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ABBATE, Niccolo dell'

Italian painter (b. 1509, Modena, d. 1571, Fontainebleau)

Painter of the Bolognese school who, along with others, introduced the post-Renaissance Italian style of painting known as Mannerism to France and helped to inspire the French classical school of landscape painting.

During his stay in Bologna (1548-52), his style matured, influenced by his contemporaries Correggio and Parmigiano. His stucco-surface landscapes in the Poggi (now Palazzo dell'Università) survive to show his understanding of nature.

Among his later paintings executed for Charles IX were a series of landscapes with mythologies that influenced many 17th-century French painters He also designed a series of tapestries, "Les Mois arabesques," and some of his designs were adopted by the painted enamel industry of Limoges. His last works are believed to be 16 murals (1571) in which he was assisted by his son, Giulio Camillo. His work in France is recognized as a principal contribution to the first significant, wholly secular movement in French painting, the Fontainebleau style.

AELST, Willem van

Dutch still-life painter from Delft. He was a good draughtsman and vivid colourist. He specialized in still-lifes, as did his uncle and teacher Evert van Aelst of Delft (1602–57), whose name survives only in inventories and who died in poverty. Willem’s earliest known work, a Still-life with Fruit (1642; destroyed in World War II), is likely to have been influenced by his uncle’s style. On 9 November 1643 he enrolled in the Delft painters’ guild and from 1645 to 1649 was in France. From 1649 to 1656 he worked in Florence as court painter to Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. van Aelst returned to the Netherlands in 1656 — first briefly to Delft before settling in Amsterdam in 1657. Van Aelst’s usual signature on paintings, Guill[er]mo van Aelst, recalls his stay in Italy, as does the (occasional) use of his bent-name ‘Vogelverschrikker’ (scarecrow), which appears, for example, on a Still-life with Poultry (1658; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

Aelst's still-lifes are distinguishable from those of other Dutch painters, being frequently littered with bric-á-brac of Renaissance antiquarianism.

AGOSTINO, Giovanni di

Italian painter, Sienese school (active 1310-1347 in Siena)



Florentine painter, trained by Cosimo Rosselli, in whose studio he met Fra Bartolomeo. The two went into partnership in 1508, but soon after this Albertinelli temporarily abandoned painting to become an innkeeper, saying (according to Vasari) that he was fed up with criticism and wanted a 'less difficult and more cheerful craft'. Vasari also says he was a 'restless man, a follower of Venus, and a good liver.' His paintings are elegant but rather insipid. His best work is the Visitation (1503) in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

ALBERTINELLI, Mariotto

Italian painter, Florentine school (b. 1474, Firenze, d. 1515, Firenze)



Florentine painter, trained by Cosimo Rosselli, in whose studio he met Fra Bartolomeo. The two went into partnership in 1508, but soon after this Albertinelli temporarily abandoned painting to become an innkeeper, saying (according to Vasari) that he was fed up with criticism and wanted a 'less difficult and more cheerful craft'. Vasari also says he was a 'restless man, a follower of Venus, and a good liver.' His paintings are elegant but rather insipid. His best work is the Visitation (1503) in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

ALSLOOT, Denis van

Flemish painter (b. 1570, Bruxelles, d. 1626, Bruxelles)





Flemish painter. The earliest document referring to him is a receipt dated 26 May 1593 for the gilding and decoration of the Garnier family monument in Notre-Dame-du-Sablon in Brussels. The records of the Brussels painters' guild, which survive only from 1599 onwards, do not mention his admission as a master but show that he took on four apprentices between 1599 and 1625, the last being Pieter van der Borcht. In 1599–1600 he entered the service of Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella, who entrusted him with many important commissions. In 1603 and 1604 van Alsloot received two payments from them for the design and weaving of two-and-a-half laps of tapestry with grotesques. This has often been taken, erroneously, to indicate that he held a prominent place in the development of Brussels tapestry manufacturing.

