The online art gallery, overstockArt.com, announced today the final phase of the launch of its new line of hand carved and hand painted ceramic tiles. The final phase of the product line launch introduces a line of decorative inlay tiles. It launched in May with art trivet tiles.

The new line is a first for the company, long recognized as the go-to source on the web for purchasing art reproduction oil paintings. “We are excited to diversify our home décor offerings with the new ceramic tile line,” said David Sasson, overstockArt.com’s president and CEO. “The magnificence of fine art masterpieces translates beautifully to this medium and provides our customers with a new and unique way to display art in their homes in a functional form.”

The inlay tiles create a mural image in a set of 12 tiles. They can be used in a variety of places including, baths, backsplashes, fire places, and walls. The trivet tiles can be used as wall décor or as decorative trivets. Like the paintings available on overstockArt.com, the ceramic tiles focus on reproductions of great masters such as Gustav Klimt, Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, and more.

A select number of tiles were included in both phases of the launch. Additional art trivet tiles and inlay tiles will become available in the weeks and months ahead. To view the new ceramic tile line, visit the new Ceramic Art Tile Gallery.

The woman has been a muse ever since humans began to paint. However, the woman’s body has not been seen in the same perspective in all ages of mankind. Each part of history sees women from the perspective of that era. In the past, the plump woman was the perfect prototype for she symbolized health and a guarantee that she will have many followers. Art saw her that way when it was at it’s peak, during the Renaissance. Nevertheless, she was regarded as a mythological muse, untouched and pure. Mother, wife or mistress, she was the prototype of an intangible being, perfect.

Woman’s beauty was a superior beauty, which could be admired through the paintings that had access only to the select, the high stratum of society. Art was considered the access of a higher level of knowledge. Artists created paintings with mythological subjects, and the woman is the main character. The most famous pure women are Botticelli’s “angels.” In the painting called Spring, women characters appear in the picture, that simply dressed and through their allure give the impression that they are not from the same world as the viewer. At the heart of the painting is Venus in front of a sacred plant, alluding to Eden’s goddess of love. Venus is also present in the famous painting, Birth of Venus, which is at the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence. The masterpiece places Botticceli as the creator of sublime beauty. Through the foamy waves, carried by a shell, sits the Goddess, a beautiful woman, the embodiment of purity, naked, with long blond hair, a timeless woman. Such beauty sparked assumptions that the artist has made the Goddess as the embodiment of love poetry.

Renaissance models were mostly important women in society, whose life is shared with the state or powerful men with an impressionable fortune. These women defined fashion and beauty of those years. Such model we meet at Leonardo da Vinci’s Young woman with ermine, the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the 17-year-old mistress of the Duke of Milan. Another favorite of the official is dedicated The beautiful blacksmith, alleged to be Lucrezia Crivelli, next to currying favor with Duke after Gallerani. However, the famous La Gioconda, which is still shrouded in mystery is the most famous woman smile created by Leonardo. One hypothesis explaining the painting Mona Lisa is said to represent chastity. La Gioconda amazes with her mysterious smile, which gives the feeling that she is the one that admires or observes the viewer. Furthermore, Freud advances the hypothesis that Mona Lisa is the ideal portrait of the artist’s mother.

In the same time Tiziano shows a sensual side of women in the painting Venus of Urbino. The painting shows a typical fashion for that period, the preference for composition from a closed fund to gradually comes to light.

Like Leonardo, Rubens made portraits of famous women, at the time. These include Portrait of Marie de Medici and Portriat of Anne of Austria, which embodies the strong woman, with certain social position. However, there is not a painter, who hasn’t included among his works portraits of women who stood near them. In the last years of his life, Rubens dedicated many of his paintings to his beautiful wife, Helene Fourment. The paintings are testimony to the love the artist feel for this girl. Proofs are over 19 paintings made in a modernist approach. In some of these works, Rubens leaves Helen to be admired by the viewer in all her glory. He surprises her wearing only a fur coat, which let’s found almost all her robust body.

