charts and spend 11 weeks in it, selling a total of 56,000 in the country, this version has "Die Antwort Weiss Ganz Allein Der Wind" (Blowin' In The Wind) as a B-side.


title: Lili Marleen

text: Original issuing of the song by Decca Records in the US and Brunswick Records in the UK was on 10". Decca re-issued the single on 7" during the 1950s and early 1970s. This is also the version of the single that was reissued by MCA in 1978 and 1980 on 7".


title: Lili Marleen

text: Most likely re-issued in the 1970s, it was originally released in the Netherlands on 7" by Brunswick Records. This version of the single was re-issued again in the UK in 1989, and in 1992 it was issued in Germany, both by MCA, the 1989 re-issue also having been released by Old Gold Records.


title: Lili Marleen

text: Released in 1959 by Philips Records in association with Columbia Records on 7" in the Netherlands, it was intended as an abridged extended play version of an internationally released compilation album of the same name, consisting of songs sung in German by Dietrich.


title: Lili Marleen

text: American entertainer Connie Francis recorded "Lili Marlene" on 3 June 1961. She recorded the single's B-side, "Mond von Mexico", on 5 October 1961. Both songs were recorded in Vienna, Austria, at the Austrophon Studio. The single was released in 1962, marking her seventh single in German. Francis also recorded the song in Italian and French. Her version of "Lili Marleen" peaked at number 9 on the German music charts.


title: Lili Marleen

text: French singer Amanda Lear recorded a Eurodisco cover of the song in 1978 and released it as the B-side of the single "Gold" as well as a standalone single. The German-English language version later appeared on her third studio LP "Never Trust a Pretty Face". French editions of the album included a German-French version of the track.


title: Lili Marleen

text: The singer later re-recorded the song for her albums "Cadavrexquis" (1993) and "Heart" (2001), the latter version with updated lyrics, written by Norbert Schultze shortly before his passing.


title: Lili Marleen

text: The Italian version, translated by lyricist Nino Rastelli and recorded in 1942 by Lina Termini, was probably the first to be released; the earliest English language recording of the song was probably Anne Shelton's, but other cover versions followed. A version called "The D-Day Dodgers" with words by Harry Pynn was sung by the allied troops in Italy once the Normandy invasion had begun in 1944. A recording was made by Perry Como on 27 June 1944 and issued by RCA Victor on 78 rpm (catalog number 20-1592-A) with the flip side "First Class Private Mary Brown". This recording was later re-issued as catalog number 20-2824-A with flip side "I Love You Truly". The song reached chart position #13 on the United States charts. The song was recorded during the musicians' strike and consequently has a backing chorus instead of an orchestral backup. A version with French words by Henri Lemarchand was recorded by Suzy Solidor in 1941.


title: Lili Marleen

text: Lilly Hodácová recorded the first version in Czech, shortly before the end of the war. Other artists who recorded the song included Hildegarde (on Decca), Bing Crosby (recorded 30 December 1947), Martha Tilton (on Coral), and Vaughn Monroe (on V-Disc). Al Martino revived the song for Capitol Records in 1968. Another version was recorded in the 1960s by Hank Locklin, Connie Francis and Vera Lynn. A German version of the song also covered by Edith 'Lolita' Zuser. An instrumental version was also covered by Billy Vaughn. Hank Snow also recorded a version in 1963 on his album "I've Been Everywhere". Another French singer, Patricia Kaas used "Lili Marlene" as an intro for her song "D'Allemagne" and sang the entire song during concerts in the 1990s. Matia Bazar (Italy) recorded an uptempo beat song called "Lili Marleen" on her 1982 album "Berlino, Parigi, Londra". The song is a "spoken words" early 1980s dance track. Spanish group Olé Olé, led by Marta Sánchez, released an electro-pop version of the song in 1985. It became one of the best-selling singles in Spain of the 1980s, and paved way for the singer to have a successful career. The song was eventually included in the also best-selling album "Bailando sin salir de casa" in 1986. German blackmetal band Eisregen recorded a version of "Lili Marlene" on their album "Hexenhaus". The German Gothic metal/Industrial metal band Atrocity released the song in both languages (English & German) on "Gemini": on the blue edition was the German version, and on the red edition was the English version. Kid Creole and the Coconuts included an uptempo, disco-influenced version of "Lili Marlene", with German lyrics sung by Coconut Adriana Kaegi, on their 1980 debut LP release "Off the Coast of Me". Carly Simon recorded the song as the third track on her 1997 Arista CD "Film Noir". It has also been translated into Hawaiian by Kiope Raymond, and recorded by Raymond and Pearl Rose on Rose's 2000 album "Homecoming". Most recently it was recorded by Neil Hannon of the Irish pop group The Divine Comedy as a B-side to the 2006 single "A Lady of a Certain Age". A slow-tempo instrumental version can be found on the compilation LP, "Vienna: City of Dreams", by the Austrian zither master Anton Karas. "Lili Marlene" has been adopted as the regimental slow march by the Special Air Service, Special Air Service Regiment and Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, and its melody is the basis of the official march of Kodam III/Siliwangi in the Indonesian Army.


title: Lili Marleen

text: During WWII Soviet counterpropaganda officer (and future dissident) Lev Kopelev wrote a parody of the original song for demoralization of enemy soldiers. The original text (in German) of this parody is lost, but famous Russian poet Joseph Brodsky wrote a poem in Russian, based on this parody. The poem is quite different from the original German song, though many Russians think the Brodsky version is an exact translation.


title: Lili Marleen

text: It has been sung and marched as 'passacaille' and slow march by the Military of Chile in its adaptation to the Spanish Language.


title: Lili Marleen

text: It is also adapted to Indonesian as "March of Siliwangi Division" of the Indonesian Army. It was first sung by the Siliwangi Division while marching from West Java to Yogyakarta as a result of the Renville Agreement with the Dutch Government in February 1948. The song has 2 languages in 1 song, Indonesian and Sundanese (language used by the people of West Java). See following song.


title: Lili Marleen

text: Humphrey Jennings directed the 29-minute-long film "The True Story of Lili Marlene" in 1944 about the song.


title: Lili Marleen

text: The song features prominently in "Lili Marlene" (1950), starring Lisa Daniely. The film tells a fictionalised version of the story of the woman (played by Daniely) who purportedly inspired the song.


title: Lili Marleen

text: The song is sung in a bar in Germany in the 1961 film "Judgment at Nuremberg". In a scene featuring Marlene Dietrich (who recorded the song several times), and Spencer Tracy, Dietrich's character explains to Tracy's that the German words are much sadder than the English translations.


title: Lili Marleen

text: The song's popularity among both Allied and Axis troops in the Western Desert front during World War Two was described in the British television program "The World at War", a documentary series broadcast in 1973-74 and narrated by Laurence Olivier, in Episode 8, "The Desert: North Africa 1940-1943".


title: Lili Marleen

text: Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed the 1980 film "Lili Marleen", the story of Lale Andersen and her version of the song.


title: Lili Marleen

text: In 1981 Matia Bazar inserted a cover of Lili Marleen, in the original German language, on their album "Berlino, Parigi, Londra" (Side A - track 1).


title: Lili Marleen

text: The song is featured prominently in a scene of a 1983 Yugoslavian film "Balkan Express" set during World War II. In the scene, a bar singer (portrayed by popular folk singer Toma Zdravković) refuses to sing the song to some German soldiers who then escort him out of the bar. Later in the scene, he returns to the stage and is depicted singing the song with blood on his face, implying he had been persuaded into singing by beating.


title: Lili Marleen

text: Estonian punk rock band Vennaskond released an Estonian version of the song on their album "Usk. Lootus. Armastus." in 1993. Another Estonian group, Swing Swindlers, recorded a melancholy swinging version in 2007 (both in German and Estonian) and featured the song in their film "Berlin 1945: Musik Unter Bomben" with vocals by Mart Sander, Kelli Uustani, Nele-Liis Vaiksoo, and Pirjo Levandi.


title: Lili Marleen

text: The 2009 film "Bad Day to Go Fishing", directed by Alvaro Brechner, showed an uncontrollable titan (Jouko Ahola) who could only be appeased by the melody of "Lili Marlene".


title: The Blue Nile

text: The Blue Nile is a Scottish pop band from Glasgow. The group's early music was built heavily on synthesizers and electronic instrumentation and percussion, although later works featured guitar more prominently. Following early championing by established artists such as Rickie Lee Jones and Peter Gabriel (the band later worked with both acts), the Blue Nile gained critical acclaim, particularly for its first two albums "A Walk Across the Rooftops" and "Hats", and some commercial success in both the UK and the US, which led to the band working with a wide range of musicians from the late 1980s onwards.


title: The Blue Nile

text: The Blue Nile's highest chart placement came when "Tinseltown in the Rain" reached No. 28 in the Netherlands in 1984, their only Dutch charting song. The band has had four top 75 hits on the UK Singles Chart, the highest being "Saturday Night" which reached No. 50 in 1991. In the United States, "The Downtown Lights" was its only chart entry, peaking at No. 10 on "Billboard"'s Alternative Songs chart.


title: The Blue Nile

text: The band members have also gained a reputation for their avoidance of publicity, their idiosyncratic dealings with the recording industry and their perfectionism and slow work rate, which has resulted in the release of just four albums since the group's formation in 1981. The group appears to have disbanded since the release of the fourth album "High" in 2004, although there has never been any official confirmation.


title: The Blue Nile

text: In 2006, Buchanan had a top 10 hit in the UK when he featured on Texas' song, "Sleep", which reached No. 6.


