Master of Alkmaar - Works of Mercy - 1504
Master of Alkmaar - Two wings of a memorial tablet with eight male portraits and nine female portraits, respectively accompanied by Saints James the Great and Mary Magdalen (c. 1490).
Master of Alkmaar - Road to Calvary - 15th century
The Master of Alkmaar was a Dutch painter active around Alkmaar at the beginning of the sixteenth century. His name is derived from a series of panel paintings from the church of Saint Lawrence in that city, dated to 1504 and showing the Seven Works of Mercy; they are currently in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The paintings, bearing the stamp of Geertgen tot Sint Jans, are done in bright colors, and their figures are drawn in an exaggeratedly caricatured manner. It has been proposed that this artist is identical to Cornelis Buys I, the brother of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen; he is known to have been active in Alkmaar between 1490 and 1524. More recently, the name of Pieter Gerritsz, originally of Haarlem, has been proposed, he being in Alkmaar beginning in 1502. This artist, in 1518, was compensated for a painting of Saint Bavo in Haarlem, and his name can be found in records of the Egmond Abbey and of the church of Saint Lawrence in Alkmaar, over a period covering the years 1515 to 1529.
Portrait of the painter Louis gallait.
Louis Gallait (9 or 10 May 1810 – 20 November 1887) was a Belgian painter. He earned his reputation especially with the large painting of Charles V’s abdication. Gallait’s works were considered as the basis for a desirable renewal of historical paintings because of the realism, costume faithfulness and colorful posture of his paintings. His last artwork was sent on tour in Germany and that led to new signals even among German historians. He was also a distinguished portrait painter.
Gallait died in Brussels in 1887. There is a painting by Louis Gallait at the Norton Art Museum in West Palm Beach, Florida (“Art and Liberty”).
Gallait was born in Tournai, Hainaut, Belgium in 1810. He first studied in his native town under Philippe Auguste Hennequin. In 1832 his first picture, Tribute to Caesar, won a prize at the exhibition at Ghent. He then went to Antwerp to continue his studies under Mathieu Ignace van Brée, and in the following year exhibited at the Brussels Salon Christ Healing the Blind. This picture was purchased by subscription and placed in the Tournai Cathedral. Gallait next went to Paris, and he sent to the Belgian Salons Job on the Dunghill, Montaigne Visiting Tasso in Prison, and — to the Brussels Gallery in 1841 — The Abdication of Charles V. This was hailed as a triumph and gained him a European reputation. Official invitations induced him to settle at Brussels.
Among his greater works may be named The Last Honors paid to Counts Egmont and Horn by the Corporations of the Town of Brussels, now at Tournai; The Death of Egmont, in the Berlin gallery; the Coronation of Baudouin, Emperor of Constantinople, painted for Versailles; The Temptation of St Anthony, in the palace at Brussels; The Siege of Antioch, Art and Liberty, Portrait of M. B. Dumortier and The Plague at Tournay, all in the Brussels gallery. A Gipsy Woman and her Children was painted in 1852. He also served as the director and president of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts.
“M. Gallait has all the gifts that may be acquired by work, taste, judgment and determination,” wrote Théophile Gautier. His art is that of a man of tact, a skilled painter, happy in his dramatic treatment but superficial. No doubt, this Walloon artist, following the example of the Flemings of the Renaissance and the treatment of Belgian classical painters and the French Romantic school, sincerely aimed at truth. Unfortunately, misled by contemporary taste, he could not conceive of it excepting as dressed in sentimentality. As an artist employed by the State, he exercised considerable influence, and for a long period he was the leader of public taste in Brussels.
Louis Gallait, The Death of Epaminondas, 19th century
Epaminondas (Greek: Ἐπαμεινώνδας; ca. 418 BC – 362 BC), or Epameinondas, was a Theban general and statesman of the 4th century BC who transformed the Ancient Greek city-state of Thebes, leading it out of Spartan subjugation into a preeminent position in Greek politics. In the process he broke Spartan military power with his victory at Leuctra and liberated the Messenian helots, a group of Peloponnesian Greeks who had been enslaved under Spartan rule for some 230 years, having been defeated in the Messenian War ending in 600 BC. Epaminondas reshaped the political map of Greece, fragmented old alliances, created new ones, and supervised the construction of entire cities. He was militarily influential as well, inventing and implementing several major battlefield tactics.
The Roman orator Cicero called him “the first man of Greece”, and Montaigne judged him one of the three “worthiest and most excellent men” that had ever lived, but Epaminondas has fallen into relative obscurity in modern times. The changes Epaminondas wrought on the Greek political order did not long outlive him, as the cycle of shifting hegemonies and alliances continued unabated. A mere twenty-seven years after his death, a recalcitrant Thebes was obliterated by Alexander the Great. Thus Epaminondas—who had been praised in his time as an idealist and liberator—is today largely remembered for a decade (371 BC to 362 BC) of campaigning that sapped the strength of the great land powers of Greece and paved the way for the Macedonian conquest.
Louis Gallait - Tasso in the Prison
Torquato Tasso (11 March 1544 – 25 April 1595) was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580), in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem. He suffered from mental illness and died a few days before he was due to be crowned as the king of poets by the Pope. Until the beginning of the 19th century, Tasso remained one of the most widely read poets in Europe.
Louis Gallait - Joanna the Mad with Philip I the Handsome
Joanna (6 November 1479 – 12 April 1555), known as Joanna the Mad (Spanish: Juana la Loca), was heiress of the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, a union which evolved into modern Spain. She married Philip the Handsome, initiating the rule of the Habsburgs in Spain. After her mother’s death, the couple briefly ruled Castille (1504-1506). After Philipp’s death in 1506, Joanna became mentally ill and was was confined to a nunnery, while her father Ferdinand and later her son Charles ruled Spain in her place.
Philip I (22 July 1478 – 25 September 1506), known as Philip the Handsome or the Fair, was the first member of the house of Habsburg to be King of Castile. The son of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, Philip inherited the greater part of the Duchy of Burgundy and the Burgundian Netherlands (as Philip IV) from his mother, Mary of Burgundy, and briefly succeeded to the Crown of Castile as the husband of Queen Joanna of Castile, who was also heiress-presumptive to the Crown of Aragon. He was the first Habsburg monarch in Spain. He never inherited his father’s territories, nor became Holy Roman Emperor, because he predeceased his father, but his son Emperor Charles V eventually united the Habsburg, Burgundian, Castilian, and Aragonese inheritances.
The future King Henry VIII of England met Philip the Handsome on a visit Philip made to Henry’s father’s court in London, and regarded him as providing a model of leadership towards which he aspired.
