Nineteenth-Century Art

(fl 1882–97).

Spanish architect. His work is representative of the eclecticism of late 19th-century Spanish architecture, which is especially marked by classical values. His idiom was derived from Mannerist architecture and has a strong Baroque element. The influence of French art is also evident, especially the ostentatious style of Charles Garnier. Aladrén y Mendívil’s early works are more restrained in style and show a mastery of plan and façade design. This is apparent in the Diputación de Guipúzcoa (1885), San Sebastián, which he executed in collaboration with Adolfo Morales de los Ríos. With this same architect he designed his most renowned work, the Casino (now Ayuntamiento; 1882–7) at San Sebastián, which was promoted by the city council to take advantage of wealthy visitors, as San Sebastián was the court summer residence. The upper part of the building was set aside for gaming and the lower for relaxation and recreation, with banqueting-rooms, a café and restaurant. It is French in style and incorporates medieval, Renaissance and Baroque influences, combining these with the use of iron technology. These official works recommended him to industrial magnates in the Basque region, who made important commissions. These he executed with an academic respect for symmetry and following French models, as in the elegant country house (...

An antiquary (Lat. antiquarius) is a lover, collector and student of ancient learning, traditions and remains. Antiquarianism originated from the revived interest in Classical antiquity during the Renaissance and became a scientific and historical method in the 17th century. The difference between literary and non-literary sources distinguishes humanism from antiquarianism, the latter being based on those tangible remains of antiquity (inscriptions, coins and ruins) related to literary sources. From the 16th century new attitudes towards antiquity were discussed in antiquarian circles, later giving rise to antiquarian societies. Thereafter, antiquarianism was firmly linked to archaeological excavations and to the study and collecting of ancient art. It was also linked to the search for a national identity in the arts and for the origins of Western culture and was sustained by a curiosity about civilizations outside Europe. Antiquarianism, in fact, was associated with the Grand Tour and with travel more generally. Antiquaries and artist–antiquaries were responsible for producing numerous drawings, prints and illustrated volumes. High-quality illustrations of archaeological sites and ancient sculpture contributed to the growth of art history as an autonomous discipline. They also contributed to the popularization of the Antique and to the transformation of commercial dealing in objects associated with antiquarian interests (...

Italian family of patrons and collectors. They were one of the wealthiest and most celebrated patrician families of Milan. The earliest records of them date from 1228, when they made lavish donations to the monastery of Chiaravalle, near Milan. Giuseppe Archinto (i) (d 1476), Chancellor under Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza (reg 1466–76), added to the family’s wealth. His grandson Francesco Archinto (d 1551), a jurist, was the favoured commissary of Louis XII in the area of Chiavenna; a portrait of him, preserved by the family, is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Francesco’s cousin Filippo Archinto (1500–58) was appointed Senator by Duke Francesco Maria Sforza and in 1530 represented Milan at the coronation of the Emperor Charles V in Bologna. Filippo held various Imperial posts, including that of Ambassador to Rome, where Pope Paul III ordained him Bishop. In 1566 the Pope appointed him Archbishop of Milan, in which capacity his portrait (...

(b Stradella, Pavia, 1723; d Parma, 1803).

Italian painter, also active in France. He studied painting in Florence under the Baroque fresco painter Vincenzo Meucci (1694–1766). He then went to Parma, where he won the esteem of Duke Philip, the Bourbon ruler of Parma, and the protection of Philip’s minister, Guillaume Du Tillot, who made Baldrighi court artist and sent him to Paris for further training, hoping thereby to bring refined French taste to the court of Parma. The painter was able to study and work with artists such as François Boucher, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Marc Nattier, Jean-Etienne Liotard and Jean-Baptiste Perroneau. Letters between Du Tillot and the banker Claude Bonnet, who represented the interests of the Parma court in Paris, have proved a rich source of information for Baldrighi’s stay in Paris, and indeed one of the artist’s first works was a portrait of Mme Bonnet (1752), followed a year later by the portrait of ...

[Edwardian Baroque; English Renaissance; Imperial Baroque]

Architectural style adopted widely in Great Britain and the British Empire from about 1885 until World War I, particularly for government, municipal and commercial buildings. Great Britain, with its nationalism, prosperity and extensive empire, was at this time boldly confident of its place in the world as a major power and adopted a style that reflected that confidence. Baroque Revival architecture is characterized by imposing classical façades, with much associated decorative sculpture, and it makes emphatic use of domes and towers, turrets and cupolas. Interiors are spacious and dignified and are also often decorated with sculpture and painting.

Known at the time as English Renaissance, Baroque Revival was a freely adapted version of the English Baroque architecture of the period 1700–20 by such architects as Christopher Wren, John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Hawksmoor and Thomas Archer. Its immediate source was perhaps Kinmel Park, Denbs, a country house designed by W. E. Nesfield (R. Norman Shaw’s partner) in ...