title: The Blue Nile

text: Paul Buchanan (born 16 April 1956, Edinburgh, Scotland) and his childhood friend Robert Bell grew up together in Glasgow and both attended the University of Glasgow in the late 1970s, Buchanan gaining a degree in literature and medieval history, Bell in mathematics. Buchanan's civil servant father had been a semi-professional musician and had musical instruments in the house, but it was only after he and Bell had graduated that Buchanan began to think seriously about a career in music.


title: The Blue Nile

text: Although Buchanan had grown up in the same neighbourhood as Paul Joseph "PJ" Moore, they only became well acquainted at university, where Moore was studying electronics, and the three friends became part of a band, first known as McIntyre (named after the John McIntyre Building, the university's administrative offices) and then Night by Night, although Buchanan later commented that Night by Night only played "twice, maybe three times" in it short existence. The band struggled to retain a settled line-up and, by 1981, Buchanan, Bell and Moore were the only remaining members. They decided not to recruit anybody else, trading in a guitar for an effect pedal and borrowing an old drum machine that only played Hispanic American music rhythms. Buchanan later recalled, "We went and gigged, because we needed the money, we'd do gigs where we'd do cover versions with the cassette of Latin American rhythms. And we were terrible. But we picked songs that were so completely durable and well known that people recognized them. No matter how badly we mangled them."


title: The Blue Nile

text: Renaming themselves the Blue Nile (after the title of the 1962 book by Alan Moorehead), the group managed to raise enough money to record and release its first single, "I Love This Life", on their own Peppermint Records label. Only a limited number were produced, but one found its way to RSO Records via their friend and engineer Calum Malcolm. Malcolm had been a member of short-lived Edinburgh punk band The Headboys who had released their records on the RSO label, and he still had contacts with the company. RSO licensed the single for distribution, but almost as soon as the record was released RSO went bankrupt and was absorbed into the PolyGram recording company, and the single consequently disappeared.


title: The Blue Nile

text: Undaunted by this setback, they continued to play gigs around Glasgow, starting to write their own songs alongside the cover versions they were playing. Having no drummer and with limited musical ability, particularly in Buchanan's guitar playing (he later admitted that "we could play a little, but I was the worst by a long way"), the newly formed Blue Nile adopted an atmospheric, electronic approach primarily out of pragmatism. The band also made the most of their imagination, thrift and mechanical ingenuity. Buchanan recalled, "PJ had bought a tray from a waiter. It was made of zinc and it made a good noise when you hit it. We sampled it and PJ made a pad to trigger it from for £3. It was all very primitive back then — you had to hit it about two seconds before you wanted the sound to appear in the song."


title: The Blue Nile

text: The most commonly told story about the Blue Nile is that in 1983 they were approached by local a hi-fi manufacturer, Linn Products, and asked to produce a song that would showcase the Linn equipment to best effect. Linn was so pleased with the resulting record that it offered the Blue Nile a contract to make a whole album, and set up its own record label specifically to release it.


title: The Blue Nile

text: In interviews, both Buchanan and Moore have categorically denied that Linn approached the band to make a record for them, or that the record company influenced the album's sound in any way at all, with Moore saying, "It was a myth that we were a 'hi-fi band signed to a hi-fi company'. We just got lucky that we'd found our way to an excellent engineer who knew the company." The engineer in question was Calum Malcolm, with whom the band had already recorded some demos in his Castlesound studio near Edinburgh. Since Malcolm was a friend of Linn's founder Ivor Tiefenbrun, and had ties with the company, his studio was fitted out with Linn equipment. When Linn representatives visited one day and asked to hear some music to test out their new speakers, Malcolm played them the demo of "Tinseltown in the Rain". Impressed, Linn offered the band a contract with the record label it was in the process of setting up. Despite the fact that the group took nine months to reply to Linn's offer, the contract was eventually signed and its first album, "A Walk Across the Rooftops", was released as Linn Records' first album in May 1984.


title: The Blue Nile

text: On its release, "A Walk Across the Rooftops" gained widespread acclaim from music critics for its mixture of sparse, detailed electronic sounds and Buchanan's soulful vocals, later described as a "fusion of chilly technology and a pitch of confessional, romantic soul". In 1984, the band gained greater exposure in Europe, with the videos for their two singles, "Stay" and "Tinseltown in the Rain", often shown on the video channel Music Box. The band's profile began to grow, although its existence remained precarious. Buchanan commented, "I've always found it strange that people missed the 'punk' aspect of "A Walk Across the Rooftops". We were living in a flat in Glasgow with no hot water. We barely knew what we were doing and that was very liberating."


title: The Blue Nile

text: Keen to capitalise on the positive critical reception awarded to "A Walk Across the Rooftops", Linn sent the band back to Castlesound studio early in 1985 to produce a quick follow-up record. However, as the band later admitted, there was no new material ready to record, and they were not happy with the songs they were producing under pressure in the studio. The lack of progress led to stress and arguments among the band members, and matters were not helped when Virgin Records, to whom Linn had licensed the band's records, began legal proceedings against the group and the label for not producing the new material stipulated in the licensing agreement. After two years with almost nothing to show for its efforts, the band was forced to leave the studio to make way for another band, and had to return home to Glasgow. Away from the pressures of the studio, the group overcame the writer's block and, eventually returning to Castlesound in 1988, was able to rapidly complete a new album.


title: The Blue Nile

text: "Hats" was released in October 1989 to rave reviews, including a rare five-star rating from "Q" magazine. Warmer and smoother sounding than the first album, and exploring the highs and lows of romantic love, "Hats" peaked at #12 on the UK Albums Chart. It was also the group's breakthrough record in the US, where it reached #108 on the US "Billboard" 200 album charts in May 1990. All three singles released in the UK from the album made the top 75 in the UK Singles Chart.


title: The Blue Nile

text: The Blue Nile's first live public performance after making "A Walk Across the Rooftops" was in December 1989 on the television programme "Halfway to Paradise", a Scottish-based arts magazine show broadcast on Channel 4. The band also composed and performed the theme tune for the programme, later released as a single B-side. The band played two songs with the American singer Rickie Lee Jones (who had recently befriended the band and had become one of its biggest supporters), performing her own "Flying Cowboys" and the Blue Nile's "Easter Parade". The duet version of "Easter Parade" was used as the B-side of both Jones's 1990 single, "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying", and the 12" single of "Headlights on the Parade". During 1990, the Blue Nile supported Jones on her US tour (their experience in America was filmed by BBC Scotland for a documentary titled "Flags and Fences"), followed by a tour of the UK culminating in two homecoming gigs in September 1990 at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, becoming the first non-classical band to play at the newly opened venue.


title: The Blue Nile

text: The radio play gained by "Hats" in the US, in particular the single "The Downtown Lights", brought the Blue Nile to the attention of several well-known US-based musicians. In 1991, the band was invited to Los Angeles to work on songs by Julian Lennon, Robbie Robertson and Michael McDonald. As a result, Buchanan moved to Los Angeles and lived there for a while, and had a relationship with the actress Rosanna Arquette between 1991 and 1993. Speaking about that period of his life Buchanan said, "It really was interesting. I have to say it was lived in all earnest ... And there was much good there, I enjoyed it, I really enjoyed it ... The great thing all the time was you were constantly wanting to phone friends and say, Guess who's in the shop? Guess who's in the supermarket? I'm not immune to all that. In the movies—celluloid's better than life isn't it? It makes everything glossy. I don't mean it's better, but it's so glamorous, I met lots of people—it was fascinating." The band also worked on Annie Lennox's first solo album, "Diva", co-writing the track "The Gift". Lennox later covered "The Downtown Lights" (from "Hats") for her second album, "Medusa", released in 1995.


title: The Blue Nile

text: Having been let go by Linn and Virgin Records, the group signed a deal with Warner Bros. Records in 1992, although it later transpired that Buchanan had made the deal by himself without informing his bandmates. His explanation was that "none of the others were in town at the time". The band decided that it wanted to find somewhere private to record its new album with its portable studio, and began travelling around Europe searching for suitable locations. Having spent two years looking at and dismissing locations in cities such as Venice, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, the record was finally recorded piecemeal over three locations in Paris, Dublin and Los Angeles.


title: The Blue Nile

text: In June 1996, seven years after "Hats", the Blue Nile released a third album, entitled "Peace at Last". It displayed a marked difference in style to the first two albums, with Buchanan's acoustic guitar work more to the fore. Buchanan recalled that he had bought the guitar in a New York music shop, and by coincidence Robert Bell had seen the guitar earlier the same day and called Buchanan to tell him about it. A gospel choir made a brief appearance on the first single, "Happiness". Despite the release of "Peace at Last" on a major label, critical reaction to the album was more mixed than for the band's previous records, although sales were good, entering the UK album chart at #13.


title: The Blue Nile

text: In 1997, the Blue Nile appointed a full-time manager for the first time - the experienced ex-Dire Straits manager, Ed Bicknell - who extricated the group from the deal with Warner Bros. He also attempted to persuade the band to change its recording habits, but had little success. Bicknell parted ways with the band in 2004, later saying that "in terms of the modern recording world the history of the Blue Nile was the most screwed-up I had ever encountered". Following tour dates in 1996 and 1997, culminating in an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival in June 1997, the Blue Nile disappeared from public view for the next seven years, apart from an appearance at a 2001 tribute concert at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin for the Irish music presenter Uaneen Fitzsimons, following her death in a car crash. A remixed version of the single "Tinseltown in the Rain" was used as the theme song for the BBC Scotland TV series "Tinsel Town", broadcast in 2000 and 2001.