As sensual is Goya’s Maja presented in the painting Naked Maja. The woman begins to be seen more earthly and her nakedness is no longer regarded as pure, but rather sensual. She becomes available to the desired impulses. The painting challenges traditions, customs, and morals of the 1800s. Maja appears naked not only of her clothes but of the time’s customs and offers herself to the viewer admiration. By making this painting the artist approaches creative freedom and the right to express himself without censorship. The freedom will be appreciated more because the artist made the painting with the price of his life. The Inquisition intended Goya a process for immorality.

For Naked Maja is considered as the first paintings in art history that has not mythological suggestions, the only nudes accepted by the society in those times. He thus opened the way for modern artists. Pablo Picasso breaks tradition and tries to give the viewer the feeling that admires a woman by suggestion, in Portrait of Dora Maar.

However, the artist who devoted the most to one single woman is Salvador Dali. His paintings are the undisputable evidence of the enormous love for a woman and what she symbolizes in the artist’s life. The many portraits of Gala, including Gala seen naked from behind, shows the strong connection between the two. Dali calls her his “his genius, his twin.” The artist proves that there is a deep connection between women and men saying: “By signing my paintings with the logo Gala-Dali, I gave a name to the existential truth: without my twin, Gala, I do not exist.” Dali transforms the admired woman into an adored woman, forever loved, that no longer stands as a statue in front of the viewer, but comes down from the heart of the artist, that reveals her to the world by waving passionate the brush on canvas.

His paintings support the hypothesis that a genius artist always has a muse near, that will inspire him forever, whether pure, sensual or just earthly.

Camille Pissarro is often thought of as the forefather of Impressionism, which rejected the bourgeoisie and embraced nature and the expression of the immediate. Early works exemplified the hardworking peasant in harmony with nature, while later works depict more industrialized settings than any other painter of the period.  In the Industrial Age drastic changes shaped an anarchist Pissarro. How would the artist handle the Age of Information Technology, where Twitter is the breaking news source on everything?

He would have mixed feelings. Maybe it’s the anarchist itch. Not many painters before Pissarro showcased the working class as a prominent and intellectual figure in his true element. For most of his life this is seen in his depictions of rural life. The Hay harvest Eragny (1901) (above) is a wonderful example of a style consistent throughout Pissaro’s lifetime. The Impressionists rendered more than light. The loose brushstrokes of selective color represented a moment, and the style itself is aesthetically pointing out that it can fade at any moment. It didn’t help that a revolution was happening. The French Revolution (1789–1799) caused many artists to flee to England and paint the true color of the urban underbelly. Before the revolution the arts had been supported and controlled by the government and its select institutions (The Salon). The Impressionists were frankly sick of censorship and started their own movement, hosting several exhibitions outdoors.

Pissarro provided financial assistance to Jean Grave, the dominant figure in the French anarchist-communist movement. The movement held that life was best when left to its simpler elements with people working together in small communal groups as versus a national monopoly. Pissarro’s empowered the peasant in his or her natural environment in and through his artwork.

In the Age of Information Technology we are undergoing a myriad of changes. Caught in a worldwide recession, oppressive governments fall under dictators and wars rage over resources we have monopolized into scarcity. Our children play less, if at all. We still struggle to feed our families and keep roofs over our heads. The working class is caught up in a worldwide revolution spreading like the bird flu, and the breaking news is not broken by mainstream media or governments. It’s by Twitter and the like. Forget censorship. Wikileaks and Anonymous are our Impressionist painters, our Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir.

When Pissarro began painting cities and factories, he wasn’t a one-sided anarchist but more of an optimist. To look at one of these artworks, it is clear that though smog taints blue skies there is an allure and thrill attached to the urban fast life, a new and sometimes uncanny sort of beauty. Pissarro painted this allure. It’s present in many of his cityscapes. Some theorize that he hated and loved the urban sprawl. A melting pot of mixed feelings, the proof is the accuracy of the artwork. Nothing is embellished. It would stand to reason that Pissarro would feel similarly about the aspects of information technology that while they consume our lives like smog, empower the individual voice within the masses.

