- Simon Vouet
Simon Vouet (
9 January 1590 -30 June 1649 ) was a French painter and draftsman, who helped introduce the ItalianBaroque style to France.A French contemporary, lacking the term "Baroque", said, "In his time the art of painting began to be practiced here in a nobler and more beautiful way than ever before," and the allegory of "Riches" ("illustration, right") demonstrates a new heroic sense of volumes, a breadth and confidence without decorative mannerisms. Vouet's new style was distinctly Italian, after his years of study in Italy, from 1613 to 1627, mostly in Rome where the Baroque style was originating in these years, but he also visited Venice, Bologna, where the Carracci family had their academy, and Genoa and Naples.
Vouet was born in
Paris and held his training under his father, also a painter. He was a natural academic, who studied and absorbed everything in his environment and distilled them: Caravaggio dramatic lighting, Italian Mannerism,Paolo Veronese 's color, and the art of the Carracci,Guercino , andGuido Reni . Famous and respected, he was president of Rome's "Accademia di San Luca ", when Louis XIII called him to France.In Paris, Vouet was the fresh dominating force, painting public altarpieces and allegorical decors for private patrons. Vouet's atelier produced a whole school of French painters for the following generation, and through Vouet French Baroque painting retained a classicizing restraint from the outset. Compare French Baroque artists
Philippe de Champaigne ,Nicolas Poussin and above all,Charles le Brun , his most influential pupil, who organized all the interior decorative painting atVersailles and dictated official style at the court ofLouis XIV of France , but who jealously excluded Vouet from the Académie Royale in 1648. Vouet's other students includedValentin de Boulogne , the main figure of the French "Caravaggisti",Pierre Mignard ,Eustache Le Sueur ,Nicolas Chaperon ,Claude Mellan and the Flemish artistAbraham Willaerts .External links
* [http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/bio/a223-1.html Getty Museum website:] Simon Vouet
* [http://www.museen-sh.de/ml/digicult.php?digiID=200.6885392&s=2 Works by Simon Vouet]
* [http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=316 Online Vouet Gallery at MuseumSyndicate]
* [http://blantonmuseum.org/works_of_art/detail.cfm?work=146&sort=an&view=all&startrow=1&id=372 Saint Cecilia at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin]
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