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(b Ciminna, Jan 24, 1634; d Palermo, July 3, 1714).

Italian architect, writer and painter. He trained as a priest in Palermo and entered the Padri Ministri degl’Infermi. Another member of this Order was Giacomo Amato, with whom he worked, although they were not related. While serving as a chaplain Amato studied geometry, architecture, optics and engraving. His earliest known artistic work is a painting on copper of the Miracle of S Rosalia (1663), the patron saint of Palermo. After 1686 he created many works of an ephemeral character. For the feasts of S Rosalia and for important political events he provided designs for lavish triumphal chariots, probably developed from those by Jacques Callot, triumphal arches and other ceremonial apparatus set up on principal roads and piazzas, and he painted hangings, papier-mâché models and massive altarpieces for the cathedral. These works influenced Amato’s permanent architecture. The spiral columns of the campanile of S Giuseppe dei Teatini, Palermo, recall the festival designs of ...

(b Madrid, 1664; d Madrid, Feb 15, 1726).

Spanish architect, painter and writer. He was trained in architecture by the Jesuits and in painting by Claudio Coello and worked mainly as an architect. Two overdoors showing multiple allegorical scenes of the Battle of Lepanto (1721; Madrid, Pal. Arzobisp.) and a St Barbara (1723; Madrid, Mus. Lázaro Galdiano) reveal Ardemans as a talented painter working in the tradition of Francisco Rizi, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Francisco de Herrera the younger, and partially influenced by Luca Giordano. His debt to Coello is apparent in a ceiling fresco attributed to him in the Capilla del Cristo de los Dolores of the Venerable Orden Tercera de San Francisco, Madrid, which shows St Francis riding in a chariot of fire with figures watching from a balcony. Also attributed to Ardemans is the portrait of Pedro Atanasio Bocanegra (c. 1689; Granada, Pal. Arzobisp.)

As an architect, Ardemans belongs to a period of transition, continuing into the 18th century the Baroque tradition of the Madrid school. He worked in Granada (...

(b Lisbon, Nov 27, 1729; d Lisbon, Jan 27, 1810).

Portuguese painter, draughtsman, teacher and writer. He was apprenticed to João de Mesquita, an obscure painter–decorator who specialized in ornamentation, and he also studied painting and drawing under Bernardo Pereira Pegado. His early training coincided with the end of the reign of John V, during which time a lavish and ostentatious courtly Baroque style predominated in Portugal. He learnt easel painting from a friend, the somewhat older André Gonçalves, in whose studio he became acquainted with examples of the Italian Baroque style that dominated Portuguese painting. Gonçalves’s own work, however, did not greatly influence that of Carvalho, who adhered to a Late Baroque Italian style, painting works with clear and luminous colours deriving from Rubens.

In 1755 Lisbon was devastated by a powerful earthquake, and shortly after Carvalho was commissioned to paint a series of altarpieces and ceilings for the new churches that were built. He became the most sought-after church decorator of his day, painting an extensive series of panels of religious subjects for such churches as the Mártires, S António da Sé and S Pedro de Alcántara. He won significant recognition, however, for the ...

(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 ...

[Lauritz] (Lauridsen)

(b Århus, March 4, 1706; d Copenhagen, Sept 5, 1759).

Danish architect and architectural historian. He trained as a military engineer and served in the Engineers’ Corps from 1725. With the financial support of King Frederick IV, he departed in 1729 on a tour to Germany, Italy, France, Holland and England in order to study civil architecture. He returned to Denmark in 1731 and began work on the Royal Palace in Roskilde, demonstrating his familiarity with south German and Austrian Baroque architecture. In 1733 he became a court architect and in 1735 was entrusted with the royal building on Zealand and Lolland-Falster. His most important projects of this period were the repeated rebuilding of and extensions (1733–44) to the Hirschholm Castle (destr.), north of Copenhagen. He appears here to have used ideas gathered in France and Germany, without giving the impression of eclecticism.

In 1736, when the interiors of Christiansborg Castle in Copenhagen (begun in 1731 under the supervision of ...

(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 ...

(b Aberdeen, Dec 23, 1682; d London, Aug 5, 1754).

Scottish architect.

Gibbs was the younger son of an Aberdeen merchant, Patrick Gibb(s), and was brought up a Roman Catholic. He was educated at the Grammar School and at Marischal College in Aberdeen. Shortly before 1700 he left Scotland for the Netherlands, where he stayed with relatives before making his way through France to Italy, visiting Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Genoa and Naples. He arrived in Rome in the autumn of 1703 and registered at the Pontifical Scots College, apparently with the intention of training for the priesthood. Within a year, however, he left to become a pupil of Carlo Fontana, then the most influential architect in Rome. His father had suffered financial hardship as a result of the 1688 Revolution, so that Gibbs had to rely on the charity of friends for his income, probably supplementing it by guiding and drawing for British tourists.

These contacts with potential patrons proved useful when Gibbs arrived in London late in ...

(b Naples, May 14, 1718; d Naples, March 8, 1785).

Italian architect and theorist. He began his training in 1732 with the architect Martino Buoncore, whose style he later dismissed as ‘Gothic’. However, Buoncore had a good architectural library, in which Gioffredo studied the writings of Palladio, Vitruvius and Vincenzo Scamozzi. During the same period he studied with the painter Francesco Solimena, believing an understanding of the human body to be an essential part of architecture.

