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Alberto Villar Movellán

(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 (...

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Marco Carminati

(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 ...

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Alastair Service

[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 ...

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Carlos Cid Priego

(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...

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[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...

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(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...

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Ornella Selvafolta

(b Turin, Oct 11, 1829; d Turin, Nov 9, 1921).

Italian architect. He studied under Carlo Promis (1808–72), an architect active in Turin in the first half of the 19th century, and in 1851 graduated in hydraulic engineering and civil architecture. He worked first in the engineering office of Severino Grattoni, who was then engaged on the Moncenisio tunnel. In the competition (1861) for a new façade for Florence Cathedral, Ceppi was a joint winner (announced 1863), but when a new competition was arranged he refused to enter. He decided instead to concentrate exclusively on the construction industry in Turin, which was at that time undergoing considerable changes, as Turin had just become the capital of Italy. From 1861 he worked with Alessandro Mazzuchetti (1824–94) on the project for the Stazione di Porta Nuova Centrale (completed 1868), facing Piazza Carlo Felice, for which Promis had provided the initial designs. While the outline and general layout of the design were largely Mazzucchetti’s, the decorative and architectural schemes of the façade were largely the work of Ceppi, who adopted a successful and convincing formal vocabulary derived from the English Gothic Revival. The station, notable for its ample fenestration, achieves a fine balance between decoration and functional and structural concerns. The long façades are punctuated with appropriate and elegant decoration highlighted by a lively use of colour. This work shows one of Ceppi’s main merits—the ability to adopt the formal vocabulary of a past age and to re-invent it to meet modern needs. Simultaneously attracted by technical progress and fascinated by classical architecture, Ceppi knew how to adapt any style with originality, and bring its content back to life....

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Matthias Frehner

(b Buochs, Feb 22, 1767; d Thorberg, March 30, 1838).

Swiss sculptor. He was trained by his father, Jakob Lorenz Christen, a wood-carver and painter of votive pictures, and by the painter Johann Melchior Wyrsch in Lucerne, and the wood-carver Friedrich Schäfer (1709–86). He began an apprenticeship as a sculptor in Rome (1788), studying with Alexander Trippel. In 1790 he returned to Switzerland, where he initially settled in Zurich. In 1792, together with a number of students, he founded an art school in Stans. In 1794 he moved to Lucerne. He also worked in Basle (1799), Berne (1801) and Aarau (1803), where he fulfilled a number of portrait commissions, including a bust of Heinrich Pestalozzi (bronze, undated, terracotta version, 1809; both Aarau, Aargau. Ksthaus). In 1805 in Milan he produced a massive bust of Napoleon Bonaparte. Further commissions in Aarau included a bust of General César de la Harpe (Aarau, Aargau. Ksthaus). Christen produced several portrait busts for ...

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Francesco Frangi

[Enrico, Antonio d’; il Tanzio]

(b Riale d’Alagna, 1575–80; d 1632–3).

Italian painter. He is best known for his dramatic oil paintings executed in a unique style of Caravaggesque realism modified by the elegance of Lombard Late Mannerism. He also adopted elements of a robust and unsophisticated realism from Piedmontese art, as is evident in his frescoes for the sacromonte at Varallo (see Varallo, Sacro Monte, §2). His drawings are in the highly refined and meticulously finished technique associated with Renaissance draughtsmanship.

Tanzio’s family had lived at Varallo since 1586, and he had two brothers who were also artists: the fresco painter Melchiorre d’Enrico, with whom he may have trained, and the sculptor and architect Giovanni d’Enrico (c. 1560–1644). On 12 February 1600 a safe conduct was issued to Melchiorre and Tanzio to leave Valsesia to visit Rome for the Holy Year. Tanzio’s first biographer, Cotta, wrote that the artist studied ‘in the Academies of Rome’ and that in ...

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Mimi Cazort

Italian family of artists. The work of the brothers (1) Ubaldo Gandolfi and (2) Gaetano Gandolfi and of the latter’s son, (3) Mauro Gandolfi, reflects the transition from late Bolognese Baroque through Neo-classicism and into early Italian Romanticism. During their period of collective productivity, from c. 1760 to c. 1820, the Gandolfi produced paintings, frescoes, drawings, sculptures and prints. Their drawings (examples by all three artists, Venice, Fond. Cini) made an outstanding contribution to the great figurative tradition of Bolognese draughtsmanship that had begun with the Carracci. Their prolific output and their activity as teachers gave them considerable influence throughout northern Italy, except in Venice. One of Ubaldo’s five children, Giovanni Battista Gandolfi (b 1762), trained at the Accademia Clementina, Bologna, but apart from a vault fresco signed and dated 1798 in the church of S Francesco in Bagnacavallo nothing is known of his adult career. A drawing (Paris, Fond. Custodia, Inst. Néer.) is signed ...

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Alberto Villar Movellán

(b Alella, Barcelona, 1804; d Barcelona, 1888).

