in the Near East: during the 14th and 15th centuries its
power and its trade were checked by the advances of
Aragon, the loss of trading stations to the Ottoman Turks,
the rivalry of Venice, and the discovery of the sea route to
India. Despite these setbacks Genoa was still an important
commercial power in the 16th century. Its bankers pio-
neered the use of credit and lent money throughout Eu-
rope.
Christopher COLUMBUSwas one of its most notable
citizens. Its outstanding buildings from the Renaissance
period include the palaces of the Strada Nova (now the Via
Garibaldi) from the second half of the 16th century and
parts of the Palazzo di San Giorgio.
Gentile de Fabriano (Niccolò di Giovanni di Massio)
(c. 1370–1427) Italian painter
The most accomplished exponent of the International
Gothic style, Gentile first became famous for his work in
northern Italy. His productions are stylistically linked with
paintings of the Lombard school, in which he may have
trained. In 1409 he was commissioned to execute frescoes
(now destroyed) in the doge’s palace in Venice, later com-
pleted by his artistic heir PISANELLO. Further commissions
followed in Brescia, Siena, Florence, Orvieto, and Rome,
where he painted frescoes in the basilica of St. John Lat-
eran, which—like the greater part of Gentile’s work—are
now lost. The Adoration of the Magi (1423; Uffizi, Flo-
rence), considered to be his surviving masterpiece, is the
quintessential International Gothic painting. Commis-
sioned for a family chapel in the sacristy of Sta. Trinità,
Florence, it depicts an exotic procession approaching the
Virgin and Child through a fantastic landscape and is
crammed with richly decorative natural detail. Among
Gentile’s other major extant works is the altarpiece known
as the Quaratesi polyptych (1425), made for the Quaratesi
family of Florence, which features a notable painting of
the Madonna (London; other panels elsewhere). Such
works greatly influenced the course of Florentine art.
Gentileschi, Artemisia (1593–c. 1653) Italian painter
Trained by her father, Orazio GENTILESCHI, in 1612 she
was embroiled in a sensational court case when he ac-
cused her teacher, Agostino Tassi, of raping her. Tassi was
eventually acquitted, but thereafter Artemisia had to live
with the notoriety. In 1612 she married a wealthy Floren-
tine painter, Pietro Antonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi. Between
1620 and 1626 she worked in Rome, where she produced
some of her finest paintings, commanding high fees for
her portraits, nudes, and religious scenes in the style of
CARAVAGGIO. Her controversial Judith and Holofernes
(1625; Uffizi, Florence), as well as Penitent Magdalene,
Rape of Proserpine, Portrait of a Condottiere, and Esther and
Ahasuerus all date from this period. In the mid-1620s
she settled in Naples, where she numbered the dukes of
Tuscany, Modena, and Alcalda among her patrons. After
a year painting at the court of Charles I of England
(c. 1628), she undertook the important commission of St.
Januarius with Lions for the new basilica at Pozzuoli. De-
spite Gentileschi’s fame and wealthy clientele, much of her
considerable output has not survived.
Further reading: Keith Christiansen, Orazio and
Artemisia Gentileschi (New Haven, Conn: Yale University
Press, 2001); Mary D. Garrard, Artemesia Gentileschi
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, repr. 1991).Gentileschi, Orazio (Orazio Lomi) (1565–c. 1638)
Italian painter
Born in Pisa, the son of a Florentine goldsmith, he was in
Rome by 1585, painting in a late mannerist style. His
friendship with CARAVAGGIOchanged his fortunes and his
working method and he adopted his mentor’s use of
CHIAROSCURO. He collaborated with the landscape painter
Agostino Tassi, whom he accused in 1612 of raping his
daughter (see GENTILESCHI, ARTEMISIA). After a decade
working in Rome he painted altarpieces and frescoes for
Fabriano cathedral and moved to Genoa in 1621. Here he
painted an Annunciation (1623) that is often considered
his masterpiece. A considerable number of his works on
religious subjects have survived in Italy and elsewhere.
From 1624 to 1626 Gentileschi worked in Paris for Marie
de’ Medici. Late in life he was invited by Charles I to ex-
ecute decorative work in the royal palace at Greenwich
and he died in England.geometry After the great triumphs of antiquity in the El-
ements of Euclid and the Conics of Apollonius, advances in
geometry were sparse during the medieval period. The
first task facing the Renaissance scholars was to recover
the texts of the ancient geometers. Erhard RATDOLTfirst
issued the Elements in a Latin translation in 1482; the
Greek princeps, edited by Simon Grynaeus, appeared in- Numerous other editions, including translations,
introductions, summaries, and commentaries appeared
throughout the 16th century. Apollonius’ Conics was first
printed in a 1537 Latin edition, while much of Ar-
chimedes was made available in TARTAGLIA’s edition of
Given the completeness of Euclid, there was in fact
little for the Renaissance mathematician to add, and, when
a major advance in geometry did come, it took place in an-
alytical and not classical geometry. The roots of this disci-
pline lay more in the works of Archimedes and Apollonius
than in those of Euclid. Archimedes had worked out a
number of techniques for determining the areas of curved
figures. The area of a parabolic segment, for example, was
shown by him to be 4/3 the area of a triangle inscribed in
it. Such problems, however, only began to appeal to mod-
ern mathematicians towards the end of the Renaissance.
The generally conservative nature of geometrical preoccu-
pations is exemplified by the French mathematician Jean
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