CategoriesStyles and Movements
Old Masters
The leading European painters and sculptors active between about 1300 and 1800, and the works made in their workshops.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Old Masters are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In medieval and early modern European cities, a master was an artist admitted to the local guild, entitled to run a workshop and train apprentices. The English phrase Old Masters later came to mean the admired painters of earlier centuries, and it still loosely covers European artists active from about 1300 to 1800, from Giotto to Francisco de Goya.
It is a convenience rather than a style. It spans the gold grounds of early Italian altarpieces, the oil glazes of Jan van Eyck and Titian, the dramatic light of Caravaggio and Rembrandt van Rijn, and the airy ceilings of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Because assistants did so much, catalogues use graded labels: “workshop of” means produced under the master's supervision, “circle of” by a close contemporary, “follower of” by someone working in the style soon after, and “after” a copy of a known work. Technical study keeps revising who painted what.
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