A Pablo Picasso work of art was again the subject of a theft. At the beginning of the week, all newspapers wrote about the drawing that had been stolen from the Weinstein Gallery in San Francisco. “Tete de Femme” the stolen piece of art, created in 1965, was estimated to be worth $275,000. According to the art gallery, the thief grabbed Picasso’s drawing off the wall and fled in a waiting taxicab. Fortunately, a Union Square restaurant’s security camera captured the crook. Police have recovered the Picasso drawing on Thursday. Furthermore, the man suspected of taking the valuable sketch had been arrested. Now he faces several charges, including grand theft, possession of stolen property and possession of a controlled substance. His bail was set at $5 million, police said.

Obviously, “Tete de Femme” is not the first Picasso drawing to be stolen. In 1969, some sketches by Pablo Picasso were stolen while on display in a travelling art exhibit organized by the University of Michigan. The theft also took drawings made by the British sculptor Henry Moore. All the sketches were valued at $200,000, and recovered later while being in a California auction house. No arrest was made.

Recently, on February 24th, 2006, “The Dance” by the spanish artist disappeared from the Museu da Chacara do Ceu in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The thieves took advantage of a carnival parade passing by the museum and disappeared into the crowd. They also took “Man of Sickly Complexion Listening to the Sound of the Sea” by Salvador Dali, “Luxembourg Gardens” by Henri Matisse, and “Marine” by Claude Monet. Unfortunately, none of these paintings had been recovered so far.

Two years later, on June 12th, three armed men broke into the Pinacoteca do Estado Museum, Sao Paulo and stole Picasso’s “Minotaur, Drinker and Women.”

Another painting made by Picasso that has yet to be found is “The Pigeon with Green Peas.” The painting was stolen from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris last year, on May 20th. Together with the other five paintings stolen that day, the loot is estimated to be worth about $123 million.

Spain, Picasso’s homeland, was not to be overlooked by the art thieves. On March, 2010, several paintings by Pablo Picasso, Fernando Botero, Antoni Tapies and Julio Gonzalez were stolen while being trucked from a warehouse in Getafe. The cameras recorded images of three masked men who entered the building and hijacked the truck.

Not many people know, but Picasso was himself assumed to be involved in an art theft. Two volumes published in the United States in 2009, rebuild one of the most daring art heist of the 20th century: The theft of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. During the investigation, which lasted several years, even Pablo Picasso had been summoned for questioning by French police. In the morning of August 21, 1911, when the most precious possession of the the Salon Carré museum disappeared, the French police began a controversial investigation of the theft.

Guillaume Apollinaire, Picasso’s friend, was believed to have been involved in the theft of Mona Lisa. He was arrested and put in jail. Apollinaire tried to implicate his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning. Picasso, who was just at the beginning of his ascent into bourgeois life of the Belle Epoque Paris, admitted that he bought two statues stolen with Gioconda, who inspired the famous “Ladies of Avignon”, but claimed that he did not know their origin. Later on, both Picasso and Apollinaire were exonerated. The real thief was Vincenzo Peruggia, who was caught after two years.

Last week, the Van Gogh Museum told press officials that a known self-portrait by Van Gogh isn’t really the artist, it’s his brother, Theo. Vincent Van Gogh’s brother was a major patron of his artwork, supporting Vincent throughout most of his life, morally and financially.

Art historians at the museum say that if this is true then the “self-portrait” will be the only known portrait created by Van Gogh of his brother, aside from casual sketches. Museum spokeswoman Linda Snoek said that the piece was rendered in 1887, when the brothers resided together in Paris. It seems this era of Vincent Van Gogh’s life isn’t well known, except through a few letters exchanged between the brothers.

The brothers are close in resemblance, but scholars say that it is in fact Theo for a number of reasons. A CBS news source shares the following comparisons, “The portrait of Theo shows he had rounder ears than Vincent did. The other portrait shows Vincent with long, angular ears, consistent with other artists’ paintings of Vincent. That is before he famously self-mutilated one of his ears in December 1888.

