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Olympus Digital SLR Cameras and Lenses-01

The Olympus system of digital single-lens reflex (SLR) bodies and lenses was a clean sheet of paper design, introduced in 2003. Olympus and Kodak asked the following questions:

• Does it make sense to make digital camera sensors in the 24x36mm frame size from the 35mm film days?
• If one is going to use smaller sensors than the old film format, why lug around huge lenses designed to cast an image large enough to cover the old 24x36mm frame?

Their answers were "No, no, and here is the Four Thirds system of cameras and lenses designed around a 13x17mm sensor." The result is the world's most compact camera system capable of professional results. The Olympus system should be seriously considered by photographers specializing in travel or those whose shoulders are aching. Note that the aspect ratio is 4:3 rather than the 3:2 of 35mm film and most digital cameras. The 4:3 aspect ratio is closer to old standard paper sizes, such as 8x10, 11x14, and 16x20, and older film formats, such as the 4x5 view camera. It is probably a better aspect ratio for portraits and not as good for landscape.

The Four Thirds system included a design for a brand-new lens mount. Functionally this is very similar to the Canon EOS lens mount, introduced in 1987, with an all-electronic interface between camera and lens. The mount diameter, however, was reduced from Canon's 54mm to about 44mm, similar to the Nikon F-mount. A 44mm on a film camera is a bit tight, but the dimension is vast compared to the size of the image circle for a Four Thirds sensor and therefore provides lens designers with a lot of flexibility. When looking at Four Thirds lenses, multiply by 2 to determine the 35mm equivalent in angle of view, e.g., a 14-42mm zoom lens for an E-system body will work the same as a 28-84mm lens on a 35mm film camera.

If you are new to photography, start with the photo.net article "Building a Digital SLR System."

Contents

1. Olympus DSLR Bodies
2. Nomenclature
3. History
4. Normal Lenses
5. Wide-to-Telephoto Zoom Lenses
6. Wide-angle Zoom lenses
7. Telephoto Zoom Lenses
8. Wide-angle Prime Lenses
9. Telephoto Prime Lenses
10. Macro Lenses
11. Teleconverters
12. Flashes
13. Accessories
14. Underwater
15. Starter Olympus DSLR Systems
16. More
17. Discontinued Cameras and Lenses

History of Painting

After last publication…..



Dürer: AD 1494-1528

In 1494 a young German artist, trained originally by his father as a goldsmith, arrives in Venice to improve his skills as a painter. The following year he returns to Nuremberg to open a studio in his home town, but in 1505 he is back in Venice - staying eighteen months to savour the artistic delights of this city. He is impressed above all by the aged Bellini.

The young man is Albrecht Dürer, who becomes the outstanding figure in Renaissance Germany. His achievement is enhanced by his originality in many differing fields of art.


An early example is his extraordinary self-portrait at the age of twenty-two, now in the Louvre. A young man with dishevelled blond hair, wearing exotic red headgear and lavish robes, stares moodily from the canvas. It is the first example in history of an artist presenting himself as an eye-catching figure of dramatic interest. Renaissance painters in Italy have sometimes inserted themselves as bystanders in a crowded scene. But Dürer takes centre stage, beginning a long romantic tradition of the self-portrait (carried by Rembrandt to its greatest lengths).

Five years later Dürer paints himself in even more splendid clothes, with a view of the Alps through a window. Here, he says, is a man who has travelled - to Italy.

Dürer's two trips to Italy result in other work of great originality. As he travels, he sketches in watercolour the features of the landscape which take his fancy - trees by a lake, a castle on a hill, mountain valleys. These watercolours are not preparatory work for oil paintings. They are done, it seems, purely for pleasure - beginning a rich tradition in the story of art. Dürer's astonishing skill in the medium is evident in his famous 1502 sketch of a hare.

He breaks new ground yet again, travelling to Antwerp in 1520, when he keeps the first example of a journal illustrated with sketches. Meanwhile he makes himself the most prolific Renaissance master in the new printmaking techniques of woodcut, engraving and etching.


Cranac hand Holbein: AD 1505-1553

An almost exact contemporary of Dürer is Lucas Cranach, but his career follows a very different path. Whereas Dürer keeps his own independent studio, Cranach serves for almost half a century, from 1505, as court painter to the electors of Saxony in Wittenberg. As a result he produces endless portraits of the worthies of Saxony, resulting in a marked deterioration from the early style of his youth.

