Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous Renaissance artists in the world and is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of all time. His masterpiece, Mona Lisa, is permanently displayed in the Louvre Museum in France protected behind bulletproof glass.  Beyond painting, da Vinci was also a scientist and inventor; he created plenty of drawings of the human body and many modern technologies found in the world today. Simply put, da Vinci was undoubtedly a genius.

Among his famous masterpieces, there are also the Last Supper and The Lady with an Ermine. Even to this day, his works are not fully understood and he still serves as inspiration for many, many aspiring artists.

Michelangelo is one of the most well-known artists of all time. He was a painter, a sculptor and an architect who also happened to write poetry from time to time. Most know him from his iconic painting of the Sistine Chapel or his creation of one of the greatest frescoes of the Renaissance, The Last Judgment, 20 years later.

Michelangelo's other creations, the sculpture David and Pietà, the St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the famous carving of Moses on the tomb for Pope Julian II, and the design for the Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo’s Church, all serve as inspirations for young artists of the 21st century. 

Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch post impressionist painter widely known for being the artist who cut off part of his own ear. More importantly, however, his works of art, are among the most famous and cherished of all time.  

He inspired upcoming generations of artists especially through his technique of painting with flurries of thick brushstrokes made up of bright colors squeezed straight from the tube.

Among some of his most famous paintings are Starry Night, Cafe Terrace at Night, and Sunflowers.

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The Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, was a modern painter who through his unique artistic style inspired generations of artists to follow in his footsteps.

Picasso changed the very definition of classic art by introducing concepts such as collaging and Cubism. His distinctive take on the creation of art in every medium makes him one of, if not the most, impactful artists in the world of art itself.

Some of his most famous works include Guernica, Bird of Peace, and Woman with Fan.

Rembrandt, also known as the Dutch Master, is one of the greatest painters and one of the biggest artists in all history, greatly admired for his mastery with which he crafted all his works of art. His paintings are admired for the vivid reality depicted and for the skillful illustration of his subjects’ inner feelings. He is particularly known for portraits in which he demonstrated an uncanny ability to evoke the innermost thoughts of his subjects, including himself, through the play of facial expression and the fall of light across the sitter’s features.

He’s known for masterworks such as The Night Watch and Doctor Nicolaes Tulp’s Demonstration of the Anatomy of the Arm.

The French painter Claude Monet was one of the founders of the French Impressionist movement and also a figure of Pop Art and Minimalism. Most of his paintings resemble the passing of seasons and the ways in which light modified the landscape, capturing it through prismatic shards of color in rapidly painted strokes.

His most recognized paintings are Waterlilies, Women in Garden, and Impression Sunrise.

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Edvard Munch’s The Scream is probably one of the most widely recognized paintings of all time, due to its iconic evocation of the feelings of angst and fear. Some even go as far as naming the painting the Mona Lisa of anxiety. In 2012, a pastel version of Edvard Munch’s iconic evocation of modern angst fetched a then-astronomical price of $120 million at auction (a benchmark which has since been bested several times). 

Munch’s career was more than just a single painting. Edvard Munch is seen as the one who contributed to the spread of Expressionism and heavily influenced artists such as Max Beckmann, Egon Schiele, and Erich Heckel.

Salvador Dali's extraordinary imagination and eccentric personality made him one of the most recognizable figures in the art world.  Known for his mind-bending and dreamlike creations, Dali's artwork explored the realm of the subconscious and challenged the conventional notions of reality. 

Dali employed meticulous detail and rendering techniques to create striking and often bizarre imagery.  Beyond his art, Dali's flamboyant personality, signature mustache, and theatrical antics further cemented his status as a cultural icon.  

His contributions to the surrealist movement on and off the canvas have secured his place as one of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century. 

Dutch painter Jan Vermeer is considered one of the most important figures in the history of arts. His works vividly portray still life with an uncanny beauty to them. Which is the reason many thought that he may have used an obscure camera to capture his images.

Among his most famous works there are the Girl With a Pearl Earring, The Milkmaid, and View of Delft.

No artist is as closely tied to the sensual pleasures of color as Henri Matisse. His work was all about sinuous curves rooted in the traditions of figurative art, and was always focused on the beguiling pleasures of pigment and hue. “I am not a revolutionary by principle,” he once said. “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter…a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair.”

Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo, was a master of canvas and paint. She also become one of the most iconic symbols of the feminist movement. 

Her works of art portray the grim reality of the world and life in general. She used her mastery to paint surrealistic portraits of herself, showing her vulnerabilities and her personal and physical suffering.

Jean-Antoine Watteau was arguably the greatest French painter of the 18th-century, a transitional figure between Baroque art and the Roccoco style that followed. He emphasized color and movement, structuring his compositions so that they almost resembled theater scenes, but it was the atmospheric quality of his work that would become highly influential for artists like J.M.W Turner and the Impressionists.

Eugène Delacroix was a towering figure of 19th-century art. As a leader of Romanticism, which privileged emotions over rationalism, Delacroix’s expressive paint handling and use of color laid the foundation for successive avant-garde movements of the 1800s and beyond.

