Pietro Lorenzetti 002, fresco, Italy

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French Symbolist painter known for both his murals and works on canvas. The pale colors and Classical subject matter seen in his seminal work The Sacred Grove (1884), was largely influenced by studying the frescos of both Giotto and Piero della Francesca. “To simplify, that is to release the thought,” he once explained. “The simplest conception proves to be the most beautiful.” Born Pierre-Cécile Puvis on December 14, 1824 in Lyon, France, he studied under Thomas Couture and Eugène Delacroix in Paris, developing a style of simplified shapes and nuanced color. During the 1850s, Puvis befriended Edgar Degas, who shared his interest in melding antiquity with a modern sensibility towards painting. Over the following decades, the artist exhibited at the Salon and developed a number of patrons in both Europe and America. Influencing a generation of younger artists such as Paul Gauguin and Maurice Denis, Puvis’s work was widely acclaimed, appealing to both conservative and avant-garde painters alike. The artist died on October 24, 1898 in Paris, France. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and the National Gallery in London, among others.

Pietro Lorenzetti (1280—1348) was an Italian painter, active between c.1306 and 1345. Together with his younger brother Ambrogio, he introduced naturalism into Sienese art. In their artistry and experiments with three-dimensional and spatial arrangements, the brothers foreshadowed the art of the Renaissance.

Byzantine architectural and visual style was a style that existed with remarkable homogeneity within the Eastern Roman empire between the 6th century and until the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. The Byzantine style's presence extended to Greece. Through Venetians, who became Constantinople's archrivals, it spread to Italy, and Sicily, where it persisted almost intact through the 12th century and became a foundation for the Italian Renaissance. Preserved by the Eastern Orthodox church, the Byzantine style spread to eastern Europe, the Balkans, and particularly to Russia, where it remained, with little or no local modification, through the 17th century. Byzantine architecture and painting remained uniform in tradition rather than changed with time and personal expression. The result is a sophistication of style and spiritual expression not paralleled in Western art. As with all large Picryl collections, this one is made with the assistance of AI image recognition. It allows collections of sizes never seen before. We do our best to clean after AI as it is based solely on visual resemblance and we apologize if we missed a few images in the collection that do not belong to the Byzantine style.