Hand-Painted Fine Art Reproductions of Famous Paintings

Accademia di San Luca, (the "Academy of Saint Luke") was founded in Rome in 1593, "with the ostensible purpose of giving artists a higher education and the real one of asserting the Church's control over art," according to Peter Robb, biographer of the pivotal Baroque artist Caravaggio.
This painting academy of Rome was named for the Evangelist Saint Luke, reputed to have made a portrait of the Virgin Mary, who was patron of many painters' guilds in the Low Countries and in Italy. It has for its modern descendant the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca
Its predecessor, the guild of painters and miniaturists, had its statutes and privileges renewed much earlier, under Pope Sixtus IV December 17, 1478. The statutes directed that each academician was to donate a work of his art in perpetual memory and later, a portrait. Thus the academy in its premises in Palazzo Carpegna, Piazza dell' Accademia di San Luca, has accumulated a unique collection of paintings and sculptures, including about 500 portraits, as well as an outstanding collection of drawings.
The Protestant reformers of the early decades of the 16th century had threatened the foundations of the Catholic Church, perhaps its very existence, and one of their chief criticisms had been the Church's use of images. The Counter-Reformation began with the Council of Trent - actually not one council but a whole series between 1545 and 1563 - which addressed reform of the Church in all its aspects, including art. In 1565 Cardinal (subsequently Saint) Charles Borromeo forbade the painting of popular subjects without official approval, and instructed bishops to in turn instruct artists on correct procedures. Saint Charles had little practical impact, and his austerity almost immediately began to be relaxed. In 1582 Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti's Sacred and Profane Images, a work of immense length, seemed to conclude simply that religious art should be comprehensible. Under the direction of Paelotti and the learned Cardinal Federico Borromeo - nephew of Saint Charles, but a genuine art-lover - the Academy in those initial years inevitably emphsised Christian doctrine and piety, and a conservative reverence for the heritage of late Mannerism as championed by its first president, the ultra-conservative artist Federico Zuccari. And equally inevitably, the major developments in the artistic world took place outside its orbit, in the work of Caravaggio and his great contemporary, Annibale Carracci. By 1595 the secretary was lamenting that the Academy was abandoned and that nothing was happening there.
Nevertheless the Academy did survive. From the very beginning the statutes of the Academy directed that each candidate-academician was to donate a work of his art in perpetual memory and, later, a portrait. Thus the Academy, in its modern premises in Palazzo Carpegna, Piazza dell' Accademia di San Luca, has accumulated a unique collection of paintings and sculptures, including about 500 portraits, as well as an outstanding collection of drawings. The Academy can also boast of many famous graduates, including the sculptors Ernesto Biondi and the brothers Attilio Piccirilli and Furio Piccirilli who emigrated to the United States and were among the founders of the Piccirilli Brothers studio, a family enterprise that carved many significant monuments in the USA.