(b Milan, 1847; d Magreglio, 1927).

Italian silversmith. He was known for his complex designs of flatware, chalices and inkwells. His flatware designed c. 1885 was Renaissance Revival in style, while that designed c. 1887 (Milan, Castello Sforzesco) is more reminiscent of the Mannerist style of Benvenuto Cellini and Antonio Gentile, the handles being adorned with the forms of nymphs and satyrs. Bellosio is also well known for his work exhibited at the Turin Exhibition of ...

(b Rome, 1821; d Rome, Dec 1, 1884).

Italian architect. Trained in the conservative milieu of his native city, he reflected in his works the confined, Renaissance Revival taste of private and public patronage during the reign of Pope Pius IX (reg 1846–78), but at the same time he also used new engineering techniques that were developing internationally. He is best known as the designer of the railway station (1867–74; destr. c. 1930) that housed the terminus of the first railway line out of the Papal States. Its location, away from the centre of Rome, emphasized the ancient city’s rapid expansion, and it became an exemplary model of urban planning. Built near the Baths of Diocletian, the gigantic new structure offered a grand contemporary foil to the ancient monument, demonstrating that past and present could dwell comfortably side by side. The building itself restated this thesis: a sleek central train shed with a steel-supported, curved iron and glass roof was flanked by elaborately articulated twin palazzi. His other most notable works are the Camposanto (...

(b Hanau; fl Paris, second half of the 19th century).

French gem-engraver of German birth. He worked in cameo in the Renaissance Revival style. Many of his gems are copies of English and French royal portraits dating from the 16th century. The cutting is very sharp and refined, often more so than in the original, and his gems are characterized by the frequent use of a raised line cut from the pale layer of the stone to border the main subject in imitation of the 16th-century Italian engravers from whom he derived his models and style. Bissinger’s skill was demonstrated by a series of 112 gems, copied from examples in the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris, which he exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1878 in Paris. His work had already featured in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 and was noted in the London Art Journal (1868, p. 38). In 1873 he exhibited at the Weltausstellung in Vienna. After the ...

(Aleksandrovich)

(b St Petersburg, Nov 28, 1880; d Petrograd [now St Petersburg], Aug 7, 1921).

Russian poet and critic. Italian Renaissance painting and the work of contemporary Russian and foreign artists of the modern school greatly influenced Blok’s poetry, which in turn was exceptionally suggestive for masters of the fine arts as well as for many Symbolist poets. Blok belonged to the second generation of Russian Symbolist poets, who saw literature as a powerful theurgic force, capable of revealing the true, ideal world through temporal symbols. Symbolism in Russia was strongly influenced by the mystical philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), who initiated the cult of the divine Sophia—the image of Eternal Woman as the soul of the universe and the link between the human and the divine. Blok reflected this cult in his Stikhi o prekrasnoy dame (‘Verses about the beautiful lady’). The beautiful lady whom Blok described is both a real woman and a transcendental figure, unattainable Beauty, the Ideal. She assumes an unearthly aspect, revealing herself to the poet in an atmosphere of dreams that are like fairy tales or medieval visions....

Italian family of patrons. Pietro Boncompagni (d 1404), a reader in civil law from 1378 to 1391, was buried in a tomb in S Martino, Bologna, where a Boncompagni family chapel, outstanding for its works of art, was completed in 1534. Its richly carved decoration is attributed to Amico Aspertini, and it features an Adoration of the Magi (1532) by Girolamo da Carpi on the wooden altar (attrib. Bartolomeo Ramenghi Bagnacavallo I). A great-grandson of Pietro Boncompagni, Cristoforo Boncompagni (1470–1546) was a draper and financier. He built a palazzo (1538–45) near the cathedral of S Pietro; its decorations were completed by his sons after his death. Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola may have contributed to this elegant and dignified structure. Restored in 1845, the palazzo, now called Palazzo Benelli, stands at Via del Monte 8. Interior restoration work began in 1980.

Cristoforo Boncompagni’s ten children included a son Ugo Boncompagni, who became ...

(Christoph)

(b Basle, May 25, 1818; d Basle, Aug 8, 1897).

Swiss historian and art historian. He was born into one of the leading families of Basle and was the son of the chief pastor. Raised on the neohumanist Humboldtian ideals adopted for the city’s schools by the ruling bourgeoisie in the aftermath of the French Revolution, he saw his world transformed by the rise of modern industrial society and the spread of social democracy and aggressive nationalism. His work reflects an intense experience of his own time by a citizen of one of the last city-republics in Europe.

Burckhardt first studied theology but lost his faith and switched to history and philosophy at the University of Berlin (1839–43). He took courses in art history, then a new discipline, from Franz Kugler, to whom he remained attached all his life. He also spent a term in Bonn, then a centre of German Romanticism. Later celebrated as the historian and admirer of the Italian Renaissance, he began his career as a German nationalist, a medievalist and an enthusiastic champion of the Gothic....