ALTDORFER, Albrecht

German painter (b. ca. 1480, Regensburg, d. 1538, Regensburg)



German painter and graphic artist working in Regensburg, of which town he was a citizen from 1505 onwards, the leading artist, the guiding spirit of the so-called Danube School.

His training is unknown, but his early work was influenced by Cranach and Dürer's art too was known to him through the woodcuts and engravings. Mingled with these German impressions was a knowledge of the art of Mantegna, perhaps through the mediation of Michael Pacher.

Yet in spite of these varied influences Altdorfer's style always remained personal. Most of his paintings are religious works, but he was one of the first artists to show an interest in landscape as an independent genre. He was the first European to paint forests, sunsets, and picturesque ruins, in which he represented man as part of nature, allied with trees, rocks, mountains, and clouds and often resembling them. In works such as the altar for St Florian near Linz (1518) or the Christ Taking Leave of His Mother (National Gallery, London) he achieved a wonderful unity of mood between action and landscape, and two pure landscape paintings (without any figures) by him are known (National Gallery, London, and Alte Pinakothek, Munich). His patrons included the emperor Maximilian and Louis X, Duke of Bavaria, for whom he painted the celebrated Battle of Issos (Alte Pinakothek, Munich, 1529), which formed part of a large series of famous battle-pieces from Classical antiquity. With its dazzling light effects, teeming figures, and brilliant colours, it is one of the finest examples of Altdorfer's rich imaginative powers.

The fantastic element that pervaded his paintings was also prominent in his drawings, most of which were done with black and white lines on brown or blue-gray paper. His engravings and woodcuts, usually miniatures, were distinguished by their playful imaginativeness, the most important being 40 plates entitled The Fall and Redemption of Man. In 1530 he began using the new medium of etching to produce nine landscapes and a series of fanciful tankards intended as work models for goldsmiths.
From 1526 until his death Altdorfer was employed as town architect of Regensburg. No architectural work by him is known, but his interest in architecture and his skill in handling intricate problems of perspective are demonstrated by his Birth of the Virgin (Alte Pinakothek, Munich).

AMBERGER, Christoph

German painter, Swabian school (b. ca. 1505, Augsburg, d. 1562, Augsburg)





Amberger was an Augsburg portrait painter whose works resemble those of Holbein, but with a strong Venetian influence, perhaps due to Paris Bordone, who may have visited Augsburg in 1540. There is a signed altarpiece of 1560 in St Anna, Augsburg, but the only signed portrait by him seems to be the Emperor Charles V (Berlin). There are works in Augsburg, Birmingham (Barber Institute), Glasgow, Munich, Philadelphia (Johnson), Toledo, Ohio, Vienna and York.

AMERLING, Friedrich von

Austrian painter (b. 1803, Wien, d. 1887, Wien)

Austrian painter. He came from a family of craftsmen and studied (1815–24) at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, where one of his teachers was the conservative history painter Hubert Maurer (1738–1818). From 1824 to 1826 he attended the Academy in Prague, where he was taught by Josef Bergler. In 1827 and 1828 Amerling stayed in London, and he met the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose work was to be a strong influence on Amerling’s painting during the next two decades. Amerling also travelled to Paris and Rome but was recalled to Vienna on an official commission to paint a life-size portrait of the emperor Francis I of Austria (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). With this work, Amerling became the most sought-after portrait painter in Vienna, a position he was to retain for about 15 years. In addition, he was also a major painter of historic and genre pictures, and landscapes. He worked mostly for the arictocracy. He was the master of the Hungarian painter József Borsos.

AMMANATI, Bartolomeo

Italian sculptor (b. 1511, Settignano, d. 1592, Firenze)

Florentine Mannerist architect and sculptor, strongly influenced by Michelangelo and by Sansovino, on whose Library in Venice he worked. His best-known works in Florence are the Ponte Sta Trinitá (1567-70), destroyed during the Second World War, but rebuilt, and his additions to the Pitti Palace (1558-70), including the rusticated courtyard. In sculpture his chief work is the rather ponderous fountain (1560-75) in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, with its marble Neptune and bronze Nymphs. Ammanati beat several sculptors, including Cellini and Giambologna, in a competition for this commission, but the work was not well received. In old age, influenced by Counter-Reformation piety, he wrote a recantation of his secular works (denouncing nude figures as lustful) and he is said to have destroyed some. He was married to Laura Battiferri, a poet who was the subject of a memorable portrait by Bronzino.

