The best painters in history

Although the title of "father of abstraction" has been assigned to multiple artists from Turner to Picasso, few painters could claim it as justly as Kandinsky. Many artists have managed to get excited but very few have also managed to change our way of understanding Art. Wassily Kandinsky belongs to the latter.

It has been said that Giotto was the first true painter just as Adam was the first man. We agree on the first. Giotto continued the Byzantine style of Cimabue and other predecessors but earned the right to appear with gold letters in the history of painting by endowing his works with a quality almost unknown to date: emotion. THE EXPULSION OF THE AREZZO DEVILS

"Cézanne is the father of us all." This lapidary phrase has been attributed to both Picasso and Matisse and it certainly matters little who actually said it because in any case it is true. Starting from the wave of fresh air that Impressionism represented, Cézanne left the entire Impressionist group behind to develop a painting style never seen to date that opened the door wide for the arrival of Cubism and the rest of the avant-garde twentieth century. THE MOUNTAIN SAINTE-VICTOIRE

"There is a painter who has the habit of painting atmospheres ..." wrote a critic of the time about William Turner, the greatest landscape painter of all time. Turner's experiments during his last years close to abstraction are among the most advanced to his time that has been seen in the history of Art. THE NAUFRAGIO

The importance of Monet in the history of Art is sometimes "forgotten" by the fact that before his work the viewer tends to see only the irresistible beauty that emanates from the canvas forgetting the complex study that Monet made of painting (a "Defect" that Monet himself caused by declaring "I do not understand why people want to understand my paintings when it is enough to enjoy them). Despite Monet's experiments in particular, his studies on the changes of light on the same object throughout the day and the almost abstract quality of his "water lilies" are an obvious prologue to 20th century art. CAMILLE WITH GREEN DRESS

The quarrelsome and violent Caravaggio is considered the father of baroque painting with its spectacular play of light and shadow and its "tenebrist" scenes captured in forced perspectives. THE LETTER PLAYERS

The fascinating magnetic play of light and shadow of his works seems a reflection of his life that went from fame to oblivion while his technique was only improving. His self-portraits by far the most fascinating in the history of painting tell us about a sincere and honest painter a teacher capable of penetrating the mind of the greatest stranger: self. THE RAPTURE OF EUROPE

Together with the previous one of the summits of baroque painting. But unlike the Dutch, the Sevillian artist moved almost all his life within the comfortable but also rigid courteous society. Despite this, Velázquez was a renovator, an “atmosphere painter” almost two centuries before Turner or the Impressionists, and he captured it both in the colossal chamber paintings (“Meninas” “La fragua de Vulcano”) and in the bold and unforgettable Sketches of the Villa Médicis. LAS MENINAS

Picasso is a gigantic earthquake of eternal sequels to art history. With the possible exception of Michelangelo (who focused his greatest efforts on sculpture and architecture) no other artist showed such ambition when placing his work within the history of Art. Picasso created the avant-garde. Picasso destroyed the avant-garde. He looked back at the great masters and surpassed them when he proposed. He faced the entire history of Art and redefined the tortuous relationship between work and spectator by his own hand. THE GUERNICA

For better or worse Leonardo will always be known as the author of the most famous painting of all time the Gioconda or Mona Lisa. But it is more than that much more. His almost scientific humanistic gaze penetrated the art of quattrocento and revolutionized it with his sfumetto that no one was able to imitate. THE ADORATION OF THE MAGICIANS