The Artists

Artist Andrei Rublev The monk-iconographer whose Trinity became the measure of the Russian icon: stillness, humility, and gold held in perfect balance. c. 1360–1430 Artist Lucas Cranach the Elder Luther's friend and the Reformation's image-maker, whose workshop put the evangelical message into altarpieces, portraits, and prints. 1472–1553 Artist Pieter Saenredam The Dutch painter of whitewashed church interiors — the Reformed interior, empty of images, made itself the picture. 1597–1665 Artist Giotto di Bondone The Florentine who gave biblical figures weight, grief, and ground to stand on — the hinge between medieval symbol and Renaissance story. c. 1267–1337 Artist Fra Angelico The Dominican friar whose frescoes for his brothers' cells at San Marco were painted as instruments of prayer, one mystery per monk. c. 1395–1455 Artist Michelangelo Buonarroti Sculptor of the Pietà and the David, painter of the Sistine ceiling — the Renaissance's defining sacred artist, shown here in del Conte's portrait. 1475–1564 Artist Caravaggio The painter who dragged sacred history into a Roman tavern's light — saints with dirty feet, apostles recruited from the street. 1571–1610 Artist Rembrandt van Rijn The Dutch master who painted the Bible as an interior event — and painted himself, at every age, as its witness. 1606–1669 Artist Ibn Muqla The Abbasid vizier who gave Arabic writing its proportional system — the calligrapher's geometry on which a thousand years of Qur'an copying rests. died 940 Artist Kamal ud-Din Behzad The master of the Timurid miniature, head of the royal atelier at Herat, whose building sites, gardens, and crowds set the Persian standard. c. 1450–1535 Artist Mimar Sinan Chief architect of the Ottoman sultans for fifty years, builder of the Süleymaniye and the Selimiye — the classical Ottoman mosque perfected. c. 1489–1588 Artist Riza-i Abbasi The Safavid court painter who turned the Persian miniature toward the single figure — youths, lovers, and readers alone on the page. c. 1565–1635 Artist Marc Chagall The Jewish painter of Vitebsk who carried the shtetl, the Torah, and the crucified Jesus of Jewish suffering into modern art. Shown in a 1941 photograph; his paintings remain in copyright. 1887–1985 Artist Moritz Daniel Oppenheim Called the first Jewish painter of the modern era: his Scenes from Traditional Jewish Family Life gave emancipated German Jewry its self-portrait. 1800–1882 Artist Raja Ravi Varma The painter who put the gods on the bazaar wall: his oleographs of Lakshmi, Saraswati, and the epics made divine images a part of every Indian home. 1848–1906 Artist Abanindranath Tagore Founder of the Bengal School, whose Bharat Mata (1905) gave Indian nationalism a goddess's face — and swadeshi art its emblem. 1871–1951 Artist Sesshu Toyo The Zen monk-painter who studied in Ming China and returned to make ink landscape the deepest expression of Japanese Zen. 1420–1506 Artist Hakuin Ekaku The Rinzai Zen reviver who painted Daruma with a sumo wrestler's glare and wrote the koan of the sound of one hand. 1685–1768 Artist Tawaraya Sotatsu Founder of the Rinpa school, painter of the Wind God and Thunder God screens — gold ground, divine weather, design as devotion. died c. 1640 Artist Wu Daozi The Tang muralist whose temple walls made crowds gasp — the sage of painting in Chinese tradition, whose work survives in copies and in legend. c. 680–760 Artist Liang Kai The court painter who walked away from the academy to become 'Madman Liang', inventor of the splashed-ink immortal. c. 1140–1210 Artist Mishkin-Qalam The Bahá'í master calligrapher whose rendering of the Greatest Name became the faith's most reproduced image — a word, beautifully written, in place of a face. 1826–1912 Artist Fariborz Sahba The Iranian-Canadian architect of the Lotus Temple in New Delhi and of the Bahá'í terraces on Mount Carmel. born 1948 Artist Norval Morrisseau The Anishinaabe founder of the Woodland School, who painted the legends of his people in X-ray lines and unmixed color — against the elders' first objections, then with their blessing. 1932–2007 Artist Bill Reid The Haida master carver and jeweler whose Raven and the First Men brought the monumental carving tradition back to full strength. 1920–1998 Artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye The Anmatyerre elder who began painting on canvas at about eighty and produced one of the great bodies of work in Australian art — her Country, Alhalkere, in yam, seed, and track. c. 1910–1996 Artist Käthe Kollwitz The German artist of grief: her Pietà, enlarged in Berlin's Neue Wache, is Germany's central memorial to the victims of war — a mother holding her dead son, made by a mother who lost hers. 1867–1945 Artist Doris Salcedo The Colombian sculptor of political violence's traces — her Fragmentos floor in Bogotá is a counter-monument hammered from surrendered weapons by women victims of the conflict. born 1958 Artist Sobha Singh The Punjabi painter whose portraits of the Gurus hang in a million homes — shown here, by the rules of his own tradition's guidance, as himself: a 1985 photograph of the artist. 1901–1986 Workshop The Chola Bronze Workshops Anonymous Tamil caster lineages whose lost-wax bronzes — above all the dancing Shiva — are the summit of Indian sculpture. 9th–13th centuries Workshop The Gandhara Workshops The stucco and schist ateliers of the Peshawar valley that gave the Buddha his first human face — Apollo's features, a monk's robe, a teacher's calm. 1st–5th centuries Workshop The Gujarat Manuscript Ateliers The family workshops of western India that painted the Kalpasutra and the Jain lives in gold, lapis, and red — hundreds of copies, one devotional economy. 15th–17th centuries Workshop The Janamsakhi Ateliers The painters of the janamsakhis, the illustrated lives of Guru Nanak. This directory's image for them is a manuscript's opening folio of text — no figure of the Guru — by the community's guidance. 17th–19th centuries Workshop The Ise Carpenters (Miyadaiku) The master shrine carpenters who rebuild Ise Jingu every twenty years with hand tools and unjoined cypress — a craft transmitted by being performed. Lineage from the 7th century Workshop The Persepolis Carvers The imperial workshops of Darius and Xerxes — masons from across the empire whose Apadana reliefs process twenty-three nations up the stairs with their gifts. 6th–4th centuries BCE