Art Education

[Brandini, Bartolomeo]

(b Gaiole in Chianti, Oct 17, 1493; d Florence, Feb 7, 1560).

Italian sculptor, painter and draughtsman. He was the son of Michelagnolo di Viviano (1459–1528), a prominent Florentine goldsmith who was in the good graces of the Medici and who taught Cellini and Raffaello da Montelupo. Baccio remained loyal to the Medici, despite their being in exile from 1494 to 1513, and this led to a flow of commissions after the elections to the papacy of Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici) in 1513 and of Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici) a decade later; after Cosimo de’ Medici became Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1537, these increased still further. This political stance made him unpopular with most Florentines, including Michelangelo, who were Republican at heart, and this lay at the root of much of the adverse criticism—not always justified—that greeted Bandinelli’s statues.

Baccio seems to have had an ambitious and impatient temperament, which led to frequent changes of master and of direction when he was learning his art. Until ...

(b Lugano, June 13, 1648; d after July 6, 1709).

Italian painter and theorist. He went to Milan about 1665 to study painting under Francesco Cairo. A decade later he moved to Venice, where for the Lombard chapel of S Maria dei Frari he painted St Carlo Borromeo Distributing Alms to the Poor (in situ) in the dark, dramatic, fully Baroque manner of his teacher. David’s other documented works in Venice are in S Maria del Carmelo and the Palazzo Albizzi a Sant’Aponal. While in Venice he also operated a highly successful art academy, remarkably, in competition with Pietro della Vecchia, a far more successful painter. Contemporary reports indicate that ‘he contradicted della Vecchia at every turn’, and that he played down the importance of drawing, making it secondary to the painter’s own ideas. This attitude was highly radical, given that drawing was then considered the basis of an artist’s education. By May 1686 David was in Rome, where he remained for the rest of his life. His two large canvases for S Andrea al Quirinale, the ...

(b Villena, Alicante, c. 1645; d Madrid, June 28, 1717).

Spanish painter, engraver and writer. He began his training in Murcia with Nicolás de Villacis (c. 1618–94) and Mateo Gilarte (c. 1620–after 1680), who both worked in a naturalist and tenebrist style. He travelled to Rome in the 1660s and came into contact with the Italian Baroque, especially the work of Pietro da Cortona and Carlo Maratti. On his return he was first in Valencia, where the work of Jerónimo Jacinto Espinosa became a strong influence. Towards 1674 he established himself in Madrid, where he entered the circle of Juan Carreño de Miranda.

García Hidalgo’s numerous paintings were frequently signed, and he painted a good many for the Augustinian Order in Madrid, Madrigal de las Altas Torres, Santiago de Compostela and Sigüenza (e.g the Vision of St Augustine, 1680; Sigüenza Cathedral), and for the Carmelite Order in Alba de Tormes, Peñaranda de Bracamonte and Segovia (e.g. the ...

American library in Saint John’s University, Collegeville, MN, founded in 1965. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML; formerly the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library) contains over 115,000 microfilm and digital images of medieval, Renaissance, early modern and Eastern Christian manuscripts. To fulfil its mission of preserving endangered manuscripts and making them more accessible to scholars, HMML photographs entire manuscript libraries that lack the resources to preserve their own collections, are inaccessible to researchers, or are in immediate danger of destruction. Until 2003, HMML photographed entire manuscripts on black and white microfilm and shot selected illuminations in colour. When the Library switched to digital photography in 2003, it shot entire volumes in colour and recorded codicological information.

The vast majority of HMML’s holdings reproduce texts predating 1600. Nearly half of HMML’s Western manuscripts derive from libraries in Austria and Germany, but HMML also houses significant collections from Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and England. The Maltese collections are particularly important and include the Archives of the Knights of Malta. HMML has photographed collections of Eastern Christian manuscripts since the 1970s, and its collections of Armenian, Syriac, and Christian Arabic manuscripts are becoming the most significant resource for the study of Eastern Christian manuscripts in the world. HMML has by far the world’s largest collection of Ethiopian manuscripts preserved on microfilm and in digital form....