(b Mataró, April 12, 1771; d Barcelona, July 7, 1855).

Spanish sculptor and teacher. He began studying at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Lonja in Barcelona at the age of 14, and he worked in the studio of Salvador Gurri (fl 1756–1819), a late Baroque sculptor with Neo-classical tendencies. Campeny left the studio after he was attacked by Gurri, who, as a teacher at the Escuela (1785), continued to persecute him and threw him out. Campeny then worked in Lérida, Cervera and Montserrat. He produced his first major work, St Bruno (1795; destr. 1831), in carved polychromed wood. He also trained with Nicolás Traver and José Cabañeras, both late Baroque artists. Stylistically, Campeny began with a moderate and personal naturalism, later assimilating some of the Baroque influences from his Catalan teachers. Readmitted to the Escuela, in 1795 he won a scholarship to complete his studies in Rome, where he went in 1796...

[Buoneri, Francesco]

(fl c. Rome, 1610–20).

Painter active in Italy. His nationality is not known. He was a follower of Caravaggio, and his rare works reveal a highly original and idiosyncratic response to that artist’s naturalism. Agostino Tassi mentioned him as involved, with several French artists, in the decoration of the Villa Lante at Bagnaia between 1613 and 1615, and Giulio Mancini noted a ‘Francesco detto Cecco del Caravaggio’ who was close to Caravaggio.

Richard Symonds, who visited Rome in 1650, mentioned that the model for Caravaggio’s Amore vincitore (Berlin, Alte N.G.) was one ‘Checco da Caravaggio’, ‘his owne boy or servant that laid with him’ (quoted Papi, 1992). The central work in Cecco’s oeuvre is Christ Driving the Money-changers from the Temple (Berlin, Alte N.G.), which Longhi (1943) identified as the work, formerly in the collection of Vicenzo Giustiniani, that had been referred to in G. M. Sylos’s Pinacotheca sive Romana pictura et scultura...

(b Lyon, April 22, 1827; d Florence, Sept 21, 1888).

French collector. His father Jean-Baptiste Carrand (1792–1871) was a collector of medieval and Renaissance decorative objects (Byzantine and Gothic ivories, Renaissance maiolica, enamelwork, arms, bronzes and coins) and a connoisseur of manuscripts and documents, first in Lyon and then in Paris, where Louis worked in partnership with him. Their most prestigious purchases were some early medieval and Gothic ivory pieces and the famous flabellum (9th century, court of Charles the Bald) from the Benedictine abbey of Tournus in Burgundy. In 1867 they exhibited ivories, bronzes, arms, wood-carvings and secular gold items in the Exposition Universelle, Paris. After his father’s death Louis continued to enlarge the collection. In particular he added early medieval and Renaissance textiles. In 1880 he moved to Nice and in 1881 to Pisa, where he remained until 1886, continuing to buy artefacts not only from French and Italian sales but also from England, Germany, Greece and Turkey. In ...

(b Edgcote, Northants, Nov 7, 1851; d Oxford, April 24, 1924).

English critic and historian. In her writing she combined the results of methodical scholarship with a passionate enthusiasm to give a vivid picture of her subjects. She respected the new ‘scientific’ approach to art led by Giovanni Morelli, and her favourable reviews of Bernard Berenson’s early publications were partly responsible for the warm reception some of the new ideas received in England. Among 19th-century artists, she wrote a monograph on Jules Bastien-Lepage (1894), a biography of Jean-François Millet (1896)—possibly under the influence of her one-time editor and friend W. E. Henley—and articles on other French painters. She was a fervent admirer of the Arts and Crafts Movement and her monographs on Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1894), G. F. Watts (1896) and Lawrence Alma-Tadema were greatly admired, not least by the artists themselves, who became her firm friends. She also championed the Italian landscape artist Giovanni Costa....

(b Venice, 1637; d Venice, ?1712).

Italian painter. He trained first with Matteo Ponzoni, then with Sebastiano Mazzoni; Mazzoni encouraged the development of a Baroque style, but Celesti was also attracted by the naturalism of the tenebrists. The first known works by Celesti are mature in style, and he had already achieved considerable fame in Venice when the Doge Alvise Contarini honoured him with the title of Cavaliere in 1681. The complexity of his sources is evident in two canvases, Moses Destroying the Golden Calf and Moses Chastising the Hebrew People for their Idolatry, both painted c. 1681 for the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, and signed Cavaliere; they are influenced by Luca Giordano and by the narrative techniques of Jacopo Tintoretto. The most distinguished works of Celesti’s early period are two large lunettes that show three scenes: Benedict III Visiting St Zacharias, A Doge Presented with the Body of a Saint, and the Virtues Surrounding a Doge Holding the Model of St Zacharias...