The Stroke of Genius Unravelled

Answers to the previous quiz on artists.



1.Sir Joshua Reynolds

Sir Joshua Reynolds was the most important and influential of 18th century English painters, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769.

2.Tintoretto or Jacopo Robusti

Tintoretto (real name Jacopo Comin) was one of the greatest painters of the Venetian school and probably the last great painter of the Italian Renaissance.For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso, and his dramatic use of perspectival space and special lighting effects make him a precursor of baroque art.


3.Fransisco Josede Goya y Lucientes ,the Spanish painter and printmaker .



The Naked Maja

Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown .Two of Goya's best known paintings are The Nude Maja (La maja desnuda) and The Clothed Maja (La maja vestida). They depict the same woman in the same pose, naked and clothed, respectively. He painted La maja vestida after outrage in Spanish society over the previous Desnuda. Without a pretense to allegorical or mythological meaning, the painting was "the first totally profane life-size female nude in Western art". He refused to paint clothes on her, and instead created a new painting.


4.John Zoffany

Zoffany was a German neoclassical painter, active mainly in England.He was known for being very arrogant with his art. He had been known to have an outstanding argument with many artists, he would often draw caricatures of other artists he did not like in his art. Zoffany became especially noted for producing huge paintings with large casts of people and objets d'art, all readily recognizable.



His "The Tribuna of the Uffizi" is one such hell of a work

5. Raphael Sanzio ,the Italian master painter and architect of the Florentine school in High Renaissance, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings.

The inscription on his marble sarcophagus, written by Pietro Bembo, reads: "Ille hic est Raffael, timuit quo sospite vinci, rerum magna parens et moriente mori." Meaning : "Here lies Raffaello who, when alive, Nature was afraid to be won by him, when he died, she wanted to die herself".
Raphael was highly admired by his contemporaries. When compared to Michelangelo and Titian, he was sometimes considered inferior; at the same time, it was maintained that none of them shared all the qualities possessed by Raphael, "ease" in particular.

6. Maqbool Fida Husain ,the actress of course Madhuri Dixit

He actually made the film Gaja Gamini with his muse Madhuri Dixit, who was also the subject of a series of paintings which he signed Fida.

7.Amedeo Clemente Modigliani

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani as an Italian artist, practicing both painting and sculpture, who pursued his career for the most part in France. He died in Paris of tubercular meningitis— penniless and destitute—managing only one solo exhibition in his life and giving his work away in exchange for meals in restaurants. Had he lived through the 1920s when American buyers flooded Paris, his fortunes might well have changed. Since his death his reputation has soared. Nine novels, a play, a documentary and three feature films have been devoted to his life.

8. Leonardo Da Vinci

9. Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix

Eugene Delacroix was the most important of the French Romantic painters. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement.

1 0. Hans Holbein ,the German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He is best known for his numerous portraits and his woodcut series of the Dance of Death.