ANDREA DEL CASTAGNO

Italian painter, Florentine school (b. 1423, Castagno, d. 1457, Firenze)

Andrea del Castagno (originally Andrea di Bartolodi Bargilla), one of the most influential 15th-century Italian Renaissance painters, best known for the emotional power and naturalistic treatment of figures in his work. Little is known of Castagno's early life, and it is also difficult to ascertain the stages of his artistic development owing to the loss of many of his paintings. As a youth, he was precocious. He executed a mural of Cosimo de' Medici's adversaries (rebels hanging by their heels) at the Palazzo del Podestà in Florence, earning him the byname Andreino degli Impiccati ("Little Andrea of the Hanged Men"). It is known that he went to Venice in 1442, and frescoes in San Zaccaria are signed and dated by both him and Francesco da Faenza. His first notable works were a Last Supper and three scenes from the Passion of Christ, all for the former Convent of Sant'Apollonia in Florence, now known as the Cenacolo di Sant'Apollonia and also as the Castagno Museum. These monumental frescoes, revealing the influence of Masaccio's pictorial illusionism and Castagno's own use of scientific perspective, received wide acclaim. In his altarpiece painting of the Assumption of the Virgin for San Miniato fra le Torri in Florence, Castagno's style more closely resembled International Gothic. In 1451 Castagno continued the frescoes at San Egidio begun earlier by Domenico Veneziano. The light tones that Castagno adopted for his outstanding St Julian (1454-55) show Veneziano's influence. In a work for a loggia of the Villa Carducci Pandalfini at Legnaia, Castagno broke with earlier styles and painted a larger-than-life-size series of Famous Men and Women, within a painted frame (now in the Castagno Museum, Florence). In this work, Castagno displayed more than mere craftsmanship; he portrayed movement of body and facial expression, creating dramatic tension. Castagno set the figures in painted architectural niches, thus giving the impression that they are actual sculptural forms. He achieved similar force in his Youthful David (National Gallery, Washington, D.C.), painted on a shield. His last dated work (Florence Cathedral) is an equestrian portrait of Niccolò da Tolentino. Castagno's emotionally expressive realism was strongly influenced by Donatello, and Castagno's work in turn influenced succeeding generations of Florentine and Paduan painters.

ANTONELLO da Messina

Italian painter, Southern Italian school (b. ca. 1430, Messina, d 1479, Messina)

Italian painter who probably introduced oil painting and Flemish pictorial techniques into mid-15th-century Venetian art. Vasari says that Antonello brought the 'secret' of oil painting to Venice. While this is probably untrue, his San Cassiano altarpiece was certainly influential, for several younger Venetian artists borrowed directly from it and Giovanni Bellini admired the modelling of its figures. His practice of building form with colour rather than line and shade greatly influenced the subsequent development of Venetian painting. Little is known of Antonello's early life, but it is clear that he was trained in Naples, then a cosmopolitan art centre, where he studied the work of Provençal and Flemish artists, especially that of Jan van Eyck. His earliest known works, a Crucifixion (c. 1455; Museum of Art, Sibiu) and St Jerome in His Study (c. 1460; National Gallery, London), already show Antonello's characteristic combination of Flemish technique and realism with typically Italian modelling of forms and clarity of spatial arrangement. In 1457 Antonello returned to Messina, where he worked until 1474. The chief works of this period, the polyptych of 1473 and the Annunciation of 1474 (both in the Museo Nazionale, Messina), are relatively conservative altarpieces commissioned by the church, but the Salvator Mundi (1465; National Gallery, London), intended for private devotions, is bold and simple, showing a thorough understanding of the human form and the depiction of personality. It was but a short step from the Salvator Mundi to such incisive characterizations of human psychology as seen in Portrait of a Man (c. 1475; National Gallery, London), a work that presaged the uncanny vitality and meticulous realism of such panels as Portrait of a Condottiere (1475; Louvre, Paris), which established his reputation in northern Italy. From 1475 to 1476 Antonello was in Venice and possibly Milan. Within a short time of his arrival in Venice, his work attracted so much favourable attention that he was supported by the Venetian state, and local painters enthusiastically adopted his oil technique and compositional style. Among his known works from this period are a Crucifixion (1475, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp) and the San Cassiano Altarpiece of which only two fragments remain (1475-1476, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). In St Sebastian (c. 1476; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), his most mature work, Antonello achieved a synthesis of clearly defined space, monumental, sculpture-like form, and luminous colour, which was one of the most decisive influences on the evolution of Venetian painting down to Giorgione's day. In 1476 he was again in Messina, where he completed his final masterpiece, The Virgin Annunciated (c. 1476; Galleria Nazionale, Palermo).