title: The Blue Nile

text: After the longest period yet between albums, the Blue Nile released "High" in August 2004. Part of the lengthy delay in making the record was due to Buchanan contracting a form of chronic fatigue syndrome which affected his health for two years, but as he explained on the album's release, it was mostly a result of the band's perfectionism taking hold once again, "We recorded an album and a half and ... we realised we weren't in love with it ... The vast majority of it we just dumped; we just put it to one side and didn't touch it any more." The album reached number 10 on the UK Albums Chart, the highest position to date for the band. Although acoustic guitar is still present on some tracks, the overall musical sound is more reminiscent of "Hats".


title: The Blue Nile

text: It became apparent during the recording of "High" that old tensions among the band members had resurfaced. Buchanan's comments in a 2012 interview seemed to indicate that the album was finished out of a sense of duty and loyalty rather than any willingness to do so. "When we eventually finished "High", I don't think it was bristling with the same joy and naivety we'd felt when we started. We'd gathered ourselves long enough to make it. It seemed to me a stoic record, to some extent a record about ourselves, though I didn't realise that 'til later. It was a collected and fairly stoic record which I was proud of and, in a sense, we just made ourselves focus. We showed up, we went into the room and worked, and whatever drift had set in we were loyal to each other and we knew we had to form the wagons into a circle."


title: The Blue Nile

text: During preparations for the tour in February 2005 following the album's release, Buchanan and Bell realised that Moore had stopped contacting them and would not be showing up for the tour. Although in interviews around the time Buchanan brushed aside questions about Moore's absence and insisted that they remained friends, he acknowledged years later that in fact he and Bell have had virtually no contact with Moore since the recording of "High".


title: The Blue Nile

text: Buchanan and Bell toured England and Scotland in May and June 2006, followed by Scotland and Ireland in November 2006, billed as "Paul Buchanan sings the songs of the Blue Nile", refraining from simply calling themselves the Blue Nile as a mark of respect for Moore's absence. The band consisted of Buchanan on vocals and guitar, Bell on bass guitar and keyboards, Alan Cuthbertson and Brendan Smith on keyboards, Stuart McCredie on guitar, and Liam Bradley on drums. On 14 July 2007, Buchanan and Bell played at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester as part of the Manchester International Festival. In July 2008, the band played shows at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Somerset House in London and the Radisson Hotel in Galway.


title: The Blue Nile

text: Although there has never been an official statement to clarify whether or not the Blue Nile still exists, the indications are that the band has split up. There appears to be disagreement among the band members themselves as to whether they will ever make another record together. Moore is emphatic that he will never rejoin the band, saying in communications sent in 2010 to the band's biographer that he was "finding it healthier to put all that behind me", and in a 2013 interview his terse reply to the question of a reunion was, "I think stuff happened that was simply beyond the pale. It's a shame, but if the feeling for sitting down together really isn't there, then continuing to do so even because you want to is pointless." On the other hand, Buchanan has not given up hope that the three members of the Blue Nile may make more music together in the future, saying, "I don't know where things stand with the other two guys ... In a way, I think it would be the right and proper thing to do but I'll just need to wait and see. If the others say let's do this ... Certainly, if I bump into them on a corner my hope would be that we could say: so what are you doing tomorrow?" He also lamented the estrangement with Moore, saying, "We're inhibited by the Scottish male thing where you have to give the other guy space, but I love PJ and there isn't a month goes by where I don't think about phoning him".


title: The Blue Nile

text: In September 2010, a biography of the Blue Nile by the Scottish journalist Allan Brown, titled "Nileism: The Strange Course of the Blue Nile", was published. Although Brown was a long-time acquaintance of Buchanan, he found Buchanan reluctant to participate, and both Bell and Moore refused Brown's invitations for interviews or any co-operation with the book's writing.


title: The Blue Nile

text: In May 2012, Buchanan released his first solo album, "Mid Air", a collection of short, stripped-back songs mostly with just Buchanan's voice and piano, recorded with Calum Malcolm's son Cameron as the album's engineer and released on Buchanan's own Newsroom Records label. In a radio interview, Buchanan mentioned that towards the end of the recording process he had called in Robert Bell to help out on two tracks ("Mid Air" and "My True Country") that neither he nor Cameron Malcolm were satisfied with. Bell also later remixed "Buy a Motor Car", which appeared on the deluxe edition of the album released in October 2012. The album peaked at number 14 on the UK Albums Chart of 2 June 2012, and its title track, "Mid Air", was used a year later in the Richard Curtis film, "About Time".


title: The Blue Nile

text: In November 2012, Virgin Records released two-CD "Collector's Edition" versions of the band's first two albums, "A Walk Across the Rooftops" and "Hats". Each version had the original album remastered by engineer Calum Malcolm, along with a bonus disc of rare and previously unreleased material selected by Buchanan and Bell. A similar reissue of the third album, "Peace at Last", was released on 3 March 2014.


title: The Blue Nile

text: In July 2016, Buchanan took part in the David Bowie Prom at the Royal Albert Hall, performing "Ashes to Ashes", "I Can't Give Everything Away" and, as a duet with Laura Mvula, "Girl Loves Me".


title: The Blue Nile

text: In 2019, the band's major label albums were re-issued on vinyl, with a re-issue of "High" charting at number 74 in the UK charts after being released by Confetti Records on 5 June 2020 as vinyl or double CD edition.


title: The Blue Nile

text: The band has influenced future musicians such as Duncan Sheik, who covered the song "Stay", as well as Wild Beasts. The 1975 lead singer Matt Healy labeled The Blue Nile his "favorite band of all time" and declared "Hats" to be his "favorite record of the ‘80s." Healy would describe The 1975's 2018 song "Love It If We Made It" as the "Blue Nile on steroids", while critics drew comparisons between the song's construction and that of "The Downtown Lights".


title: The Blue Nile

text: Four unreleased tracks from the "Rooftops" and "Hats" sessions can be found on bootleg recordings. These include:


title: The Blue Nile

text: An instrumental version of "Stay Close" from "High" was available as an MP3 download from the band's website. The remixed version of "Soul Boy" that appeared on the "She Saw The World" single was also available as an MP3 download.


title: The Blue Nile

text: A remixed version of "Tinseltown in the Rain" was used as the theme music for the BBC Scotland drama series "Tinsel Town".


title: The Blue Nile

text: Buchanan played a number of new tracks in his 2006 solo shows which are regarded by many fans as unreleased Blue Nile songs. These can be found on live bootlegs, and include:


title: Kenzie (songwriter)

text: Kim Yeon-jung (Hangul: 김연정), known professionally as Kenzie, is a South Korean songwriter and record producer who signed under SM Entertainment. She has composed, arranged and written mostly songs for SM artists such as BoA, Isak N Jiyeon, Super Junior, The Grace, TVXQ, Girls' Generation, Shinee, f(x), Exo, Red Velvet, SuperM, and NCT, as well as non-SM acts such as Twice, CIX, and The Boyz.


title: Kenzie (songwriter)

text: Kim is a '99 Alumna of Berklee College of Music, having majored in music production and engineering (MP&E). She moved to the US to further her studies though her goal was still to be a music producer and composer in her native country, South Korea. Although she had been trained in classical music and knew how to play piano and trumpet, she had acquainted herself with the pop scene, and through the knowledge of the success of S.M. Entertainment groups like S.E.S. and H.O.T., she set herself a goal to work with S.M., which she accomplished after graduating and meeting the CEO Lee Soo-man himself.


title: Kenzie (songwriter)

text: Her favorite songs of her own are the top selling number 1 hits, BoA's "My Name" and Girls' Generation's debut song "Into The New World", "Oh!" , alongside f(x)'s debut song "La Cha Ta". For future goals, she wants to expand her horizons in the music field and work with American and European artists to further explore and showcase the multi-cultural sound of her music, which includes Western and Eastern influences.


title: Kenzie (songwriter)

text: In 2018, she was also in charge of arranging the debut song for girl-group Nature under n.CH Entertainment titled "Allegro Cantabile". It was a remake of the anime opening title song "Nodame Cantabile".


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: The Merkur XR4Ti is a performance-oriented 3-door hatchback sold in North America from 1985 to 1989. A product of the Ford Motor Company, the car was a version of the European Ford Sierra adapted to U.S. regulations. The XR4Ti project was championed by Ford vice president Bob Lutz.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: The Sierra was the successor to Ford of Europe's Cortina/Taunus and was developed while Lutz was chairman of Ford's European operations. Due to financial restrictions the decision was made to keep the front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout of its predecessor and pursue improved fuel economy through advanced aerodynamics. The Probe III design study unveiled at the 1981 Frankfurt Motor Show indicated the direction Ford would take with the Sierra. Responsibility for the Sierra design was handled by vice president for design Uwe Bahnsen and chief stylist Patrick le Quément. The Sierra was released in Europe in September 1982, and the performance-oriented XR4i appeared in 1983, slotted into the lineup above the Fiesta-based XR2 and Escort-based XR3.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Lutz spearheaded the plan to bring a version of the XR4i to North America to compete with sporty luxury imports like BMW. Although the car would have to be modified his instructions were that the nature of the car not be compromised. The XR4 for America would be turbocharged, adding a `T' to its name while keeping the `i' indicating a fuel injected engine as in Europe. The `Sierra' name was not used in North America as it was already being used by General Motors for their GMC C/K Sierra pickup truck, and sounded too similar to the Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: With their own production lines occupied building Sierras for the European market, Ford contracted out assembly of the XR4Ti. Using body panels from Ford's factory in Genk, the cars were largely hand-built by Wilhelm Karmann GmbH in Rheine, Germany. The XR4Ti was introduced at a starting price of US$16,503 ().