Most people know Georges Seurat as the inventor of pointillism alongside fellow artist Paul Signac. Pointillism is described as a radical painting technique in which small daubs of color were applied to the canvas, leaving it to the viewer’s eye to resolve those dots and dashes into images. 

Just as importantly, Seurat broke with the capture-the-moment approach of other Impressionists, going instead for ordered compositional style that recalled the stillness of classical art.

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent figures of the Vienna Secession movement.  Known for his decorative and highly intricate style, Klimt's artwork often explored themes of sensuality, sexuality, and the human condition. 

Klimt often incorporated gold leafing and intricate patterns in his art which captivated viewers and established him a leading artist of his time.  

Klimt's most famous works include The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.  

René Magritte was a Belgian-born artist who was known for his work with surrealism and thought-provoking artwork. After attending art school in Brussels, he worked in commercial advertising to support himself while he experimented with his painting. 

Magritte was one of the most prominent Surrealist painters, whose bizarre flights of fancy blended horror, peril, comedy, and mystery. 

René Magritte's works were characterized by particular symbols—the female torso, the bourgeois “little man,” the bowler hat, the castle, the rock, the window, and others. His most famous works were Les Amants , Le Fils de L'homme, The Treachery of Images, and Goldconde. 

Thomas Gainsborough RA FRSA was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century.
 

The feathery brushwork of his mature work and rich sense of colour contribute to the enduring popularity of his portraits. Unlike Reynolds, he avoids references to Italian Renaissance art or the Antique, and instead shows his sitters in fashionable contemporary dress.

Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy and became a favorite painter of George III and his family. Though he later quarrelled with them over the hanging of his pictures. 


His amusing letters, later published, record his impatience with his clients' demands for portraits. Though he became most famous for those very portraits, his private inclination was for landscape and rustic scenes.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s reputation rests in part on the idea that many of her paintings evoke a certain part of the female anatomy. O'Keeffe herself angrily rejected the notion that her compositions—especially her floral studies—were symbolic representations of vaginas.

Nevertheless, there so much more to the her work, which could be described as a blend of symbolism, precisionism and abstraction.

Edward Hopper’s enigmatic paintings look into the hollow core of the American experience—the alienation and loneliness that represents the flip side of to our religious devotion to individualism and the pursuit of an often-elusive happiness. In compositions such as Nighthawks, Automat and Office in a Small City, he captures stillness weighed down by despair, his subjects trapped in the limbo between aspiration and reality. His landscapes are similarly suffused with a sense that America’s open spaces are as purgatorial as they are limitless.

Hampered by alcoholism, self-doubt and clumsiness as a conventional painter, Pollock transcended his limitations in a brief but incandescent period between 1947 and 1950 when he produced the drip abstractions that cemented his renown. Eschewing the easel to lay his canvases fait on the floor, he used house paint straight from the can, flinging and dribbling thin skeins of pigment that left behind a concrete record of his movements—a technique that would become known as action painting.

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Technically, Warhol didn’t invent Pop Art, but he became the Pope of Pop by taking the style out of the art world and bringing it into the world of fashion and celebrity. Starting out as a commercial artist, he brought the ethos of advertising into fine art, even going so far as to say, “Making money is art.” Such sentiments blew away the existential pretensions of Abstract Expressionism. Although he’s famous for subjects such as Campbell’s Soup, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, but what was Andy Warhol's greatest creation? Himself, of course.

View Craig Alan's populous-style series: Click Here

"Cezanne is the father of us all." This famous quote has been attributed to both Picasso and Matisse, and certainly it does not matter who actually said it, because in either case would be appropriate. While he exhibited with the Impressionist painters, Cézanne left behind the whole group and developed a style of painting never seen so far, which opened the door for the arrival of Cubism and the rest of the vanguards of the twentieth century.

Along with Rembrandt, one of the summits of Baroque painting. But unlike the Dutch artist, the Sevillan painter spent most of his life in the comfortable but rigid courtesan society. Nevertheless, Velázquez was an innovator, a "painter of atmospheres" two centuries before Turner and the Impressionists, which it is shown in his colossal 'royal paintings' ("Meninas", "The Forge of Vulcan"), but also in his small and memorable sketches of the Villa Medici.

One of the most fascinating figures in the history of painting, his works moved from Impressionism (soon abandoned) to a colorful and vigorous symbolism, as can be seen in his 'Polynesian paintings'. Matisse and Fauvism could not be understood without the works of Paul Gauguin.

Goya is an enigma. In the whole History of Art few figures are as complex as the artist born in Fuendetodos, Spain. Enterprising and indefinable, a painter with no rival in all his life, Goya was the painter of the Court and the painter of the people. He was a religious painter and a mystical painter. He was the author of the beauty and eroticism of the 'Maja desnuda' and the creator of the explicit horror of 'The Third of May, 1808'. He was an oil painter, a fresco painter, a sketcher and an engraver. And he never stopped his metamorphosis.

Manet was the origin of Impressionism, a revolutionary in a time of great artistic revolutions. His (at the time) quite polemical "Olympia" or "Déjeuner sur l'Herbe" opened the way for the great figures of Impressionism.

