Michelangelo Merisi, AKA Caravaggio, was one of history’s great painters. Born in Milan, his later assigned name come from his father’s association with the town of Caravaggio.

Caravaggio spent a good part of his checkered life in Rome, where an exhibition of his work goes went on display on the 20th of February and runs ran until 13 June, 2011 2010. [Sorry: got the year wrong – this was last year, I got caught in an internet time warp. I’ve changed tense in the rest of the article See addendum below.]

The exhibition marked the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death and was at the Scuderie del Quirinale, a museum housed in what was once stables for a palace.

The exhibition consisted of 24 paintings, seemingly a small number for a major exhibit, but the curators eschewed the usual practice of including works “related to” or “of the school of, or “from the workshop of” and limited the selections to works accepted without question to be from the master’s hand.

On loan from a number of sources were some of Caravaggio’s most striking and iconic works, a surprising accomplishment given the anniversary year.

The museum’s pages for the exhibition have information and a viewer for the works. The latter is unfortunately a poorly designed Flash module, in which you must painstakingly click through the thumbnails three at a time (how much simpler a page of linked thumbnails would have been, but museum sites love their little widgets).

The reward, after clicking on the larger preview image, is a pop-up with a reasonably large image of the painting. It’s tedious, but worth clicking through just to see the impressive selection of works included in the exhibit.

For better reproductions, see a resource like the Web Gallery of Art, or one of the many other resources for Caravaggio listed on ArtCyclopedia.

[Correction: I saw a notice about this exhibit in Rome, that is current and runs to 15 May, 2011. I did a Google search and came up with the other one from last year. Sorry to disappoint, but the online resources are still there and make a good jumping off point for digging into Caravaggio, always a worthwhile pursuit. – Charley]

Francisco Pons Arnau was a Spanish Academic painter active in the mid 19th Century [Correction: late 19th, early 20th Centuries]. He became a follower of Joaquín Sorolla (see my recent post on Sorolla), and was influenced by Art Nouveau.

He painted portraits, figures, landscapes and what might be called intimate landscapes — garden scenes with detailed depictions of shrubs or trellised vines.

Beyond that, I’ve been able to find little information. Fortunately, there are several examples of his richly colored, light-filled paintings on the web.

The best selection I’ve come across is on The Athenaeum, and there is a nice, easy to access selection on Art Inconnu. There is a video slideshow overview of his work posted to YouTube by mariayutub.

[Initial idea via Francis Vallejo on Twitpic]

The “Cobbe” portrait of Shakespeare, named for the family estate where the painting was found, not for the artist (who remains unknown), stands on good evidence to be the only portrait of the Bard actually painted from life.

The painting has crossed the Atlantic and is currently on display in New Amsterdam, er… I mean New York, at the Morgan Library and Museum.

Accompanied by a few other Shakespeare portraits (like all other known portraits, created posthumously), the Morgan’s first folio 1623 edition of Shakespeare’s plays and other related artifacts, the painting will be on display through May 1, 2011.

Unfortunately, the Morgan hasn’t seen fit to put more than a small image on their site.

I found large images of the painting here, accompanying a post on Doobybrain, and here accompanying a post on Fragments. The latter image, though smaller, looks to have truer color.

For more on this portrait and a comparison to other key portraits of Shakespeare, see my post: Shakespeare’s Portrait? from March, 2009.