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Chief executive officer Pete Petersen decided that the car would be sold under the `Merkur' brand name. The name means `Mercury' in German, and tied the new brand in with the Lincoln-Mercury dealers through which the car would be available. Initially, 800 Lincoln-Mercury dealers enrolled to also become Merkur dealers.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Ford projected sales of 16,000 to 20,000 units per year. These targets were never met, although for the first two years they came close, with over 25,000 units sold. The car continued to struggle to establish its identity in the North American market, both with the public and with dealers.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: The increasingly unfavorable dollar/Deutschmark exchange rate put upward pressure on price. By the late 1980s the XR4Ti was facing a redesign to comply with incoming safety regulations in the US. Ford dropped the `Merkur' name in 1988, and began to refer to their two European imports by their model names only. Sales dropped off very rapidly after 1986, so that in its last year fewer than 3,000 XR4Tis were sold. 1989 was the last year for the XR4Ti.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: The XR4Ti was the last vehicle imported by Ford into North America from Germany until 2016, when the Ford Focus RS was introduced.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: The XR4Ti kept the 3-door semi-notchback hatchback body style of the XR4i, including the European version's triple side-window profile and bi-plane rear spoiler. The lower body was clad in polycarbonate `anti-abrasion' panels that were matte grey in the early cars. The car recorded a drag coefficient (formula_1) of 0.328.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: The unibody chassis of the European Ford Sierra was modified to meet US safety requirements. The floorpan had reliefs added to accommodate catalytic converters. Side intrusion beams were added to the two doors and the bumpers were stretched to meet US impact requirements. To accommodate the engine for the US-spec car the XR4Ti also received a taller hood. Altogether 850 unique parts were developed for the car destined for the US and Canada, and all of the changes added approximately to the weight.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Suspension was independent front and back. The front suspension comprised Macpherson struts with concentric coil springs and lower lateral links triangulated by an anti-roll bar. The rear suspension used semi-trailing arms with coil springs ahead of the axle half-shafts and shock absorbers behind. An anti-roll bar was also fitted at the rear. Spring rates were softened compared to the XR4i based on feedback from Jackie Stewart, who had been brought in as both a development tester and spokesman for the car. Steering was by a power-assisted rack and pinion with 3.6 turns lock-to-lock. Brakes were disks in front and drums at rear. The car had a two-piece driveshaft and used a giubo as a torsional damper.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: While the European XR4i was powered by a 2.8 L version of the Ford Cologne V6 engine, the only engine offered in the XR4Ti was a turbocharged Lima inline-four. This engine featured a cast-iron block, cast iron cylinder head with 2 valves per cylinder and a single overhead cam driven by a timing belt. The XR4Ti engine also received a Garrett AiResearch turbocharger, fuel-injection and Ford's EEC-IV engine control unit. Built in Ford's Taubaté Brazil plant, the engine had a bore of and stroke of for a total displacement of . A nearly identical engine was used in the 1983 Mustang Turbo GT and 1983 Thunderbird Turbo coupe. The XR4Ti did not have the intercooler found in the 1984 SVO Mustang or 1987-88 Thunderbird Turbo coupe. Engines in cars equipped with automatic transmissions had maximum boost set to and produced . In cars with manual transmissions maximum boost was raised to and the ECU programming was modified to allow the engine to produce .


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: The second-order vibrations produced by this large four cylinder engine had been noticeable when it was used in the turbocharged Thunderbird and Cougar models. To minimize these in the XR4Ti without resorting to extreme measures such as adding balance shafts, extensive work was done to reduce noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) in the power-train. The first measure taken to reduce NVH was to redesign the engine's external components, including the intake manifold, to increase the stiffness of the bracketing and lighten the components. The second measure was to reduce the amount of vibration transmitted to the body structure by using soft rubber engine mounts. Engine roll was controlled by wide-based mounting brackets and engine movement due to bumps was limited by having the brackets attached to the body via hydraulic mounts.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: The base transmission was a 5-speed manual Ford Type 9 unit, while a Ford C3 3-speed automatic transmission was optional.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: In addition to the changes above many modifications were incorporated as Technical Service Bulletins.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: A number of automotive customizers produced versions of the XR4Ti that offered increased performance and improved handling. Among these companies were Roush, Rapido, and RC Consultants. These versions were often sold as either owner-installed kits or pre-built vehicles. One such special, built by Ralph Todd and called the "Scorch XS" replaced the Ford engine with a Nissan VG30DETT twin-turbocharged V6. Only one of these US$50,000 conversions was built; Scorch Prototype #001. The other Scorch cars were never completed and ultimately dismantled.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Ford only offered one special edition of the XR4Ti when, in a 1987 tie-in with ski manufacturer K2 Sports, the XR4Ti K2 appeared. This all-white model came with colored "K2" logos on the front fenders and a roof-mounted ski rack. No mechanical changes were made to the K2 version.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: In their September 1984 road test of the XR4Ti "Car & Driver" magazine reported a 0-60 mph time of 7.0 seconds, a 1/4 mile time of 15.5 seconds and a top speed of . In later tests by the same magazine the car took 7.8 seconds to accelerate from 0-60 mph, leading the testers to speculate that the earlier press car might have been a ringer, a not-uncommon practice at the time. In their test data they stated the press car came with a limited slip differential, something that was not offered as standard or an option for the XR4Ti during its production. The first test car returned a combined city/highway fuel economy of , and generated 0.80 Gs of lateral acceleration.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Numbers from the March 1985 road test by "Road & Track" magazine are comparable. Their car ran from 0-60 mph in 7.9 seconds and reached the end of the quarter mile in 16.0 seconds. Lateral acceleration was measured at 0.767 Gs and the car ran through the R&T slalom at a speed of 59.7 mph. Their car's fuel economy was measured as .


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Contemporary reviews of the car often mention either the non-intuitive pronunciation of the brand name or the car's polarizing appearance. Most praise the car's handling, while recognizing areas where it falls short of expectations. Some felt the car showed more body roll while cornering than desired. The disk/drum brake system was felt to be adequate but not outstanding. Others were disappointed that no anti-lock was offered. While "Car and Driver's" first report went into great detail about Ford's efforts to reduce NVH, their later tests reported that there was still noticeable vibration in the drive-line. Effective use of the car has hampered by what some felt was the engine's narrow power band.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Even after production ended the car continued to provoke widely differing opinions. The XR4Ti was on "Car and Driver's" Ten Best list for 1985. In 2009 however, the magazine listed that honor as one of the "most embarrassing" awards in automotive history.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: In addition to "Car and Driver"'s change of heart some have numbered the XR4Ti among the 10 worst cars ever made, and "not (Ford's) finest hour".


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: On the other hand, other articles have called it one of the 10 best forgotten cars, and a car that had unfairly received a bad reputation.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Despite the XR4Ti never being sold outside of the United States and Canada, Andy Rouse campaigned one in the British Saloon Car Championship. Rouse took the overall title for the 1985 season and the class title for 1986 with 14 wins. In 1986, Eggenberger Motorsport was among the few to use an XR4Ti to compete in the European Touring Car Championship and the Deutsche Tourenwagen Meisterschaft (German Touring Car Championship) with positive results. Ford used technical feedback from the teams racing the XR4Ti to develop the 1986 Ford Sierra RS Cosworth, which first appeared on race tracks in 1987 and was superseded in mid-1987 by the Ford Sierra RS500. Some of the body panels used to stiffen the Sierra chassis and create the Merkur shell were subsequently branded 909 Motorsport parts for later adaptation to a Sierra shell. Many see the successes and failures of the XR4Ti as being the blueprint for success of the dominant RS500 Sierras.


title: Merkur XR4Ti

text: Between 1986 and 1987, Pete Halsmer and Scott Pruett campaigned the Roush-prepped XR4Ti, although of a tubeframe construction like that of a silhouette racing car, to take the Trans-Am Series title. Along with Paul Miller, the pair also campaigned an XR4Ti successfully in the IMSA series in 1988.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Italian Renaissance painting is the painting of the period beginning in the late 13th century and flourishing from the early 15th to late 16th centuries, occurring in the Italian Peninsula, which was at that time divided into many political states, some independent but others controlled by external powers. The painters of Renaissance Italy, although often attached to particular courts and with loyalties to particular towns, nonetheless wandered the length and breadth of Italy, often occupying a diplomatic status and disseminating artistic and philosophical ideas.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The city of Florence in Tuscany is renowned as the birthplace of the Renaissance, and in particular of Renaissance painting, although later in the era Rome and Venice assumed increasing importance in painting. A detailed background is given in the companion articles Renaissance art and Renaissance architecture.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Italian Renaissance painting is most often divided into four periods: the Proto-Renaissance (1300–1425), the Early Renaissance (1425–1495), the High Renaissance (1495–1520), and Mannerism (1520–1600). The dates for these periods represent the overall trend in Italian painting and do not cover all painters as the lives of individual artists and their personal styles overlapped these periods.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The Proto-Renaissance begins with the professional life of the painter Giotto and includes Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna and Altichiero. The Early Renaissance style was started by Masaccio and then further developed by Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Sandro Botticelli, Verrocchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Giovanni Bellini. The High Renaissance period was that of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Coreggio, Giorgione, the latter works of Giovanni Bellini, and Titian. The Mannerist period, dealt with in a separate article, included the latter works of Michelangelo, as well as Pontormo, Parmigianino, Bronzino and Tintoretto.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The influences upon the development of Renaissance painting in Italy are those that also affected Philosophy, Literature, Architecture, Theology, Science, Government and other aspects of society. The following is a summary of points dealt with more fully in the main articles that are cited above.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: A number of Classical texts, that had been lost to Western European scholars for centuries, became available. These included Philosophy, Poetry, Drama, Science, a thesis on the Arts and Early Christian Theology. The resulting interest in Humanist philosophy meant that man's relationship with humanity, the universe and with God was no longer the exclusive province of the Church. A revived interest in the Classics brought about the first archaeological study of Roman remains by the architect Brunelleschi and sculptor Donatello. The revival of a style of architecture based on classical precedents inspired a corresponding classicism in painting, which manifested itself as early as the 1420s in the paintings of Masaccio and Paolo Uccello.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Simultaneous with gaining access to the Classical texts, Europe gained access to advanced mathematics which had its provenance in the works of Byzantine and Islamic scholars.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The advent of movable type printing in the 15th century meant that ideas could be disseminated easily, and an increasing number of books were written for a broad public. The development of oil paint and its introduction to Italy had lasting effects on the art of painting.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The establishment of the Medici Bank and the subsequent trade it generated brought unprecedented wealth to a single Italian city, Florence. Cosimo de' Medici set a new standard for patronage of the arts, not associated with the church or monarchy. The serendipitous presence within the region of Florence of certain individuals of artistic genius, most notably Giotto, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, formed an ethos that supported and encouraged many lesser artists to achieve work of extraordinary quality.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: A similar heritage of artistic achievement occurred in Venice through the talented Bellini family, their influential inlaw Mantegna, Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Much painting of the Renaissance period was commissioned by or for the Catholic Church. These works were often of large scale and were frequently cycles painted in fresco of "the Life of Christ", the "Life of the Virgin" or the life of a saint, particularly St. Francis of Assisi. There were also many allegorical paintings on the theme of Salvation and the role of the Church in attaining it. Churches also commissioned altarpieces, which were painted in tempera on panel and later in oil on canvas. Apart from large altarpieces, small devotional pictures were produced in very large numbers, both for churches and for private individuals, the most common theme being the "Madonna and Child".