His good fortune, historically, is that from 1517 Wittenberg is at the heart of Germany's religious upheavals. Cranach finds himself, ex officio, the portrait painter of the Reformation. It is from his brush that we know the features of Luther, Melanchthon and other reformers.

Cranach and his studio also provide numerous other pictures which greatly appeal to the nobles of Saxony. These are paintings of impossibly elongated nudes, in provocative postures and often wearing just a large hat or necklace. They derive from the Venuses peinted in Italy at this time, but transform them into something much closer to high-class pornography.

A generation younger than Cranach, and altogether more solemn as a painter, is Hans Holbein. If Cranach is the portrait painter of the German Reformation, Holbein fulfils the same role for the leaders of the northern Renaissance.


In 1520 Holbein establishes a studio in Basel. In the following year Erasmus comes to live in the city. Holbein paints the great scholar twice in 1523 and is given letters of introduction to humanist colleagues in the Netherlands and in England.

As a result, in the winter of 1526, Holbein finds himself lodging in the house of Thomas More in Chelsea. He paints here the earliest domestic family portrait in the history of art, showing More and nine of his relations grouped in a room at home (the image survives only in copies and in Holbein's original drawing).


On this first occasion Holbein stays only two years in England, but he paints a great many portraits during his visit - including the large series of coloured drawings now in Windsor castle. In 1528 he returns to Basel, but he is back in England by 1532. On this second visit, lasting till his death in 1543, he is frequently employed by Henry VIII.

The most familiar image of the self-indulgent tyrant is Holbein's sturdy portrait of him. The future Edward VI is familiar too, as a child, from Holbein's brush. So are three of Henry's queens (Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard) as well as high officials such as Thomas More. Holbein in early Tudor England opens a window on a tense society.

Portrait

History of Painting

After last publication




Venetian painting: AD 1475-1576

During the 15th century, the great formative period of the Italian Renaissance, Venice lags far behind Florence and Rome in responding to the spirit of the time. The reason is partly the long centuries of Byzantine influence; Venetian patrons still expect a painting to be an object of solemn formality, preferably against a gilded background in the tradition of icons.

It is also true to say that in architecture, at this same period, the Venetians are enjoying a magnificent late flowering of the earlier Gothic tradition. The mood of the Renaissance has less immediate appeal here. But in terms of painting this changes rapidly after 1475.


In 1475 a Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina, arrives in Venice, where he spends about eighteen months. He is expert in the northern technique of oil painting, and the rich glowing quality of his work greatly impresses Venice's leading painter, Giovanni Bellini.

After Antonello's visit, the figures in Bellini's paintings evolve towards the rounded and richly human style of the Italian High Renaissance. The grouping of the figures in his altarpieces becomes solidly three-dimensional; his Virgins sit at ease with their infants in enchantingly natural landscapes; his portraits (such as the superb image of Venice's doge in 1501) are of flesh-and-blood people, even if in their Sunday best.



In the last years of Bellini's long life there are two young painters in Venice capable of more than equalling his genius. They add to the Venetian palette the richness of colour which becomes the outstanding characteristic of the school.

The first of the two is Giorgione. He dies young in 1510 (though only two or three years younger than Raphael), and his work is only known from a very small number of richly glowing masterpieces. The second is Titian, whose life is as long as Giorgione's is short. Titian establishes a dominant position in northern Italian painting equal to that of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael in Florence and Rome.


Like any other good painter of the time, Titian receives commissions for church altarpieces (his Assumption of the Virgin for the church of the Frari in Venice, in 1518, is by far the largest yet seen in the city), but he also produces large secular paintings for delivery to an impressive clientele of princely customers.

The first such patron is Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, for whom Titian paints three magnificent classical subjects between 1517 and 1523. One of them, Bacchus and Ariadne, is today one of the treasures of the National Gallery in London.


Titian's customers also include the two great rivals of the era, Francis I of France and the emperor Charles V. He has no need to enter their service abroad. He despatches works to them from his studio in Venice.

