An extract from the Christie’s Education online course, The Great Masters of European Art 1350–1850. Florence in the 1400s, a city of wealthy guilds and merchants, in particular the Medici family, who commissioned astonishing works of art to show off their success and cultivation.
Here we are introduced to one of the great artists the Medicis favoured: Sandro Botticelli, and his most famous works: ‘Primavera’ and ‘The Birth of Venus’.
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a “golden age”. Botticelli’s posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting.
“Buildings and constructions once created by people but now fallen into oblivion have an inspirational value for me,” Mill tells My Modern Met. “They are silent witnesses of history. These giants towering over densely populated cities preserve the memories from the moment of their creation until the last stone drops off their walls.”
Russian graphic designer and watercolor painter 
“Imagine all the people” is a project by Turin-based artist and illustrator Pierpaolo Rovero that fantasizes about the way people around the word spend their time in quarantine. Depicting a diverse range of metropolitan panoramas, from New York and Paris, to Jerusalem, to Tokyo, Rovero imagines the citizens of each city indulging in the same activity while stuck at home, allowing viewers to catch glimpses through windows, balconies and skylights. 
Painted in 1996, David Hockney’s “30 Sunflowers” is a bold and luscious still life of contemporary times. In this episode of Expert Voices, discover how Hockney was inspired to paint “30 Sunflowers” after a decade hiatus, and hear Hockney himself explain the influence of the Old Masters in this vivid work.
Titian (active 1506–1576) produced a masterful group of paintings for Philip II of Spain, celebrating the loves of gods, goddesses, and mortals. Depicting scenes from Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses, Titian named them “poesie” and considered the works as visual equivalents of poetry.
Leonor Fini
Self-made and self-taught, she preferred to work on her own and was known for her fierce independence and provocative panache. A prolific painter, Fini also wrote, worked extensively in book illustration and printmaking, and designed for plays, ballets, operas, and film.
Boomers Daily 