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Throughout the period, civic commissions were also important. Local government buildings were decorated with frescoes and other works both secular, such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "The Allegory of Good and Bad Government", and religious, such as Simone Martini's fresco of the "Maestà", in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Portraiture was uncommon in the 14th and early 15th centuries, mostly limited to civic commemorative pictures such as the equestrian portraits of Guidoriccio da Fogliano by Simone Martini, 1327, in Siena and, of the early 15th century, John Hawkwood by Uccello in Florence Cathedral and its companion portraying Niccolò da Tolentino by Andrea del Castagno.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: During the 15th century portraiture became common, initially often formalised profile portraits but increasingly three-quarter face, bust-length portraits. Patrons of art works such as altarpieces and fresco cycles often were included in the scenes, a notable example being the inclusion of the Sassetti and Medici families in Domenico Ghirlandaio's cycle in the Sassetti Chapel. Portraiture was to become a major subject for High Renaissance painters such as Raphael and Titian and continue into the Mannerist period in works of artists such as Bronzino.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: With the growth of Humanism, artists turned to Classical themes, particularly to fulfill commissions for the decoration of the homes of wealthy patrons, the best known being Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" for the Medici. Increasingly, Classical themes were also seen as providing suitable allegorical material for civic commissions. Humanism also influenced the manner in which religious themes were depicted, notably on Michelangelo's "Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel".


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Other motifs were drawn from contemporary life, sometimes with allegorical meaning, some sometimes purely decorative. Incidents important to a particular family might be recorded like those in the "Camera degli Sposi" that Mantegna painted for the Gonzaga family at Mantua. Increasingly, still lifes and decorative scenes from life were painted, such as "the Concert" by Lorenzo Costa of about 1490.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Important events were often recorded or commemorated in paintings such as Uccello's "Battle of San Romano", as were important local religious festivals. History and historic characters were often depicted in a way that reflected on current events or on the lives of current people. Portraits were often painted of contemporaries in the guise of characters from history or literature. The writings of Dante, Voragine's "Golden Legend" and Boccaccio's "The Decameron" were important sources of themes.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In all these subjects, increasingly, and in the works of almost all painters, certain underlying painterly practices were being developed: the observation of nature, the study of anatomy, of light, and perspective.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The art of the region of Tuscany in the late 13th century was dominated by two masters of the Italo-Byzantine style, Cimabue of Florence and Duccio of Siena. Their commissions were mostly religious paintings, several of them being very large altarpieces showing the Madonna and Child. These two painters, with their contemporaries, Guido of Siena, Coppo di Marcovaldo and the mysterious painter upon whose style the school may have been based, the so-called Master of St Bernardino, all worked in a manner that was highly formalised and dependent upon the ancient tradition of icon painting. In these tempera paintings many of the details were rigidly fixed by the subject matter, the precise position of the hands of the Madonna and Christ Child, for example, being dictated by the nature of the blessing that the painting invoked upon the viewer. The angle of the Virgin's head and shoulders, the folds in her veil, and the lines with which her features were defined had all been repeated in countless such paintings. Cimabue and Duccio took steps in the direction of greater naturalism, as did their contemporary, Pietro Cavallini of Rome.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Giotto (1266–1337), by tradition a shepherd boy from the hills north of Florence, became Cimabue's apprentice and emerged as the most outstanding painter of his time. Giotto, possibly influenced by Pietro Cavallini and other Roman painters, did not base the figures he painted upon any painterly tradition, but upon the observation of life. Unlike those of his Byzantine contemporaries, Giotto's figures are solidly three-dimensional; they stand squarely on the ground, have discernible anatomy and are clothed in garments with weight and structure. But more than anything, what set Giotto's figures apart from those of his contemporaries are their emotions. In the faces of Giotto's figures are joy, rage, despair, shame, spite and love. The cycle of frescoes of "the Life of Christ" and "the Life of the Virgin" that he painted in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua set a new standard for narrative pictures. His "Ognissanti Madonna" hangs in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, in the same room as Cimabue's "Santa Trinita Madonna" and Duccio's "Ruccellai Madonna" where the stylistic comparisons between the three can easily be made. One of the features apparent in Giotto's work is his observation of naturalistic perspective. He is regarded as the herald of the Renaissance.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Giotto had a number of contemporaries who were either trained and influenced by him, or whose observation of nature had led them in a similar direction. Although several of Giotto's pupils assimilated the direction that his work had taken, none was to become as successful as he. Taddeo Gaddi achieved the first large painting of a night scene in an "Annunciation to the Shepherds" in the Baroncelli Chapel of the Church of Santa Croce, Florence.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The paintings in the "Upper Church" of the Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi, are examples of naturalistic painting of the period, often ascribed to Giotto himself, but more probably the work of artists surrounding Pietro Cavallini. A late painting by Cimabue in the "Lower Church" at Assisi, of the "Madonna and St. Francis", also clearly shows greater naturalism than his panel paintings and the remains of his earlier frescoes in the upper church.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: A common theme in the decoration of Medieval churches was the Last Judgement, which in northern European churches frequently occupies a sculptural space above the west door, but in Italian churches such as Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel it is painted on the inner west wall. The Black Death of 1348 caused its survivors to focus on the need to approach death in a state of penitence and absolution. The inevitability of death, the rewards for the penitent and the penalties of sin were emphasised in a number of frescoes, remarkable for their grim depictions of suffering and their surreal images of the torments of Hell.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: These include the "Triumph of Death" by Giotto's pupil Orcagna, now in a fragmentary state at the Museum of Santa Croce, and the "Triumph of Death" in the Camposanto Monumentale at Pisa by an unknown painter, perhaps Francesco Traini or Buonamico Buffalmacco who worked on the other three of a series of frescoes on the subject of Salvation. It is unknown exactly when these frescoes were begun but it is generally presumed they post-date 1348.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Two important fresco painters were active in Padua in the late 14th century, Altichiero and Giusto de' Menabuoi. Giusto's masterpiece, the decoration of the Padua Baptistery, follows the theme of humanity's Creation, Downfall, and Salvation, also having a rare Apocalypse cycle in the small chancel. While the whole work is exceptional for its breadth, quality and intact state, the treatment of human emotion is conservative by comparison with that of Altichiero's "Crucifixion" at the Basilica of Sant'Antonio, also in Padua. Giusto's work relies on formalised gestures, where Altichiero relates the incidents surrounding Christ's death with great human drama and intensity.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In Florence, at the Spanish Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, Andrea di Bonaiuto was commissioned to emphasise the role of the Church in the redemptive process, and that of the Dominican Order in particular. His fresco "Allegory of the Active and Triumphant Church" is remarkable for its depiction of Florence Cathedral, complete with the dome which was not built until the following century.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: During the later 14th century, International Gothic was the style that dominated Tuscan painting. It can be seen to an extent in the work of Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, which is marked by a formalized sweetness and grace in the figures, and Late Gothic gracefulness in the draperies. The style is fully developed in the works of Simone Martini and Gentile da Fabriano, which have an elegance and a richness of detail, and an idealised quality not compatible with the starker realities of Giotto's paintings.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In the early 15th century, bridging the gap between International Gothic and the Renaissance are the paintings of Fra Angelico, many of which, being altarpieces in tempera, show the Gothic love of elaboration, gold leaf and brilliant colour. It is in his frescoes at his convent of Sant' Marco that Fra Angelico shows himself the artistic disciple of Giotto. These devotional paintings, which adorn the cells and corridors inhabited by the friars, represent episodes from the life of Jesus, many of them being scenes of the Crucifixion. They are starkly simple, restrained in colour and intense in mood as the artist sought to make spiritual revelations a visual reality.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The earliest truly Renaissance images in Florence date from 1401, although they are not paintings. That year a competition was held amongst seven young artists to select the artist to create a pair of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery, the oldest remaining church in the city. The competitors were each to design a bronze panel of similar shape and size, representing "the Sacrifice of Isaac".