Charles V and his son, Philip II, become Titian's most persistent patrons. They particularly like his mythological subjects, or poesie. Mythology provides many opportunities to display the naked female form, and these paintings build upon a rich new tradition in western art. Botticelli has pioneered the theme of the nude, but Giorgione and then Titian develop it seductively in the art of Venice. (Cranach is doing so at much the same time, with less subtlety, in Germany.)



Titian also has an extremely busy career as a portrait painter, particularly in the 1530s and 1540s. During his long life (into his mid-80s) he paints in an increasingly free style, until his brush strokes become bold short cuts to the depiction of reality.

A similar freedom of execution is characteristic of Tintoretto, the next of Venice's great masters. Veronese, arriving from Verona in 1555, completes the trio who together give this Venetian school such distinction. Veronese paints his vast canvases in a more measured and controlled style than Titian or Tintoretto. But the richness and colour remain unmistakable, as with so many other painters in the studios of Venice at this time.

Portrait

History of Painting

After last publication

Michelangelo the painter: AD 1504-1550

Michelangelo's reputation as a painter derives, almost entirely, from his work in one building - the Sistine chapel. A few panel paintings possibly survive from his hand from the period 1495-1508, though only one of them is accepted by scholars beyond any doubt. This is the circular Virgin and Child commissioned by Angelo Doni in about 1504, now in the Uffizi. Two panel paintings in the National Gallery in London have long been attributed to Michelangelo by some and rejected by others.

At the end of his life there are frescoes for another Vatican building, the Pauline chapel, which Michelangelo completes in 1550. But all the rest of his painting is done in two creative bursts - on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel (1508-12) and on the wall above the altar (1536-41).

Michelangelo's concept for the ceiling of the chapel is as bold as his execution of the figures. An elaborate architectural perspective draws the eye up past alcoves, in which huge figures sit, to ever-receding panels which eventually display a series of narrative scenes.

These vast but distant-seeming panels along the centre of the ceiling (each about 10 by 18 feet) tell the story at the start of Genesis - from God's creation of the universe to the famous spark of life (from the Creator's finger to the languid Adam), and on through the expulsion from Eden to the more conventional form of human frailty in the drunkenness of Noah.



The attendant figures, many of them cramped in the available spaces, twist and turn with convincing flexibility. They seem to have a muscular certainty, even where distortion is involved, deriving from Michelangelo's skills as a sculptor. The colours, revealed afresh in a cleaning programme during the 1990s, are vibrantly bright, in often startling combinations. (With these surprises, of posture and colour, Michelangelo inspires a younger generation to develop the style known as mannerism).

The effect of the Sistine ceiling is exuberant, optimistic. It fits with the confident papacy of Julius II. The end wall of the chapel is very different. But it too reflects its times.



In 1527 Rome is sacked by an unruly army of German mercenaries, while Clement VII shelters helplessly in the Castel Sant'Angelo. In the aftermath of this appalling event, Clement commissions Michelangelo to paint the end wall of the Sistine chapel. The subject is to be the Last Judgement. Again Michelangelo captures the mood perfectly, giving this traditional cautionary tale a dark and dramatic violence (though the anguished nudity proves too much for some - twenty years later Daniele da Volterra is employed to paint in some loincloths).

From the Creation to the Last Judgement, the Sistine chapel forms a single masterpiece. Giotto's chapel in Padua is the only other building to express so thoroughly one painter's vision.

Raphael: AD 1504-1520

While Michelangelo is painting the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, Raphael - his junior by eight years - is working on another commission from Julius II just a few hundred yards away.

Raphael may be described as the boy wonder of the Italian Renaissance. Born in Urbino in 1483, the son of a minor painter (Giovanni Santi), Raphael makes his way in about 1504 to Florence. Over the next few years he paints the serenely beautiful Madonnas and Holy Families, set in luxuriant landscapes, which first reveal his genius. The style derives from Perugino, in whose studio Raphael probably learnt his craft, but in these paintings there is a new certainty of composition, modelling and colour.

News of his talent must have spread rapidly among the patrons of the day, because towards the end of 1508 he is summoned to Rome and is given a papal commission of great importance. Julius II wants frescoes for a series of rooms in the Vatican which he intends to use as his own apartment. This sensitive task is entrusted, in 1509, to the 26-year-old Raphael. It occupies him for the rest of his life.