Gioffredo qualified as an architect in 1741, after being examined by Giovanni Antonio Medrano (b 1703), one of the kingdom’s engineers. Unfortunately his technical education was somewhat neglected, and he earned for himself the sobriquet ‘l’imprudente architetto napoletano’ after Luigi Vanvitelli was called in to work on his Villa Campolieto (1762), Resina, and the Palazzo Casacalenda (c. 1766), Naples, both of which were in danger of collapse.

Gioffredo’s architectural knowledge was largely acquired from books and from the direct study of ancient buildings. In the preface to his ...

(b Paris, Feb 24, 1735; d Vernouillet, Sept 20, 1808).

French landscape designer and writer. He inherited a considerable fortune, which allowed him to develop his interests as a seigneur-philosophe. In 1754 he joined the army and, following the cessation of the Seven Years War in 1763, entered military service at Lunéville under the exiled King of Poland, Stanislav I Leszczyński. Between 1761 and 1766 Girardin also travelled in Italy, Germany and England, where he visited several English landscape gardens, including Stowe, Blenheim and the Leasowes.

In 1766, following the death of Stanislav, Girardin settled at Ermenonville, Oise, where during the next decade he laid out an influential Picturesque landscape garden. Shortly after its completion he published De la composition des paysages (1777), in which he codified his own accomplishments and presented his theory of landscape gardening. Although this treatise reveals his intimate understanding of the associationist aesthetics of contemporary French and English garden theory, as found for example in Thomas Whately’s ...

(b ?1673; d Greenwich, May 15, 1746).

English architect, surveyor and writer. He was educated by his father in Basingstoke, Hants, before being apprenticed to the king’s Master Carpenter, Matthew Banckes. From Banckes he received his training as carpenter and surveyor and must have worked at Hampton Court Palace and Chelsea Hospital, London, and on private houses. James’s association with Banckes (and his marriage to Banckes’s niece, Hannah, in 1697) laid the foundations of his style and his circle of contacts with other surveyors and craftsmen.

James earned his reputation as one of the most experienced and dependable surveyors of his time, undertaking a variety of work—carpentry, measurement, supervision, inspection and advice, designing and any combination of these. His earliest recorded employment was at the Royal Hospital for Seamen, Greenwich, in 1699, as assistant clerk of works. He designed little, but his association there with Nicholas Hawksmoor was an important influence on his early work, and the buildings at Greenwich were a lasting source of inspiration. He worked there until his death, eventually succeeding to Hawksmoor’s post. He was also surveyor to St Paul’s from ...

(b Milan, Nov 5, 1690; d Milan, Nov 8, 1761).

Italian architect, engineer, mathematician and writer. He worked in the local Lombard architectural tradition but incorporated late Baroque elements, reflecting architectural trends throughout Europe. His early works included the completion of the parish church at Desio (1726–36) and the Villa Perego (c. 1740) at Cremnago, both near Milan, but his most important work was at the cathedral in Milan. Following the rejection of plans by Luigi Vanvitelli, the cathedral chapter entrusted Merlo and Francesco Croce (fl 1738–65) with the task of carrying out the new façade (plans; Milan, Bib. Ambrosiana). Merlo’s plans, prepared in 1745, proposed Gothic pilasters similar to those of the interior, replacing the twisted columns proposed by Vanvitelli. Work did not begin until 1765 but was completed under Croce’s supervision by 1769. Merlo also made proposals in 1759 for the great spire of the cathedral. During his years of association with the cathedral Merlo also designed the façade of S Andrea (...

(b Trento, Nov 30, 1642; d Vienna, Aug 31, 1709).

Italian painter, architect and stage designer. He was a brilliant quadratura painter, whose most celebrated works, such as the decoration of the church of S Ignazio in Rome, unite painting, architecture and sculpture in effects of overwhelming illusionism and are among the high-points of Baroque church art. He was a Jesuit lay brother and produced his most significant work for the Society of Jesus. This affiliation was fundamental to his conception of art and to his heightened awareness of the artist’s role as instrumental in proclaiming the faith and stimulating religious fervour. The methods he used were those of Counter-Reformation rhetoric, as represented in Ignatius Loyola’s Spirited Exercises (1548). His architectural works are eclectic, and his unconventional combination of varied sources led to bold experiments with both space and structure. His ideas were spread by his highly successful two-volume treatise, Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum (1693–1700).

He received his first artistic training in Trento, with a painter who appears to have worked in the studio of Palma Giovane. He then studied with an unidentifiable pupil of, among others, Andrea Sacchi, who would have been the first to instruct Pozzo in the art of the Roman High Baroque, and he followed this painter to Como and Milan. In Milan Pozzo joined the Society of Jesus on ...

(b Turin, 1702; d Turin, Oct 19, 1770).

Italian architect and writer. He was the last of the three great masters of Piedmontese Baroque, and he achieved a reconciliation of the ideas of his predecessors Guarino Guarini and Filippo Juvarra in developing an architecture of immense creativity, particularly for churches. Vittone was the only one of the three to be born in Piedmont; most of his work was built outside Turin, however, and it remains generally less well known than that of Guarini and Juvarra.

He came from a family of small merchants, and his introduction to architecture probably came from his uncle, the architect Gian Giacomo Plantery (1680–1756). His first works were minor: the high altar (c. 1730; attrib.) in the sanctuary of S Ignazio (1725), Lanzo, a small church perhaps designed by Plantery; a wall (1730; destr.) separating the courtyard from the garden at Guarini’s unfinished Palazzo Carignano, Turin; and the parish church of S Maria della Neve (...

( 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 (...