In addition, Theo’s goatee is more yellow-brown than Vincent’s dark red beard, and Theo has shaven cheeks, consistent with photographs of him from the same period, while Vincent painted himself sporting mutton-chop sideburns.”

Another Van Gogh Self-Portrait (1887), with “mutton-chops”

Van Gogh rendered this self portrait in 1887. He made the move to Paris to live with Theo in 1886, aged 32 years. This was at the height of the Impressionist movement, where he was inspired by and moved alongside Monet and Gauguin. He and Gauguin worked together in Arles, where Van Gogh painted sunflowers to help decorate Gauguin’s residence. Interestingly, the sunflowers are later found in several of Van Gogh’s artworks. The exposure to Impressionism inspired the use of dramatic color in his modern art pieces.

In 1888, mental illness began to become more evident. It was the year that he suffered from bouts of epilepsy, psychotic attacks, and delusions. In one episode he took a knife to his ear and severed it, and later offered the removed ear to a prostitute. This was the same knife he assaulted Gauguin with earlier in the day. Before the episodes became severe, Van Gogh dreamed of creating his own school with Gauguin and other artists.

Vincent left Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1890 and regained contact with Theo. Though he viewed his life and work as a failure, he continued to paint a new work almost daily. Paint flowed through his veins. It was during this time that he created Starry Night, a beloved favorite for most in the world. Whatever fueled his artwork could not be rendered fast enough, like many artists who speak of death at the hands of their muse.

On July 27, 1890 Van Gogh shot himself in the chest and survived the suicide attempt, but he died from the wound two days later. Theo was devastated and inherited the majority of Vincent’s work. Six months later Theo, too, died. His widow took Vincent’s work to Holland to advocate for the work of a brilliant artist and his most supportive patron, his brother Theo.

The recently restored Mona Lisa has the most regarded half smile of any master portrait, and archaeologists are close to discovering who may be the inspiration behind it. In 2008, researchers from Heidelberg University located a note scribbled by a Florentine clerk in the margins of a centuries old manuscript (1503) stating that da Vinci was rendering a portrait of Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, wife of a wealthy and prominent silk merchant. The lady became a nun after her husband’s death. Just a year before the note’s discovery, an amateur historian happened upon Lady Gherardini’s death certificate. She died at age 65 on July 15, 1542, and was buried in Florence’s Saint Ursula convent.

The convent dates back to 1309 where it was later converted into a tobacco factory in the 19th century and sheltered World War II refugees in the forties. The structure is three stories high, with catacombs beneath its concrete floor. Archaeologists officially broke ground at the site on May 9 and have unearthed a skull. Once the remains have been verified through DNA testing compared with that of her deceased children, the team hopes that facial reconstruction can solve this mystery once and for all. Interestingly, in Italy Mona Lisa is nicknamed La Gioconda (“light-hearted woman”).

Other candidates for the role of Mona Lisa have included da Vinci’s mother Caterina, Princess Isabella of Naples, a Spanish lady named Costanza d’Avalos and Cecilia Gallerani, who posed for an earlier painting, The Lady With an Ermine. More interesting theories emphasize masculine facial features of the sitter, suggesting that da Vinci based the portrait on his own likeness or that of his apprentice and possible lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti. Caprotti was known affectionately to da Vinci as Salai, who inherited the Mona Lisa upon the artist’s death. Art historian Silvano Vinceti, who heads the team’s dig, suggested that Mona Lisa could be interpreted as an anagram [Mon Salai], meaning “My Salai.”

Along with the skull, ribs and vertebrae were discovered by the excavation team. The skull will be studied by paleoanthropologist Francesco Mallegni. The truth behind this excavation will not only put to rest a mystery, but let us learn more about da Vinci’s approach to art. However, the dig has led to an uproar among a few of the remaining Florentine noble families, yet the discovery is also said to be an intriguing possibility:

“At first the thought of the dig horrified me but now I am fascinated,” said Natalia Guicciardini Strozzi, a member of one of the oldest and most influential Florentine families.