[Kniller, Gottfried]

(b Lübeck, ?Aug 8, 1646; d London, Oct 19, 1723).

English painter and draughtsman of German birth. He was the leading portrait painter in England during the late 17th century and the early 18th, and, as such, the chief recorder of court society for almost 40 years. He popularized the kit-cat format for portraits and was also the founding governor in 1711 of the first proper academy of art in England. His older brother Johann [John] Zachary Kneller (b Lübeck, 1642; d London, 1702), with whom he was close, was also a painter; his works include watercolour miniatures and still-lifes, as well as copies of his more famous brother’s works.

Kneller came from a distinguished family in Lübeck. His father was the city’s chief surveyor, and Kneller was first prepared for a career in the army, studying mathematics at the University of Leyden (now Leiden). However, it seems he had always been attracted to painting, and in 1662...

(b. Paris, 1926).

Turkish historian of Islamic architecture. He studied in the faculty of architecture at Istanbul Technical University under Emin Onat, receiving his degree in 1949 for a study of Turkish Baroque architecture. He spent 1954–5 in Italy investigating Renaissance architecture, and 1962–3 in the USA on a Fulbright Fellowship. The following year he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, where he studied Byzantine architecture in Anatolia, and for the next decade he was involved in the study and restoration of the Byzantine church known as Kalenderhane Cami in Istanbul. He taught architectural history and restoration at Istanbul Technical University from 1958 until his retirement in 1993 and was dean of the architecture faculty from 1974 to 1977. From 1978 to 1983 he served on the first Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and in 1980–81 he was Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His voluminous scholarship combines a thorough knowledge of European architectural history and theory with a close and intimate reading of Turkish and Islamic buildings and their structure....

(b Paris, bapt Feb 24, 1619; d Paris, Feb 12, 1690).

French painter and designer. He dominated 17th-century French painting as no other artist; it was not until over a century later, during the predominance of Jacques-Louis David, that artistic authority was again so concentrated in one man. Under the protection of a succession of important political figures, including Chancellor Pierre Séguier (see fig.), Cardinal Richelieu and Nicolas Fouquet, Le Brun created a series of masterpieces of history and religious painting. For Louis XIV and his chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert he executed his greatest work, the royal palace of Versailles: an almost perfect ensemble of architecture, decoration and landscape. After Colbert’s death in 1683, he was no longer able to count on prestigious commissions and, apart from finishing the decoration of Versailles, he concentrated on smaller-scale religious painting.

Le Brun was the son of Nicolas Le Brun (d 1648), a master sculptor, and Julienne Le Bé, several members of whose family were writing-masters to Louis XIII, to the children of Chancellor Séguier and subsequently to Louis XIV. While still a child, Le Brun apparently produced a number of small sculptures, and, in his adolescence, he spent a short time in the studio of the painter ...

Person subjecting his or her body to an artist’s observation. A tradition of working from living models, begun in Classical times, was revived in Europe in the Renaissance and was an important feature of academic practice until the 20th century.

The model, in the academic sense, was from its inception until the 19th century synonymous with the male figure. The earliest recorded reference to artists’ models comes from Pliny the elder, who states that ‘nude statues holding a spear’ were ‘modelled after young men in the gymnasium’. But earlier than this, Greek sculptors had drawn on empirical observation and imitation of the nude male, using the individual as the basis for the construction of an aesthetic ideal. Polykleitos, for example, whose system of proportions for the human figure was embodied in a treatise (the Canon) and a statue (the Doryphoros, late 5th century bc; copy, Naples, Mus. Archeol. N.), based his work exclusively on the male nude. There was, by way of contrast, no attempt to quantify the beauty of the female form. The female model was regarded, as the earliest references indicate, in a highly subjective manner. Commonly assumed to be the artist’s mistress, she was regarded as a physical embodiment of his muse. ...

[Juan Domingo]

(b Carrara, Feb 12, 1708; d Madrid, March 15, 1762).

