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Marin Carburi of Ceffalonie was a Greek military engineer from Kefalonia.
Carburi studied mathematics at the University of Bologna, but later had to flee and became an officer in Catherine the Great's Russian army. He became famous for being able to transport the infamous Grom Stone from the Gulf of Finland to St. Petersburg to serve as a pedestal for the equestrian statue of Peter the Great.
The history of this engineering feat is quite remarkable. The French architect Falcone, who was commissioned to create a monument to Peter the Great, decided that traditional pedestals for equestrian statues were too banal for this project, and decided that only a massive rock would do. After a long search for a suitable rock, a peasant informed the commission created for this purpose that he had found a huge rock measuring forty by twenty-seven by twenty-one feet in a swamp near the Gulf of Finland. After the majority of engineers recognized its movement impossible, Catherine II commissioned Carburi to do it, with which he brilliantly coped. In fact, the military engineer became the inventor of ball bearings, creating a giant sled based on them. He wrote a detailed treatise about it, published in Paris in 1777.
Back home in Kefalonia, Carburi took up farming, but in 1782 he was murdered by his workers.
Hector Berlioz, full name Louis-Hector Berlioz, was a French composer, conductor, and music critic of the Romantic era.
Berlioz received his primary education from his father, an enlightened physician, who gave him his first lessons in music and Latin. By the age of 12, he was already composing music for local chamber ensembles and learning to play the guitar and flute with virtuosity. In 1821 his father sent him to Paris to study medicine, and he received his first scientific degree. But in parallel, he often visited the Paris Opera, where he studied the entire repertoire on the score.
Against the will of his parents, Berlioz took a compulsory course of study at the Conservatory of Paris and in 1830 received the Prix de Rome. In Italy he met the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka and became lifelong friends with Mendelssohn. From 1832 Berlioz worked for 30 years as a music critic for periodicals. He was acquainted with many of the leading writers and musicians of his time, including Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Niccolò Paganini, and George Sand.
Berlioz adored the works of Weber and Beethoven, as well as Gluck, and tirelessly introduced audiences to their works. As a result of his many trips as a conductor to Germany, Belgium, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, he taught the leading orchestras of Europe a new style.
Berlioz during these years wrote, among other things, the "Symphonie Fantastique" (1830) that made him famous, and the symphony "Harold in Italy" (1834). After a concert in 1838, where he conducted their performance, the famous violin virtuoso Paganini declared Hector Berlioz a continuator of Beethoven's musical traditions and presented him with 20,000 francs. A grateful Berlioz wrote a choral symphony, Romeo and Juliet, dedicated to Paganini.
In 1844, Berlioz created "Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration", which is not just a technical manual, it served as an introduction to the aesthetics of expression in music for generations to come. Among Berlioz's dramatic works, The Damnation of Faust (1846) and The Nativity (1854) are world-famous.
Jan Havickszoon Steen was a Dutch painter of the Golden Age, a member of the Harlem and Leiden Guilds of St. Luke. Steen is one of the most important Dutch genre painters of his time. Most of his several hundred paintings focus on human morality with the aim of teaching the viewer a moral lesson. They often refer to proverbs or old Dutch literary texts. In addition to genre paintings, Sten explored a variety of subjects: he painted historical, mythological and religious scenes, still lifes and landscapes.
Félix Vallotton, a Swiss-born French graphic artist and painter, is recognized for his distinctive woodcuts and paintings of nudes and interiors. Vallotton's journey into art began in Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian, fostering a unique style that broke from traditional norms. His early works, characterized by extreme realism, were showcased at the Salon des Artistes Français and the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889. This period also marked Vallotton's encounter with Japanese prints, notably those by Hokusai, profoundly influencing his artistic direction.
In 1892, Vallotton joined Les Nabis, a group of avant-garde artists including Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard, which led to a significant evolution in his style. His paintings from this era, such as "Bathers on a Summer Evening" and "Moonlight," exhibited at the Kunsthaus Zürich and the Musée d'Orsay respectively, reveal a departure from realism towards a more symbolic and abstract representation. The works from this period are characterized by flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplified details, mirroring the style he developed in his woodcuts.
Vallotton's woodcuts, like "Intimités" (Intimacies), a series published in 1898, showcased his mastery in capturing the nuances of human relationships, particularly the tensions between men and women. His graphic art, which included depictions of domestic scenes, bathing women, and street crowds, was not just celebrated in Europe but also influenced artists like Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
Towards the end of his career, Vallotton continued to innovate, combining elements of realism and abstraction, evident in paintings like "La Malade" (The Sick Girl) and "Clair de lune" (Moonlight). His works remain a testament to his ability to merge technical precision with a poignant exploration of human emotions and societal themes.
For art collectors and experts, Vallotton's body of work offers a rich and diverse exploration of early 20th-century art movements, especially his role in the development of modern woodcut techniques and his contribution to the Nabis movement. His works are a study in the fusion of realism and symbolism, marked by a distinctive style that makes his art enduringly relevant and compelling.
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Robert Combas is a French painter and sculptor. He lives and works in Paris.
He is widely recognized as a progenitor of the figuration libre movement that began in Paris around 1980 as a reaction to the art establishment in general and minimalism and conceptual art in particular.
Figuration libre is often regarded as having roots in Fauvism and Expressionism and is linked to contemporary movements such as Bad Painting and Neo-expressionism. It draws on pop cultural influences such as graffiti, cartoons and rock music in an attempt to produce a more varied, direct and honest reflection of contemporary society, often satirizing or critiquing its excesses.