Raphael's astonishing achievement in the Stanze (Italian for 'rooms', and the simple name by which they are still known) is a triumph over many different problems, all new to him when he begins.



The themes to be depicted for the pope are often intellectual and thematic, and thus much harder to bring to life than the intimacy of the Holy Family. They involve large numbers of characters, requiring compositional skills similar to those of a director presenting a scene on a stage. And the vaulted rooms, with walls interrupted by doors or alcoves, present irregular and difficult surfaces.

Raphael triumphs over these obstacles. In the very first room which he undertakes, the Stanza della Segnatura, he creates with great confidence two crowded and contrasted scenes - the School of Athens, featuring Plato, Aristotle and many others, and the Disputa in which biblical figures and saints discuss the Christian sacrament.

Raphael's work on the Stanze is interrupted from 1515 by another important papal commission. Pope Leo X, elected in 1513, wants a set of ten tapestries to hang around the lower walls of the Sistine chapel. He asks Raphael to design ten scenes from the New Testament, to be sent north to Europe's best weavers in Brussels.

Raphael, by now a master of large narrative compositions, paints the scenes as full-size cartoons in gouache on paper. In spite of hazardous journeys to Brussels and back to Rome, and then to England in 1623 (after being bought for Charles I's tapestry factory in Mortlake), seven of these cartoons survive in surprisingly good condition in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

During these same years Raphael has been developing formidable skills as a male portraitist, painting his subjects more informally than has been the tradition, with a soft play of light on fabric and flesh, usually against neutral backgrounds, to focus all attention on the man's character. His sitters include both his papal patrons, Julius II and Leo X, and his friend the writer Baldassare Castiglione.

The brilliant portrait of Castiglione, with its muted range of blacks and greys and browns, is the perfect example of this new style. It is a style which will be developed with great flair during the 16th century by the portrait painters of Venice, in particular Titian.



When Raphael is painting Castiglione's portrait, in 1515, Michelangelo has recently finished the Sistine ceiling and Leonardo da Vinci is also in Rome - not painting, but busy with scientific experiments. A mere six years after beginning the Stanze, Raphael is as much admired as the two older men. He has a thriving studio, with a great number of assistants. He has been appointed architect of St Peter's (in 1514) and is busy with other achitectural projects.

These three artists are already seen as the outstanding figures of the time - a period subsequently regarded as the High Renaissance in Florence and Rome. Five years later, after a brief illness in 1520, Raphael dies. He is thirty-seven. His career has spanned just sixteen years.

Portrait

History of Painting

After last publication

Renaissance man: 15th - 16th century AD

The term Renaissance Man has come to mean someone with exceptional skills in a wide range of fields. The description applies to many people during the Renaissance (a period when it is assumed that artistic talent can be easily adapted to differing crafts), but there are two outstanding candidates for the title.

They are Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The older man, Leonardo, is exceptional in that he excels in two entirely different disciplines - experimental science and the visual arts. But on the artistic side alone, Michelangelo must be the man. He creates works, all of the highest quality, in the four distinct fields of sculpture, painting, architecture and poetry.

Leonardo da Vinci: AD 1482-1519

Leonardo trains in Florence as a painter, almost certainly with Verrocchio, and he becomes a member of the painters' guild in 1472. But in about 1482 he sends a letter to Ludovico Sforza, the duke of Milan. In it he offers the duke his skills, which he lists under ten headings. The first nine are all to do with war. The 30-year-old genius declares that he can provide the duke with original designs for portable bridges, siege engines, mining and explosive equipment, mortars to spray the enemy with small stones, and even a cannon-proof vehicle to transport troops safely into the midst of the enemy - in other words a tank.

In the tenth and final clause Leonardo adds that he is also a talented architect, sculptor and painter.


This imbalance may be Leonardo's guess at the duke's priorities, but it also reflects to some extent his own interests. His famous notebooks show his hand and his eye and his feverish mind working ceaselessly together to observe and to analyze the physical world, and then to develop the ideas and designs which emerge from that process of observation.

Leonardo is ahead of his time in the notions which he dreams up (his flying machines, like the tank, are useless until there is an engine to propel them). But he is also the pioneer of new scientific principles. In his anatomical researches, as with Vesalius half a century later, observation takes precedence over theory and tradition.