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Two of the panels from the competition have survived, those by Lorenzo Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. Each panel shows some strongly classicising motifs indicating the direction that art and philosophy were moving, at that time. Ghiberti used the naked figure of Isaac to create a small sculpture in the Classical style. The figure kneels on a tomb decorated with acanthus scrolls that are also a reference to the art of Ancient Rome. In Brunelleschi's panel, one of the additional figures included in the scene is reminiscent of a well-known Roman bronze figure of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. Brunelleschi's creation is challenging in its dynamic intensity. Less elegant than Ghiberti's, it is more about human drama and impending tragedy.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Ghiberti won the competition. His first set of Baptistry doors took 27 years to complete, after which he was commissioned to make another. In the total of 50 years that Ghiberti worked on them, the doors provided a training ground for many of the artists of Florence. Being narrative in subject and employing not only skill in arranging figurative compositions but also the burgeoning skill of linear perspective, the doors were to have an enormous influence on the development of Florentine pictorial art.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The first Early Renaissance frescos or paintings were started in 1425 when two artists commenced painting a fresco cycle of "the Life of St. Peter" in the chapel of the Brancacci family, at the Carmelite Church in Florence. They both were called by the name of Tommaso and were nicknamed Masaccio and Masolino, Slovenly Tom and Little Tom.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: More than any other artist, Masaccio recognized the implications in the work of Giotto. He carried forward the practice of painting from nature. His frescos demonstrate an understanding of anatomy, of foreshortening, of linear perspective, of light, and the study of drapery. In the Brancacci Chapel, his "Tribute Money" fresco has a single vanishing point and uses a strong contrast between light and dark to convey a three-dimensional quality to the work. As well, the figures of "Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden", painted on the side of the arch into the chapel, are renowned for their realistic depiction of the human form and of human emotion. They contrast with the gentle and pretty figures painted by Masolino on the opposite side of "Adam and Eve receiving the forbidden fruit". The painting of the Brancacci Chapel was left incomplete when Masaccio died at 26 in 1428. The "Tribute Money" was completed by Masolino while the remainder of the work in the chapel was finished by Filippino Lippi in the 1480s. Masaccio's work became a source of inspiration to many later painters, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: During the first half of the 15th century, the achieving of the effect of realistic space in a painting by the employment of linear perspective was a major preoccupation of many painters, as well as the architects Brunelleschi and Alberti who both theorised about the subject. Brunelleschi is known to have done a number of careful studies of the piazza and octagonal baptistery outside Florence Cathedral and it is thought he aided Masaccio in the creation of his famous "trompe-l'œil" niche around the "Holy Trinity" he painted at Santa Maria Novella.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: According to Vasari, Paolo Uccello was so obsessed with perspective that he thought of little else and experimented with it in many paintings, the best known being the three "The Battle of San Romano" paintings (completed by 1450s) which use broken weapons on the ground, and fields on the distant hills to give an impression of perspective.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In the 1450s Piero della Francesca, in paintings such as "The Flagellation of Christ", demonstrated his mastery over linear perspective and also over the science of light. Another painting exists, a cityscape, by an unknown artist, perhaps Piero della Francesca, that demonstrates the sort of experiment that Brunelleschi had been making. From this time linear perspective was understood and regularly employed, such as by Perugino in his "Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter" (1481–82) in the Sistine Chapel.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Giotto used tonality to create form. Taddeo Gaddi in his nocturnal scene in the Baroncelli Chapel demonstrated how light could be used to create drama. Paolo Uccello, a hundred years later, experimented with the dramatic effect of light in some of his almost monochrome frescoes. He did a number of these in "terra verde" ("green earth"), enlivening his compositions with touches of vermilion. The best known is his equestrian portrait of John Hawkwood on the wall of Florence Cathedral. Both here and on the four heads of prophets that he painted around the inner clock face in the cathedral, he used strongly contrasting tones, suggesting that each figure was being lit by a natural light source, as if the source was an actual window in the cathedral.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Piero della Francesca carried his study of light further. In the "Flagellation" he demonstrates a knowledge of how light is proportionally disseminated from its point of origin. There are two sources of light in this painting, one internal to a building and the other external. Of the internal source, though the light itself is invisible, its position can be calculated with mathematical certainty. Leonardo da Vinci was to carry forward Piero's work on light.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The Blessed Virgin Mary, revered by the Catholic Church worldwide, was particularly evoked in Florence, where there was a miraculous image of her on a column in the corn market and where both the Cathedral of "Our Lady of the Flowers" and the large Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella were named in her honour.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The miraculous image in the corn market was destroyed by fire, but replaced with a new image in the 1330s by Bernardo Daddi, set in an elaborately designed and lavishly wrought canopy by Orcagna. The open lower storey of the building was enclosed and dedicated as Orsanmichele.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Depictions of the Madonna and Child were a very popular art form in Florence. They took every shape from small mass-produced terracotta plaques to magnificent altarpieces such as those by Cimabue, Giotto and Masaccio.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In the 15th and first half of the 16th centuries, one workshop more than any other dominated the production of Madonnas. They were the della Robbia family, and they were not painters but modellers in clay. Luca della Robbia, famous for his "cantoria gallery" at the cathedral, was the first sculptor to use glazed terracotta for large sculptures. Many of the durable works of this family have survived. The skill of the della Robbias, particularly Andrea della Robbia, was to give great naturalism to the babies that they modelled as Jesus, and expressions of great piety and sweetness to the Madonna. They were to set a standard to be emulated by other artists of Florence.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Among those who painted devotional Madonnas during the Early Renaissance are Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and Davide Ghirlandaio. The custom was continued by Botticelli who produced a series of Madonnas over a period of twenty years for the Medici; Perugino, whose Madonnas and saints are known for their sweetness and Leonardo da Vinci, for whom a number of small attributed Madonnas such as the "Benois Madonna" have survived. Even Michelangelo who was primarily a sculptor, was persuaded to paint the "Doni Tondo", while for Raphael, they are among his most popular and numerous works.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: One of the most influential painters of northern Italy was Andrea Mantegna of Padua, who had the good fortune to be in his teen years at the time in which the great Florentine sculptor Donatello was working there. Donatello created the enormous equestrian bronze, the first since the Roman Empire, of the condotiero Gattemelata, still visible on its plinth in the square outside the Basilica of Sant'Antonio. He also worked on the high altar and created a series of bronze panels in which he achieved a remarkable illusion of depth, with perspective in the architectural settings and apparent roundness of the human form all in very shallow relief.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: At only 17 years old, Mantegna accepted his first commission, fresco cycles of the "Lives of Saints James and Christopher" for the Ovetari Chapel in the transept of the church of the Eremitani, near the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Unfortunately, the building was mostly destroyed during World War II, and they are only known from photographs which reveal an already highly developed sense of perspective and a knowledge of antiquity, for which the ancient University of Padua had become well known, early in the 15th century. Mantegna's last work in Padua was a monumental San Zeno altarpiece, created for the abbot of the Basilica of San Zeno, Verona from 1457 to 1459. This polyptych of which the predella panels are particularly notable for the handling of landscape elements, was to influence the further development of Renaissance art in Northern Italy.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Mantegna's most famous work is the interior decoration of the Camera degli Sposi in the Ducal palace, Mantua, dated about 1470. The walls are frescoed with scenes of the life of the Gonzaga family, talking, greeting a younger son and his tutor on their return from Rome, preparing for a hunt and other such scenes that make no obvious reference to matters historic, literary, philosophic or religious. They are remarkable for simply being about family life. The one concession is the scattering of jolly winged putti, who hold up plaques and garlands and clamber on the illusionistic pierced balustrade that surrounds a "trompe-l'œil" view of the sky that decks the ceiling of the chamber. Mantegna's main legacy in considered the introduction of spatial illusionism, carried out by a mastery of perspective, both in frescoes and in "sacra conversazione" paintings: his tradition of ceiling decoration was followed for almost three centuries.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In 1442 Alfonso V of Aragon became ruler of Naples, bringing with him a collection of Flemish paintings and setting up a Humanist Academy. Antonello da Messina seems to have had access to the King's collection, which may have included the works of Jan van Eyck. Recent evidence indicates that Antonello was likely in contact with Van Eyck's most accomplished follower, Petrus Christus, in Milan in early 1456 and likely learned the techniques of oil painting, including painting almost microscopic detail and minute gradations of light, directly from Christus. As well, his works' calmer expressions on peoples' faces and calmness in the works' overall composition also appears to be a Netherlandish influence. Antonello went to Venice in 1475 and remained there until the fall of 1476 so it is likely that Antonello passed on the techniques of using oil paints, painting the gradation of light, and the principles of calmness to Venetian painters, including Giovanni Bellini, one of the most significant painters of the High Renaissance in Northern Italy, during that visit.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Antonello painted mostly small meticulous portraits in glowing colours. But one of his most famous works, "St. Jerome in His Study", demonstrates his superior ability at handling linear perspective and light. The composition of the small painting is framed by a late Gothic arch, through which is viewed an interior, domestic on one side and ecclesiastic on the other, in the centre of which the saint sits in a wooden corral surrounded by his possessions while his lion prowls in the shadows on the floor. The way the light streams in through every door and window casting both natural and reflected light across the architecture and all the objects would have excited Piero della Francesca.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In Florence, in the later 15th century, most works of art, even those that were done as decoration for churches, were generally commissioned and paid for by private patrons. Much of the patronage came from the Medici family, or those who were closely associated with or related to them, such as the Sassetti, the Ruccellai, and the Tornabuoni.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In the 1460s, Cosimo de' Medici had established Marsilio Ficino as his resident Humanist philosopher, and facilitated his translation of Plato and his teaching of Platonic philosophy, which focused on humanity as the centre of the natural universe, on each person's personal relationship with God, and on fraternal or "platonic" love as being the closest that a person could get to emulating or understanding the love of God.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In the Medieval period, everything related to the Classical period was perceived as associated with paganism. In the Renaissance it came increasingly to be associated with enlightenment. The figures of Classical mythology began to take on a new symbolic role in Christian art and in particular, the Goddess Venus took on a new discretion. Born fully formed, by a sort of miracle, she was the new Eve, symbol of innocent love, or even, by extension, a symbol of the Virgin Mary herself. We see Venus in both these roles in the two famous tempera paintings that Botticelli did in the 1480s for Cosimo's nephew, Pierfrancesco de' Medici, the "Primavera" and the "Birth of Venus".