Italian sculptor, active in Spain. He studied with the Genoese Francisco Maria Schiaffino and showed an early talent for sculpture. Entering the service of the King of Sardinia in Turin, he worked at the Royal Palace there and carried out various works that are documented but untraced. In 1739 he went to Madrid through the intermediary of the Marqués de Villarías. There in 1740 he was appointed sculptor to Philip V (primer escultor del rey); his studio in the Arco de Palacio, where he established a school of drawing, became a centre of instruction for young Spanish sculptors. It is probable that it also contributed to the idea of creating the formal Academia de Bellas Artes, a plan that had been promoted by Juan de Villanueva in 1709 and by Francisco Antonio Meléndez in 1726. With the support of the Marqués de Villarías and other members of the nobility, the plan was approved by Philip V in ...

[Giannantonio]

(b Venice, April 29, 1675; d Venice, Nov 5, 1741).

Italian painter. With Sebastiano Ricci and Jacopo Amigoni he was the most important Venetian history painter of the early 18th century. By uniting the High Renaissance style of Paolo Veronese with the Baroque of Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano, he created graceful decorations that were particularly successful with the aristocracy of central and northern Europe. He travelled widely, working in Austria, England, the Netherlands, Germany and France.

His father, a glover, came from Padua. At an early age Pellegrini was apprenticed to the Milanese Paolo Pagani (1661–1716), with whom he travelled to Moravia and Vienna in 1690. In 1696 Pellegrini was back in Venice, where he painted his first surviving work, a fresco cycle in the Palazzetto Corner on Murano, with scenes from the life of Alexander the Great and allegorical themes on the ceiling. Here his figure style is clearly derived from Pagani, but the effects of light and the free handling suggest the art of Giordano or even Cortona, whose work Pellegrini could not then have known. By contrast, brushwork in a series of paintings of the ...

(b Frankfurt am Main, May 12, 1606; d Nuremberg, Oct 14, 1688).

German painter and writer. A leading figure in 17th-century German painting, he is chiefly famed for his biographical writings in the Teutsche Academie. His great-nephew, an engraver who died young in London, also bore the name Joachim von Sandrart (1668–91).

Sandrart came from a family of Calvinist refugees from Wallonia. After initial lessons in drawing with Georg Keller and Sebastian Stoskopff (1597–1657), he began an apprenticeship in engraving in 1620 with Peter Isselburg in Nuremberg. In 1622 he went to Prague for more advanced tuition with Aegidius Sadeler II, who advised him to turn to painting. He accordingly apprenticed himself to Gerrit van Honthorst in Utrecht. Here, in 1627, he met Peter Paul Rubens, whom he accompanied on a journey through Holland. In 1628 he went with Honthorst to the English court. In 1629 Sandrart travelled via Venice and Florence to Rome. Here he initially became friendly with Domenichino; his acquaintance included both northerners—Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, François Du Quesnoy, Pieter van Laer—and Italians—Pietro da Cortona, Andrea Sacchi and Pietro Testa. From ...

(b Padua, c. 1395; d Padua, after May 1468).

Italian painter, teacher, draughtsman and printmaker. He is a controversial figure. His mediocre qualities as a painter are less contentious than his role as the head of a school for painters, possibly the earliest private establishment devoted to teaching painting and distinct from the workshop system of instruction through apprenticeships.

Having been recorded as a tailor and embroiderer, Squarcione is first referred to as a painter in 1426, when he executed an altarpiece (untraced) for the Olivetan monastery at Venda, south of Padua. He was then living near the Santo in Padua, where he later established his school. Soon after completing this altarpiece, Squarcione left Padua. According to Scardeone, who knew Squarcione’s lost autobiography, he travelled throughout Italy and Greece (i.e. the Byzantine empire). After returning to Padua, Squarcione took on his first pupil, Michele di Bartolommeo, in 1431. Apart from a Crucifixion (untraced), completed in 1439 for a Venetian patron, he undertook few commissions at this time. His purchase in ...

(b ?Woolland, Dorset, July 25, 1675; d Stalbridge, Dorset, May 13, 1734).