ARCIMBOLDO, Giuseppe

Italian painter (b. ca. 1530, Milano, d. 1593, Milano)

Italian painter. In the middle of the sixteenth century Arcimboldo made a normal debut with youthful works including designs for window s and tapestries respectively in Milan and Monza cathedrals and frescos for the cathedral of Como. None of these gave any inkling of the bizarre originality he would soon develop. In 1562 he was summoned to the Imperial court in Prague and almost immediately his original and grotesque fantasy was unleashed. He invented a portrait type consisting of painted animals, flowers, fruit, and objects composed to form a human likeness. Some are satiric portraits of court personages, and others are allegorical personifications. Arcimboldo's style has been so often imitated over the centuries that it is sometimes difficult to make exact attributions. He has been seen by some as the forerunner of Surrealism in the 20th century, but, more to the point, he should be seen in his own context at the end of the Renaissance. This was a time when people (collectors and scientists alike) were beginning to pay more attention to nature. Arcimboldo really created the fantastic image of the court in Prague, creating costumes, set designs, and decorations. Emperor Rudolf II set him the task of researching and buying works of art and natural curiosities, as well as giving him countless commissions for paintings. In 1587 Arcimboldo went back to Milan but stayed in contact with the Emperor. Towards the end of his life, he sent the Emperor the idiosyncratic portrait of him in the guise of the Greek god Vertemnus.

ASAM, Egid Quirin

German sculptor/architect (b. 1692, Tegernsee, d. 1750, Mannheim)

Bavarian architect and decorator who worked together with his brother Cosmas Damian (1686-1739). They studied in Rome (1711-14) and developed further the dramatic effects of light and illusionism with which Italian Baroque artists, notably Bernini and Pozzo, had experimented. Both men worked as architects, but Cosmas Damian was also a prolific fresco painter, and Egin Quirin was a sculptor and stuccoist. They worked best as a team, and their ecclesiastical buildings were the supreme expression of the Bavarian delight in decorative display; architecture, painting and sculpture unite to set a scene in which light and colour are the chief actors. The best known of their churches is that of St John Nepomuk, Munich (1733-46). The brothers themselves paid for the building (which was attached to Egid Quirin's house), and it is often referred to simply as the 'Asamkirche'.

ASSELYN, Jan

Dutch painter (b. 1610, Diepen, d. 1652, Amsterdam)

Dutch Italianate landscape painter (also spelled Asselijn) probably a pupil of Esaias van de Velde but whose style was formed on the Arcadian landscapes of Claude, and on the Roman Campagna: hence his work resembles that of Berchem, Both and Dujardin. He spent about ten years in Italy c.1634-44. He specialized in real and imaginary scenes of the Roman Campagna, his most famous painting, however, is not a landscape, but The Threatened Swan (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), an unusual work - showing a bird defending its nest against a dog - that is said to be an allegory of Dutch nationalism. Rembrandt, who was Asselyn's friend etched his portrait. Because of a crippled hand he was nicknamed 'Crabbetje' (Little Crab)