Spanish architect and urban planner. He studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid. Among his notable works was the neo-Baroque Gran Teatro del Liceo (1844–8; destr. 1861), Barcelona, built on the grounds of the monastery of the Trinitarians. It had a horseshoe-shaped ground-plan and was later rebuilt by José Oriol Mestres Esplugas, who retained part of the façade design. Garriga y Roca’s main interest, however, was in urban planning. In 1857 he offered a proposal for an extension of Barcelona towards the Paseo de Gracia, which mixed the radial system with the orthogonal, in the style of Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The basic grid delivered plots 140×200 m suitable for dwellings and gardens and divided by a rectilinear pattern of streets 10 m wide. Although the plan was approved by the city council, it was replaced by that of Ildefonso Cerdà, which was imposed by the central government in the disputed competition of ...

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(b Mechelen, Sept 18, 1756; d Antwerp, Jan 24, 1830).

Flemish sculptor. His work was essentially part of the late Flemish Baroque tradition; yet he was aware of the emerging Neo-classical movement, as is revealed by certain details in his religious works and, above all, by the spirit of his secular commissions. He was a pupil first of the painter Guillaume Herryns and then of the sculptor Pierre Valckx. In 1784 van Geel was appointed an assistant teacher at the academy of art in Mechelen and subsequently devoted himself consistently to teaching, first in Mechelen and then at the Académie in Antwerp. Among his pupils were Jean-Baptiste de Bay (1802–62), Guillaume Geefs, Lodewijk Royer, Joseph Tuerlinckx (1809–73) and his own son Jan Lodewijk van Geel (b Mechelen, 28 Sept 1787; d Brussels, 10 April 1852), also a sculptor. Jan Frans’s first important commission was for statues (1780–90) of St James, St Andrew...

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Juan J. Luna

Spanish family of artists. Pablo González Velázquez (1664–1727) was an Andalusian sculptor who worked in the Baroque style and in 1702 settled in Madrid, where his three sons were born. There were numerous collaborations between the sons. (1) Luis González Velázquez and (2) Alejandro González Velázquez worked together in Madrid on the chapel of S Teresa (1737–9) in the church of S José, the church of the convent of El Sacramento, the church of El Salvador and the church of the Carmelitas Descalzas; in La Puebla de Montalbán, near Toledo, they worked together on the Ermita de la Virgen de la Soledad (1741–2), for which they executed the main altarpiece and pendentive paintings of Esther, Judith, Rachel and Abigail. The two also often undertook stage designs for the theatre in the Palacio del Buen Retiro in Madrid. They collaborated with their younger brother (3) ...

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Richard Longstreth

Urban plan for the newly created seat of the US Federal government, Washington, DC, designed by Pierre-Charles L’Enfant at the request of George Washington in 1791–2, which was audacious in its size, scope and purpose. Building a new federal city stemmed from the president’s realization that choosing any established center would fuel the fractious relations that existed between the states. Locating the city midway along the Atlantic seaboard was also a political balancing act, but, equally important, the site lay further west than any potential seaport. The site also seemed to afford the easiest access to Ohio River Valley. Washington envisioned a great city, like Paris, that would be the cultural and business, as well as the governmental, center—the prime launching point for settlement of the Trans-Appalachian frontier.

Raised at the French court, where his father was a painter, L’Enfant trained at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris. He left to join the Continental Army in America in ...

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Cynthia Lawrence

(b Mechelen, March 18, 1661; dMechelen, c. 1720).

Flemish sculptor and architect. He was a pupil of Lucas Faydherbe, from whom he learnt the picturesque realism associated with Rubens’s workshop. He collaborated with the Mechelen sculptor Jan van der Steen in London before returning to Flanders and joining the Mechelen guild. Langhemans is best represented in Belgium by the works he executed for the church of St Rombout in Mechelen. The earliest is a naturalistic stone statue of St Libertus (1680) for the monument to Amati de Coriache; a dramatically gesticulating stone figure of St Mary Magdalene from the monument to Jan Baptiste and Bernard Alexander van der Zype (1701) exhibits similar tendencies. Conversely, the oak statue of the Virgin of Victory (1680), carved for the monastery of the Brothers of Charity at Kappelen, Antwerp, has a classicizing appearance, which became more pronounced in his work by c. 1700. In 1698–9 Langhemans collaborated with ...

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Lednice  

Jiří Kroupa

[Ger. Eisgrub]

Town in southern Moravia, Czech Republic, known for its manor house and garden. Situated on the border with Lower Austria, about halfway between Brno and Vienna, the estate belonged to the Liechtenstein princes from the mid-13th century to 1945. Before 1588 Hartmann II, Landgrave of Feldberg, had commissioned a house and ornamental garden for use as the family’s country seat. The house was modernized in the 17th century by Charles Eusebius, Prince of Liechtenstein, who employed, among others, the stuccoist Bernardo Bianchi, the masons Pietro Maderna, Pietro Tencalla and Francesco Caratti (1632) and the architects Giovanni Battista I Carlone (ii), Giovanni Giacomo Tencalla from Vienna and Andrea Erna from Brno (1638–41). Further modifications were made by Antonio Beduzzi in the 1730s, by Isidore Canevale in 1766–72 and by Joseph Kornhäusel, who gave the house a Neo-classical façade in 1815. The only part of the house to remain unaltered was the monumental riding school and its stables, designed in ...