The draughtsmansip in Leonardo's notebooks and sketches would in itself rank him among the world's greatest artists. So would the quality of his surviving paintings, few though they are.

Little remains of his two most ambitious projects, a large mural in Milan and another in Florence. The Last Supper in Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan has been so much restored (because Leonardo used a new but defective technique) that only its linear design is authentic. The scene of the victory at Anghiari for the council chamber in Florence was never completed and was subsequently painted over. Only a few sketches survive, some of them showing skirmishes in the battle.


Sfumato and the Mona Lisa: AD 1505

Art historians can demonstrate the influence of both these works. Leonardo is a pioneer in his treatment of the human drama between Jesus and the apostles at the Last Supper, and in his depiction of movement in battle.

But no expert guidance is required to appreciate Leonardo's panel paintings. They introduce a subtlety in the use of paint, and in the treatment of light, which adds a new technique to the painter's repertoire. Leonardo gently blurs his colours, one into another, to avoid hard lines. The effect is known as sfumato (smoky) - or in Leonardo's words 'without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke'.

Leonardo's smoky style is seen in the portrait of a young woman which he paints in Florence in about 1505. She smiles at the viewer, with her hands folded serenely on a ledge in front of her. Her gaze is wonderfully mysterious; so is the dream-like rocky background; so even is her identity.

It is probable that the sitter is Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, so the portrait is variously known now as La Gioconda or the Mona Lisa (from monna, an old Italian word for 'lady'). Now in the Louvre, she has been in France since 1517 - when Francis I makes the elderly Leonardo his court painter, and takes Monna Lisa into the royal collection.

Portrait

History of Painting

After last publication

Piero della Francesca: AD 1445-1460

A religious fraternity in Sansepolcro, near Arezzo, requires a new altarpiece. In January 1445 the members commission it from a young man in his late twenties, who has been away in Florence for the past few years learning his craft but who is now back in his small provincial home town.

The painter is Piero della Francesca. He spends much of his working life in Sansepolcro and in Arezzo, far from the main artistic centres, which to some extent explains why his name is largely forgotten for several centuries after his death. Another reason may be the profound calm of his work, unfashionable in periods when art has tended more to the dramatic gesture. He is now recognized as one of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance.

While in Florence, the young Piero has clearly seen Masaccio's frescoes. His first altarpiece at Sansepolcro is old-fashioned in concept, with a gilded background, but the figures already achieve the rounded solidity pioneered in the frescoes of the Brancacci chapel.

From this beginning, within a few years, Piero evolves his own characteristic and inimitable style. It is visible in the famous Baptism of Christ, probably painted as an altarpiece in Sansepolcro in the early 1450s. The figures stand with monumental stillness, bathed in a cool light of seemingly eternal clarity. This is Renaissance humanism in its broadest sense, allowing full weight to the dignity of man.



The stillness, the sense of a scene perfectly positioned in space, the use of patches of almost pure colour to suggest a harmony of pattern and order - all these are characteristics of Piero's timeless art. They can be seen at their best in the fresco cycle on the Legend of the True Cross, which he paints in the church of St Francis in Arezzo in the years around 1460.

Underpinning the calm certainty of Piero's created world is a fascination with theories of form and perspective, very characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. Piero is the author of two learned treatises on the mathematics of pictorial illusion.


Botticelli: AD 1478-1482

If Piero's work offers the mystery of stillness, Botticelli introduces mystery of another kind - mysterious content, expressed in a restlessly sinuous line. From about 1470 Botticelli is established as one of the leading painters of Florence, frequently working for the Medici.

His characteristic style is seen in two of the best loved and most widely recognized paintings of the Renaissance. The Birth of Venus (c.1482) is a traditional subject (in classical mythology the goddess is born from the foam of the sea and floats ashore in a scallop shell). But Botticelli's tall nude and her attendant winds are a strikingly original way of depicting the scene.



In Primavera (Spring, c.1478) the scene itself is profoundly mysterious. In a grove of oranges the three Graces dance, while Flora scatters flowers upon the ground. She wears an exquisitely embroidered floral dress and is attended by a woman with a plant growing vigorously from her mouth. This woman, in her turn, is seized by a man in flight.

