Societies and cultures are often defined by the behaviours and idiosyncrasies that are unique to a group of people. Just as this rule generally applies to the modern world, so does it to the past and more specifically the time of rebirth in western society (AKA the Renaissance.) Just before and du...

In the visual arts the sixteenth century saw the spread of Italian Renaissance ideas northward. In some cases they were carried by Italian artists like Benvenuto Cellini, who went to work in France. Cellini was Goldsmith to Francis I of France from 1537 to 1545. He completed here his first sculptur...

No one knows exactly when the Italian artist, Tiziano Vecellio, was born. Over the centuries, there has been a great deal of confusion concerning the date, due to a misprint in his biography by sixteenth-century art historian, Girgio Vasari. Vasari recorded the date as 1480, but the progress of Tizi...

Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice on March 4th, 1678 to Giovanni Vattista Vivaldi and his wife Camilla Calicchio. Giovanni Vivaldi was originally a barber but, like his infamous son, was intensely in love with the violin and started serving both as a violin teacher at a school and as a part of t...

The Renaissance period was when the most brilliant ideas of art were discovered and invented. During this time, many talents were shown and new techniques in drawing were introduced. Before the Girogionesque style was developed, most painters liked to focus on defining the shapes and the object matt...

Baroque MusicDictionary Meaning: Baroque (Ba-Rok) a 17th century style of music characterised by extensive use of ornamentation.The English word baroque came from the Italian word borocco, which means bizarre, although a better translation which more accurately reflects the sense, would be exuberant...

Introduction Many tales have been spun from Marko Polo and his stories of his life adventures exploring the Far East. History will never truly know what was fact and what was fiction, the truth lies only and died with Marko Polo himself. But, history was also altered by the yarns of Marko Pol...