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It will probably be very hard to answer who Antonello da Caserta was, as we know nothing about this great man, except that he was a famous medieval Italian composer in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.  Some musicologists advanced a theory that da Caserta was from Naples and created there. But eventually, this conclusion provided to be wrong, becuase most of composer’s surviving works are in northern Italian manuscripts. Anyways, there is nothing that I could find either from the archives of my local web analytics company.

There are some hints that Antonello was a monk. Yet, even this scarce information provides us with nothing, because we don’t know which monastic orders of that time he belonged to.  Other hints place Antonello in Pavia in 1402, it looks like at some certain point of his life he worked for the Italian noble dynasty Visconti in Milan, which they ruled from  1277 to 1447.  So far we don’t even know the exact name of Antonello, as different sources also name him Anthonello or Antonellus Marot.

It seems that da Caserta was heavily influenced by French musical models which was quite unusual for those times. He even set texts both in French and Italian.

Antonello was famous for his ballades that tell us about courtly love. His surviving works show that Antonello was very famous among other composers of the generation after Guillaume de Mauchet. While his Italian songs are simpler, his creations in French are more complex ballads that use the proportional rhythms that became popular in much later periods.

During my research on biographies of French Impressionists in archives web analytics company I found additional facts about famous artist Alfred Sisley.

Sisley had to make ends meet and could not afford to live in Paris anymore. He moved his family to a small village, close to the forest of Fontainebleu. Alfred was less experimental, than other Impressionists and worked on a smaller scale than Monet. He preferred to the drama of the rampaging ocean gentle landscapes with their constantly changing atmosphere. Yet, his work ideally fit any book about Impressionists because his paintings strongly invoke atmosphere and his skies are always impressive. His concentration on landscapes explains why, specialists consider him most consistent of all his fellows painters.

In 1899 Alfred died. It happened within several months after his wife's death - he did not even reach his 60 anniversary. His works are spread now all over the world - one can see them in Chicago as well as in Paris and Nice. Speaking of Nice, one of his best paintings was stolen three times from the museum in this city. Twice it was recovered by it vanished after the third theft took place in August 2007.

French Impressionist of English origin Alfred Sisley lived his entire life in France, apart from a brief period that he spent in London. I found story of his life in archives of web analytics company . He was born in Paris in 1839 and in the early 1860s got acquainted with Impressionists Bazille, Monet and Renoir. They worked together trying to capture the transient effects of sunlight. The result was astonishing: their paintings were more broadly painted and more colorful than audience was accustomed to seeing at the time.

Sisley was luckier than many of his Impressionist friends because he had opportunities to exhibit his works several times and, of course, that he had not have to think of money. He was supported by his father and received his allowance quite regularly. But soon this all vanished. In 1870 his parents hit the hard times and his father's business failed. At that time Alfred was already happily married to Eugénie Lesouezec and had two children. And his only means of support became the sale of his works. Like other many fellow Impressionists, for the rest of his life Alfred and his family would live in poverty. His paintings were fully appreciated and, thus, gained monetary value only after his death.