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Meanwhile, Domenico Ghirlandaio, a meticulous and accurate draughtsman and one of the finest portrait painters of his age, executed two cycles of frescoes for Medici associates in two of Florence's larger churches, the Sassetti Chapel at Santa Trinita and the Tornabuoni Chapel at Santa Maria Novella. In these cycles of the "Life of St Francis" and the "Life of the Virgin Mary" and "Life of John the Baptist" there was room for portraits of patrons and of the patrons' patrons. Thanks to Sassetti's patronage, there is a portrait of the man himself, with his employer, Lorenzo il Magnifico, and Lorenzo's three sons with their tutor, the Humanist poet and philosopher, Agnolo Poliziano. In the Tornabuoni Chapel is another portrait of Poliziano, accompanied by the other influential members of the Platonic Academy including Marsilio Ficino.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: From about 1450, with the arrival in Italy of the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden and possibly earlier, artists were introduced to the medium of oil paint. Whereas both tempera and fresco lent themselves to the depiction of pattern, neither presented a successful way to represent natural textures realistically. The highly flexibly medium of oils, which could be made opaque or transparent, and allowed alteration and additions for days after it had been laid down, opened a new world of possibility to Italian artists.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In 1483 the huge altarpiece of "the Adoration of the Shepherds" painted by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence. Painted as early as 1475 at the behest of the Portinari family, it was shipped out from Bruges and installed in the Chapel of Sant' Egidio at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. The altarpiece glows with intense reds and greens, contrasting with the glossy black velvet robes of the Portinari donors. In the foreground is a still life of flowers in contrasting containers, one of glazed pottery and the other of glass. The glass vase alone was enough to excite attention. But the most influential aspect of the triptych was the extremely natural and lifelike quality of the three shepherds with stubbly beards, workworn hands and expressions ranging from adoration to wonder to incomprehension. Domenico Ghirlandaio promptly painted his own version, with a beautiful Italian Madonna in place of the long-faced Flemish one, and himself, gesturing theatrically, as one of the shepherds.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In 1477 Pope Sixtus IV replaced the derelict old chapel at the Vatican in which many of the papal services were held. The interior of the new chapel, named the Sistine Chapel in his honour, appears to have been planned from the start to have a series of 16 large frescoes between its pilasters on the middle level, with a series of painted portraits of popes above them.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In 1480, a group of artists from Florence was commissioned with the work: Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Rosselli. This fresco cycle was to depict "Stories of the Life of Moses" on one side of the chapel, and "Stories of the Life of Christ" on the other with the frescoes complementing each other in theme. "The Nativity of Jesus" and the "Finding of Moses" were adjacent on the wall behind the altar, with an altarpiece of the "Assumption of the Virgin" between them. These paintings, all by Perugino, were later destroyed to paint Michelangelo's "Last Judgement".


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The remaining 12 pictures indicate the virtuosity that these artists had attained, and the obvious cooperation between individuals who normally employed very different styles and skills.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The paintings gave full range to their capabilities as they included a great number of figures of men, women and children and characters ranging from guiding angels to enraged Pharaohs and the devil himself. Each painting required a landscape. Because of the scale of the figures that the artists agreed upon, in each picture, the landscape and sky take up the whole upper half of the scene. Sometimes, as in Botticelli's scene of "The Purification of the Leper", there are additional small narratives taking place in the landscape, in this case "The Temptations of Christ".


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Perugino's scene of "Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter" is remarkable for the clarity and simplicity of its composition, the beauty of the figurative painting, which includes a self-portrait among the onlookers, and especially the perspective cityscape which includes reference to Peter's ministry to Rome by the presence of two triumphal arches, and centrally placed an octagonal building that might be a Christian baptistry or a Roman Mausoleum.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The High Renaissance of painting was the culmination of the varied means of expression and various advances in painting technique, such as linear perspective, the realistic depiction of both physical and psychological features, and the manipulation of light and darkness, including tone contrast, sfumato (softening the transition between colours) and chiaroscuro (contrast between light and dark), in a single unifying style which expressed total compositional order, balance and harmony. According to Marcia Hall, cangiante and what she calls unione can be added to chiaroscuro and sfumato to make four specific painting styles in the High Renaissance; these are now sometimes grouped as the "canonical painting modes" of the period.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In particular, the individual parts of the painting had a complex but balanced and well-knit relationship to a dynamic whole. Painting of the High Renaissance is considered to be the absolute zenith of western painting and achieved the balancing and reconciliation, in harmony, of contradictory and seemingly mutually exclusive artistic positions, such as real versus ideal, movement versus rest, freedom versus law, space versus plane, and line versus colour.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Most art historians state that the High Renaissance started around 1495 or 1500 and ended in 1520 with the death of Raphael, although some say the High Renaissance ended about 1525 or in 1527 with the Sack of Rome by the army of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, or about 1530. Many cite Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper", started in 1495 and completed in 1498, as being the first work of the High Renaissance. In his book, "A History of Art: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture", 1985, Frederick Hartt states that 1520 to 1530 was a transition period between the High Renaissance and Mannerism. The High Renaissance was dominated by three painters: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael; while Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Titian were the leaders of Venetian High Renaissance painting, with Correggio and Andrea del Sarto being other significant painters of the High Renaissance style.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Leonardo (1452–1519) spent his formative years training in the Florence workshop of Verrocchio before moving to Milan, where he worked from 1482 to 1499 before returning to Florence from 1500 to 1506. Because of the scope of his interests and the extraordinary degree of talent that he demonstrated in so many diverse areas, he is regarded as the archetypal "Renaissance man". But it was first and foremost as a painter that he was admired in his own time, and as a painter, he drew on the knowledge he gained from his other interests.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Leonardo was a scientific observer. He learned by looking at things. He studied and drew the flowers of the fields, the eddies of the river, the form of the rocks and mountains, the way light reflected from foliage and sparkled in a jewel. In particular, he studied the human form, dissecting thirty or more unclaimed cadavers from a hospital in order to understand muscles and sinews.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Leonardo achieved a degree of realism in the expression of human emotion, prefigured by Giotto but unknown since Masaccio's "Adam and Eve". Leonardo's "Last Supper", painted from 1495 to 1498 in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie (Milan), became the benchmark for religious narrative painting for the next half millennium. Many other Renaissance artists painted versions of the Last Supper, but only Leonardo's was destined to be reproduced countless times in wood, alabaster, plaster, lithograph, tapestry, crochet and table-carpets.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: More than any other artist, he advanced the study and painting of "atmosphere". In his paintings such as the "Mona Lisa" (c.1503-1517) and "Virgin of the Rocks" (1483-1486) (the earliest complete work fully of his hand), he used light and shade with such subtlety that, for want of a better word, it became known as Leonardo's "sfumato" or "smoke". He exhibited a revolutionary use of colour by defining the transition between figures by colour modulation instead of by actual lines. His work invited the viewer into a mysterious world of shifting shadows, chaotic mountains and whirling torrents. Another significant work of Leonardo's was "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne" (c.1503-1519); the monumental three-dimensional quality of the group and the calculated effects of dynamism and tension in the composition made it a model that inspired Classicists and the Mannerists in equal measure. Apart from the direct impact of the works themselves, Leonardo's studies of light, anatomy, landscape, and human expression were disseminated in part through his generosity to a retinue of students.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In 1508 Pope Julius II succeeded in getting the Florentine sculptor Michelangelo (1475-1564) to agree to continue the decorative scheme of the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was constructed in such a way that there were twelve sloping pendentives supporting the vault that formed ideal surfaces on which to paint the Twelve Apostles. Michelangelo soon devised an entirely different scheme, far more complex both in design and in iconography. The scale of the work, which he executed single handed except for manual assistance, was titanic and took nearly five years to complete.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The Pope's plan for the Apostles would thematically have formed a pictorial link between the Old Testament and New Testament narratives on the walls, and the popes in the gallery of portraits. It is the twelve apostles, and their leader Peter as first Bishop of Rome, that make that bridge. But Michelangelo's scheme went the opposite direction. The theme of Michelangelo's ceiling is not God's grand plan for humanity's salvation. The theme is about humanity's disgrace. It is about why humanity and the faith needed Jesus.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Superficially, the ceiling is a Humanist construction. The figures are of superhuman dimension and, in the case of Adam, of such beauty that according to the biographer Vasari, it really looks as if God himself had designed the figure, rather than Michelangelo. But despite the beauty of the individual figures, Michelangelo has not glorified the human state, and he certainly has not presented the Humanist ideal of platonic love. In fact, the ancestors of Christ, which he painted around the upper section of the wall, demonstrate all the worst aspects of family relationships, displaying dysfunction in as many different forms as there are families.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Vasari praised Michelangelo's seemingly infinite powers of invention in creating postures for the figures. Raphael, who was given a preview by Bramante after Michelangelo had downed his brush and stormed off to Bologna in a temper, painted at least two figures in imitation of Michelangelo's prophets, one at the church of Sant' Agostino and the other in the Vatican, his portrait of Michelangelo himself in "The School of Athens".