These figures depict a scene in Ovid. Zephyr (the west wind) grasps his bride Chloris (the goddess of flowers), whereupon blooms sprout from her lips and she is transformed into the fully developed Flora, strewing spring flowers upon the ground.



These two paintings, imbued with classical allusion, are believed to contain themes of special significance to the Neo-Platonists of Florence's Platonic Academy. It is even possible that their content is devised by the academy's director, Marsilio Ficino. Primavera also conceals within its imagery several hints of the names Medici and Lorenzo.

Both works are commissioned for his private villa by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, a cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent. They suggest very well the rarefied nature of Renaissance Florence in the late 15th century - an atmosphere about to be brutally interrupted by the more strident certainties of Savonarola.

Portrait

History of Painting

After last publication

Bruges and Italy: 15th century AD

The links of trade and finance between cities in Italy and the Netherlands have been immortalized in two works of art. Giovanni Arnolfini is a merchant from Lucca living and trading in Bruges. In 1434, when newly married, he commissions a double portrait from Jan van Eyck.

Hoping for a memorial to himself and his wife, Giovanni could not possibly have made a wiser investment. The Arnolfini Marriage is now one of the most famous paintings in the world. It is also an early glimpse of the Italian interest in Flemish art which will result, later in the century, in the spread southwards of the northern technique of oil painting.



An altarpiece of about 1475 proves very influential in this same respect when it reaches Florence. Tommaso Portinari, the agent in Bruges for the Medici bank, commissions from Hugo van der Goes an altarpiece for the church of St Egidio in which his family has a chapel.

The central panel of the triptych shows the Virgin with her newly born Child visited by angels and shepherds, while the kneeling Portinari family are presented from the side panels by saints. This large altarpiece makes the journey south by sea and river. It is the most imposing example of the northern style of painting to have reached Florence, the heart of the southern Renaissance.

Fra Angelico and San Marco: AD 1443-1447

The Dominican order has among its ranks a superbly talented painter. As a friar he is referred to as 'brother' (frater in Latin, fratello in Italian), and the name by which he becomes known is Fra Angelico - the angelic brother.

From 1443 Dominicans in Florence employ him to provide contemplative images for the walls of their convent of San Marco. Over the next four years he and his assistants create an extended masterpiece of Italian Renaissance art - though they would not have thought of it in those terms.


There are large frescoes in the cloisters and in the public areas of the convent (mainly by Fra Angelico), and forty-four smaller scenes from the Gospel story in the cells of the friars (many of them painted by his assistants). But the master's style - clear colours, strong design, a sense of depth and light learnt from the example of Masaccio - is one which the pupils can adopt with a fair measure of success.

The result is a building whose interior, as intended, is marvellously conducive to a sense of wonder and contemplation - certainly for the friars for whom the images were painted, and almost as much among today's tourists.

Jean Fouquet: AD 1445-1460

Jean Fouquet, born in Tours in about 1420, spends four years in Italy in the 1440s. When he returns to Tours, he begins a decade of very fruitful activity blending Italian and northern influences.

One of Fouquet's most striking works, from about 1450, is the portrait of his patron, Étienne Chevalier, seen praying with St Stephen and painted as one half of a diptych for a church in Melun. The realism with which the two men are depicted derives from the example of the Netherlands masters of the time, such as van Eyck and van der Weyden, but Fouquet adds a classical calm of his own.


In about 1452 Étienne Chevalier commissions from Fouquet the work on which his reputation is mainly based. It is a Book of Hours, for which Fouquet provides detailed miniature illustrations of scenes from the Bible and the lives of the saints. Fouquet probably completes the work by 1456. The original number of the scenes is not known but forty-seven exquisite images survive, nearly all of them in the museum at Chantilly.

In these small but beautifully controlled compositions Fouquet again brings together two traditions from outside France.

The colourful elegance of Fouquet's scenes develops the tradition of the miniatures of northern Burgundy and of the Limburg brothers, masters of the International Gothic style. But in other elements - his use of the motifs of classical architecture, his interest in persective, the rounded solidity of his figures and of their spatial relationships - Fouquet reveals the influence of what he has his seen in Renaissance Italy, such as the work recently completed by Fra Angelico in Florence.

A link with Italy remains a central characteristic in the next great period of French painting, the 17th century.