English painter. The great English exponent of Baroque decorative painting, he was the only one to compete successfully with foreigners for the relatively few large-scale decorative commissions available in England during the first quarter of the 18th century. His skill in this field was remarkable, since his training was irregular and his trips abroad (the Low Countries in 1711 and Paris in 1717) came only after he had reached maturity as an artist.

Thornhill was born into an old Dorset family, and his father, a grocer, probably abandoned both wife and children while Thornhill was still young. Their subsequent move to London meant he grew up in the house of his uncle, the physician Thomas Sydenham. In 1689, aged 14, he was apprenticed to Thomas Highmore (1660–1720), a distant relative and specialist in non-figural decorative painting, which included wainscots and balustrades as well as trompe l’oeil effects. While working for Highmore in great houses such as Chatsworth, Derbys, in the 1690s, Thornhill was exposed to the work of foreign decorative painters, in particular Louis Laguerre, Louis Chéron and Antonio Verrio, all of whom exerted a great influence on his subsequent work....

(b Enguera, Valencia, 1757; d Mexico City, Dec 24, 1816).

Spanish architect, sculptor, and teacher, active in Mexico. He studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Carlos, Valencia, at a time when Baroque forms were being rejected in Spain and Neo-classicism was being promoted. He was apprenticed to the sculptor José Puchol Rubio (d 1797), who also taught him extensively about architecture. In 1780 Tolsá moved to Madrid, where he studied under Juan Pascual de Mena and at the Real Academia de Bellas-Artes de S Fernando, where his subjects included painting. There he also designed several reliefs, including the Entry of the Catholic Kings into Granada (1784; Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando). He was selected as an academician in 1789.

Following the endorsement of Juan Adán and Manuel Francisco Alvarez de la Peña, in 1790 Tolsá succeeded José Arias (c. 1743–88) as director of sculpture at the Real Academia de S Carlos de la Nueva España in Mexico City. He took with him a collection of plaster casts for sculptures, many books, and 154 quintals (7 tonnes) of plaster for the Academia. He arrived in ...

The Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library at Saint Louis University, St Louis, MO, is a research library for medieval and Renaissance manuscript studies that holds more than 37,000 manuscripts on microfilm from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. In addition, it holds microfilms of more than 2400 manuscripts from other libraries, 52,000 colour slides of manuscript illumination, and large collections of microfilmed Jesuit historical documents relating to the Order’s activities in the Americas and the Philippines. The library maintains an extensive reference collection of published manuscript catalogues and unpublished inventories for Vatican Library manuscripts, as well as manuscript catalogues for many other libraries, works on palaeography, codicology, and illumination, manuscript facsimiles, and other reference materials and periodicals to support the study of manuscripts and their texts.

The library was opened in 1953. Since 1957 it has published the journal Manuscripta: A Journal for Manuscript Research, which features articles and reviews on palaeography, codicology, illumination, library history, manuscript catalogues, text editing, and other subjects. Since ...

( Grigor’yevich )

(b Moscow, 1686/8; d St Petersburg, Sept 28, 1743).

Russian architect, teacher and theorist . He was a pupil of Domenico Trezzini (from 1710) and then his assistant at the Ministry of Municipal Affairs in St Petersburg. He supervised the completion (1719–22), to plans by Niccolò Michetti, of the Yekaterinental Palace at Reval, where he also carried out the elaborate decoration of the White Hall and laid out the park. His Hall for Glorious Ceremonials (1725; destr.), designed to house relics of Russia’s victories in the Northern War, combined Neo-classical and Baroque features. Working in the German–Dutch style of Baltic Baroque, Zemtsov designed the church of SS Simeon and Anna (1730–34) on Mokhovaya Street and the cathedral of Prince Vladimir (1741–7; built by Pietro Trezzini, b 1710; now on Dobrolyubov Prospect). These all played an important role in the townscape of the city. While echoing the traditional Russian pattern of a church linked to a refectory and with a belfry surmounting the west entrance, Zemtsov proposed for the interiors an unusually spacious basilica with a long nave, aisles and a transept. In his design for the cathedral of the Trinity (...