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Michelangelo's later work, "The Last Judgement", painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel between 1534 and 1541, shows a Mannerist style, with generally elongated bodies, which took over from the High Renaissance style between 1520 and 1530.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: With Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Raphael's (1483–1520) name is synonymous with the High Renaissance, although he was younger than Michelangelo by 18 years and Leonardo by almost 30 and died at the age of 37 just one year after Leonardo. It cannot be said that he greatly advanced the state of painting as his two famous contemporaries did. Rather, his work was the culmination of all the developments of the High Renaissance.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Raphael was born the son of a painter, so his career path, unlike that of Michelangelo who was the son of minor nobility, was decided without a quarrel. Some years after his father's death he worked in the Umbrian workshop of Perugino, an excellent painter and a superb technician. His first signed and dated painting, executed at the age of 21, is the "Betrothal of the Virgin", which immediately reveals its origins in Perugino's "Christ giving the Keys to St. Peter".


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Raphael, who moved to Florence in 1504 and to Rome in 1508, unashamedly drew on the skills of the renowned painters whose lifespans encompassed his. In his works the individual qualities of numerous different painters are drawn together. The rounded forms and luminous colours of Perugino, the lifelike portraiture of Ghirlandaio, the realism and lighting of Leonardo, and the powerful draughtsmanship of Michelangelo became unified in the paintings of Raphael. In his short life he executed a number of large altarpieces, an impressive Classical fresco of the sea nymph, Galatea, outstanding portraits with two popes and a famous writer among them, and, while Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a series of wall frescoes in the Raphael Rooms of the Apostolic Palace nearby, of which "the School of Athens" (1509–11) in the Stanza della Segnatura is uniquely significant. This fresco depicts a meeting of all the most learned ancient Athenians, gathered in a grand classical setting around the central figure of Plato, whom Raphael has famously modelled upon Leonardo da Vinci. The brooding figure of Heraclitus who sits by a large block of stone, is a portrait of Michelangelo, and is a reference to the latter's painting of the Prophet Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel. His own portrait is to the right, beside his teacher, Perugino.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: But the main source of Raphael's popularity was not his major works, but his small Florentine pictures of the Madonna and Christ Child. Over and over he painted, in slightly different poses, a similar plump, calm-faced blonde woman and her chubby babies the most famous probably being "La Belle Jardinière" ("The Madonna of the Beautiful Garden"), now in the Louvre. His larger work, the "Sistine Madonna", used as a design for countless stained glass windows, has come, in the 21st century, to provide the iconic image of two small cherubs which has been reproduced on everything from paper table napkins to umbrellas.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: A leader of Venetian painting, Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516) was born within a year of his brother Gentile, his brother-in-law Mantegna and Antonello da Messina, but lived a decade longer than the first two and almost three decades longer than the latter. He was painting right up until his death and his works illustrate several influences. His early works show the influence of Mantegna with incisive lines and clearly delineated colours while after Messina's stay in Venice in 1475 to 1476 his works adopted a Flemish-like realism and luminous colours, which shows he was highly successful at adopting the techniques of oil painting brought by Messina. He was first the teacher of Giorgione and Titian but was later influenced by Giorgione, most notably in adopting tonalism wherein paint is applied in superimposed layers creating a soft diffused effect so figures and landscapes become more unified in atmosphere.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Bellini became the only great 15th-century painter to cross the threshold from the Early Renaissance to the High Renaissance style with works such as "Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan" (1501), wherein the Doge shows a calmness Bellini likely learned from Messina, and "Baptism of Christ" (1500–1502). Bellini, like Raphael, also produced numerous small Madonnas in rich glowing colour, usually of more intense tonality than his Florentine counterpart.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Traditionally, in the painting of altarpieces of the "Madonna and Child", the enthroned figure of the Virgin is accompanied by saints, who stand in defined spaces, separated physically in the form of a polytych or defined by painted architectural boundaries. Piero della Francesca used the Classical niche as a setting for his enthroned Madonnas (with saints grouped around the throne), as Masaccio had used it as the setting for his "Holy Trinity" at Santa Maria Novella.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Bellini used this same form, known as "Sacred Conversations", in several of his later altarpieces such as that for the Venetian church of San Zaccaria (1505). It is a masterful composition which uses tonalism and extends the real architecture of the building into the illusionistic architecture of the painting, making the niche a sort of loggia opened up to the landscape and to daylight which streams across the figures of the Virgin and Child, the two female saints and the little angel who plays a viola making them brighter than Saint Peter and Saint Jerome in the foreground.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Despite the brevity of his career (he died in 1510 at about 35) and the low number of works universally agreed to be totally by his hand (as low as four or five), Giorgione is often credited as being the founder of the Venetian High Renaissance style, although different scholars cite different reasons for asserting this.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: One is his increasing use of gradations of colour and light (colour modulation), including sfumato, often achieved by tonalism, to define the shapes of figures and landscapes and to create an atmosphere wherein all components of the painting are unified. Some believe he may have been taught this by Leonardo da Vinci, who is said to have visited Venice in 1501. In his "Castelfranco Madonna", 1505, the use of line and colour modulation are equally balanced but in "The Tempest", c.1510, colour modulation almost entirely replaces line creating an artistic vision in which humankind and nature are combined. Some consider the "Tempest" one of the most important paintings produced in Italy as the components are held together by colour and there is a dreamy atmosphere of perfect harmony. Giorgione was the first painter to assign a leading role to nature and whenever his paintings feature a landscape it becomes an integral part of the painting.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: The "Castelfranco Madonna", when compared to Giovanni Bellini's similar "San Zaccaria Altarpiece", illustrates another innovation of Giorgione – adjusting the directions and positions of the figures, such as the lance held by St. Liberale to the left and the folds in the Madonna's robe being placed in parallel, to more unify the subjects. Lastly, Giorgione's paintings are always ambiguous in their meaning and open to different interpretations. In "The Tempest", the naked woman feeding a baby and the clothed man, and a flash of lightning, perhaps represents Adam and Eve in their post-Eden days, or perhaps it does not. Another painting attributed to him, "The Three Philosophers", may represent the Magi planning their journey in search of the infant Christ, or it may not. None of Giorgione's paintings has ever had a certain interpretation.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Until recent years, it had appeared certain that Giorgione painted the very first female nude that stands, or rather, lies, as a subject to be portrayed and admired for beauty alone with the "Sleeping Venus", 1510. While it had been long accepted that Titian finished the landscape of the painting after Giorgione's death, many art scholars are increasingly questioning if Giorgione painted the entire female body.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Titian (c. 1490–1576) trained in the workshop of Giovanni Bellini alongside Giorgione and then assisted Giorgione. Following Giorgione's death, he was the monarch of the Venetian School for over 60 years. His early work shows strong influences of Bellini and Giorgione, but he soon he took the principles of form and colour announced by those two and established colour, not line, as the major determinant in painting, thereby consummating the Venetian High Renaissance style. He did this by applying colours of paint paste-like in patches alongside each other with loose and sweeping brush strokes. This brought out the light and colour in equal measure at the same time; he was famous in his own day as the master of light and colour.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Another strength of Titian was the composition of his paintings. In the "Pesaro Madonna", 1519–1526, he moves the Madonna from the centre instead placing her at the upper vertex of a powerful diagonal line (as opposed to the usual vertical or horizontal) which still focuses the attention on the Madonna. This was one of the first works to group figures in a circular, ascending structure.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: "Assumption of the Virgin", 1516–1518, also features diagonal lines (shaped by the cherubs located around the Virgin), which carries the triumphant message of the painting upward into the upper levels of the Church of Frari in Venice on whose altar it stands. This work was the first to have visual suggestion of movement; all of Titian's works have a new dynamism in the movements of people compared to the static elements of other High Renaissance painters. The "Assumption of the Virgin" also features, like all of his paintings, glowing, deep, rich colours due to Titian's applying layer after layer of paint, sometimes of different colours.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Titian was also the most sought after portraitist of his time and brought portraiture to the same level of esteem as narrative painting. Highly notable are the "Equestrian Portrait of Charles V", 1548, an equestrian picture in a symphony of purples, and the portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti, ruler of Venice, perhaps Titian's most powerful portrait.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: As Titian aged, he maintained a generally High Renaissance style until his last years, when figure was almost completed dissolved in the movement of colour, so he became increasingly isolated from the mainstream of Italian painting, which had moved almost completely towards Mannerism by 1530. In many ways, Titian can be considered the founder of modern painting.


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: Correggio (1489–1534), who never visited Rome, but must have seen the works of the Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian, worked in a personal High Renaissance style in Parma, in Northern Italy. He invented the open heaven filled with floating figures church dome, which became a hallmark of the 17th century Baroque period with his "Vision of St. John the Evangelist", 1520–1524, in Parma’s San Giovanni Evangelista, and the "Assumption of the Virgin", 1526–1530, in Parma Cathedral. One art scholar states that in the latter, Correggio creates a “dazzling illusion: the architecture of the dome seems to dissolve and the form seems to explode through the building drawing the viewer up into the swirling vortex of saints and angels who rush upwards to accompany the Virgin in to heaven.”


title: Italian Renaissance painting

text: In those domes and other works, his bold use of perspective, usually by setting a dark colour against light colours to enhance the illusion of depth, is described as astonishing. His chief interest was painting light and he anticipates the effects to be achieved by Caravaggio at the start of the next century. His mastery of foreshortening (causing objects to look shorter because they are angled to the viewer) to create perspective is described as perhaps the most skillful ever.