Equally loved and hated in different eras, no one can doubt that Raphael is one of the greatest geniuses of the Renaissance, with an excellent technique in terms of drawing and color.

Basquiat is undoubtedly the most important and famous member of the "graffiti movement" that appeared in the New York scene in the early'80s, an artistic movement whose enormous influence on later painting is still to be measured.

Artist of dreams and fantasies, Chagall was for all his life an immigrant fascinated by the lights and colors of the places he visited. Few names from the School of Paris of the early twentieth century have contributed so much -and with such variety of ideas- to change modern Art as this man "impressed by the light," as he defined himself.

Leading figure of realism, and a clear precedent for the impressionists, Courbet was one of the greatest revolutionaries, both as an artist and as a social-activist, of the history of painting. Like Rembrandt and other predecessors, Courbet did not seek to create beauty, but believed that beauty is achieved when and artist represents the purest reality without artifice.

One of the most original and fascinating artists of his era, with a very personal technique that was admired, three centuries later, by the impressionist painters.

El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, while his personality and works were a source of inspiration for poets and writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Nikos Kazantzakis. El Greco has been characterized by modern scholars as an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school. He is best known for tortuously elongated figures and often fantastic or phantasmagorical pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting.

The main figure of American painting of his era, Homer was a breath of fresh air for the American artistic scene, which was "stuck" in academic painting and the more romantic Hudson River School. Homer's loose and lively brushstroke is almost impressionistic.

Degas was born in Paris, France, the eldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas and Augustin De Gas, a banker. The family was moderately wealthy. At age eleven, Degas (as a young man he abandoned the more pretentious spelling of the family name) began his schooling with enrollment in the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, graduating in 1853 with a baccalauréat in literature.

Degas began to paint seriously early in his life. By eighteen he had turned a room in his home into an artist's studio, and had begun making copies in the Louvre, but his father expected him to go to law school. Degas duly registered at the Faculty of Law of the University of Paris in November 1853, but made little effort at his studies there. In 1855, Degas met Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whom he revered, and was advised by him to "draw lines, young man, many lines." In April of that same year, Degas received admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied drawing with Louis Lamothe, under whose guidance he flourished, following the style of Ingres. In July 1856, Degas traveled to Italy, where he would remain for the next three years. There he drew and painted copies after Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and other artists of the Renaissance, often selecting from an altarpiece an individual head which he treated as a portrait. It was during this period that Degas studied and became accomplished in the techniques of high, academic, and classical art.

View Carrie Graber's "Waiting For My Danseur": Click Here

Pierre Auguste Renoir was one of the key figures of the impressionist movement (a French art movement of the second half of the 19th century whose members sought in their works to represent the first impression of an object upon the viewer). His work is characterized by a richness of feeling and a warmth of response to the world and to the people in it.

His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light. By the mid-1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women.

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Norman Rockwell  was an American painter and illustrator. His works to this day still have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture.  Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades.  He also had a long relationship with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), during which he produced covers for their publication Boys' Life, calendars, and other illustrations. 

Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his surviving works are in public collections.  Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate more than 40 books, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as well as painting the portraits for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.

Katsushika Hokusai, known simply as Hokusai, was a Japanese artist, ukiyo-e painter and printmaker of the Edo period. Hokusai is best known for the woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji which included The Great Wave off Kanagawa." While Hokusai's work prior to this series is certainly important, it was not until this series that he gained broad recognition and left a lasting impact on the art world. It was The Great Wave print that initially received, and continues to receive, acclaim and popularity in the Western world.

View modern master Hishashi Otsuka's art: Click Here

Georgio de Chirico was a pioneering Italian artist of the 20th century, who made haunting, atmospheric paintings resembling dreams or nightmares. He merged broken fragments of classicism with ordinary, every day objects like bananas, balls or rubber gloves. He used harsh angles of European modernism, creating eerie, disjointed and unforgettable images that prefigured the rise of French Surrealism.   De Chirico founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists, and is best known for his works featuring Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains and illogical perspectives.  (Image: Rising Sun On The Plaza -1976)

A Personal Encounter with Georgio De Chirico

At age 18, Dario Campanile had the good fortune of meeting De Chirico.  Dario showed him some of his paintings and asked if he should attend art schools.  De Chirico advised the young Dario to continue experimenting and  to discover his techniques on his own.  Inspired by the encounter, Dario's hard work and discipline proved to be his best teachers. 

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Many artists made contour line drawings on paper, but Calder was the first to use wire to create three-dimensional line "drawings" of people, animals, and objects. These "linear sculptures" introduced line into sculpture as an element unto itself. Calder shifted from figurative linear sculptures in wire to abstract forms in motion by creating the first mobiles. Composed of pivoting lengths of wire counterbalanced with thin metal fins, the appearance of the entire piece was randomly arranged and rearranged in space by chance simply by the air moving the individual parts.

Calder's interest initially led not to art, but to mechanical engineering and applied kinetics, which he studied at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.