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(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 ...

(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...

(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...

(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 ...

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 ...

(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...

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) ...

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 ...

(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 ...

[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 ...

(b Venice, Jan 21, 1655; d Venice, Feb 3, 1704).

Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the son of the painter Giovanni Molinari (1633–87) and studied in Venice with Antonio Zanchi. His style had its origins in the naturalism and tenebrism of Neapolitan painting, introduced to Venice in the mid-17th century. Although his work always retained some traces of this naturalism, the typically violent subject-matter and intensity of the Neapolitan style were considerably tempered by the addition of classicizing elements and of rich, glowing colours. By the 1680s Molinari had developed his characteristic manner of depicting figures in poses of extreme torsion and vigorous movement, arranged in graceful compositions. His subject-matter included episodes from the Old and New Testaments, antiquity and Classical mythology. His classical idiom was most pronounced in his large canvases painted for churches, such as the Feeding of the Five Thousand (1690; Venice, S Pantalon) and the Death of Uzzah (c. 1695; Murano, S Maria degli Angeli). In the ...

(b Capodrise, nr Caserta, May 12, 1723; d Naples, Jan 10, 1806).

Italian painter and draughtsman. His training was dependent on the late style of Solimena, which Mondo applied to a re-evaluation of Mattia Preti’s tenebrism and Baroque solidity. However, already in his early work Mondo achieved a pictorial style very close to the compositional freedom of Giordano. Mondo’s early works include the canvases (e.g. St Mark, signed and dated 1747) in S Andrea at Capodrise (Spinosa, 1970, p. 86, no. 13) as well as Coriolanus (early 1740s; Naples, Corradini priv. col., see 1979–80 exh. cat., no. 130), which refers to the work of both Solimena and Giordano.

During the 1760s and 1770s Mondo developed small-format compositions, generally with secular subjects. These were characterized by a more spontaneous vision of reality and were thus closer to the rocailles and capriccios fashionable at that time. Notable among these canvases is Mercury Appearing to Dido (Naples, Perrone Capano priv. col.), which is one of the masterpieces of late 18th-century Neapolitan art on account of its Rococo preciosity and chromatic refinement. The same stylistic trend can be identified in the eight canvases painted for the church of the Annunziata at Marcianise and dating from the late 1780s. From these paintings it can be seen that, even in the production of sacred works, commissioned by a patron with a conservative taste that was linked to the triumphant and devotional figurative models popular at court, Mondo provides a pastoral and Arcadian interpretation of the religious subject, using the free pictorialism of his secular work. Another example can be found in the altarpiece for the confraternity of the Rosario chapel, close to the church of the S Redentore at Caserta, representing the ...

[Plazer]

Bohemian family of sculptors. (Ignác) František [(Ignaz) Franz] Platzer (b Plzeň, 6 July 1717; d Prague, 24 Sept 1787) was apprenticed first to his father Jan Benedikt Platzer (1678–c. 1730), a minor wood-carver, and later possibly to Lazar Widman. At the age of 24 he began studies at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna, probably with Georg Raphael Donner’s pupil Johann Nikolaus Moll (1709–43), with whom he collaborated from 1742. In 1744 he married the widow of the sculptor Matej Schönherr and took over some of his commissions, such as the Trinity Column in Smečno. After 1746 he worked for Count Černín on decorating the palace chapel and cemetery in Hořín and also on the Černín palace in Prague. For St Ursula’s church in Nové Město (New Town), Prague, he executed a statuary group of St John of Nepomuk (1747). From ...

(b Telfs, nr Innsbruck, Feb 2, 1745; d Innsbruck, Sept 15, 1822).

Austrian painter. He trained (1756–8) under Philipp Haller (1698–1772) in Innsbruck, and then embarked on several years of travel, before obtaining his first commissions for the Cistercian monastery at Stams in the Tyrol, with which he remained closely associated throughout his life. Between 1768 and 1775 Schöpf worked with the painter Martin Knoller, who made a deep impression on him as a teacher, on frescoes in Ettal (1769), Neresheim (1770–75) and in the Bürgersaal in Munich (1773; all in situ). Having won an imperial scholarship he spent the years 1775–83 in Rome, where he studied antique sculpture and made copies of works by Raphael, Agostino Carracci and Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni and Domenichino. Schöpf also met Anton von Maron, Anton Raphael Mengs and Heinrich Füger while in Rome. He painted historical subjects for aristocratic patrons, and also completed his first altarpieces for churches in the Tyrol: at Untermieming (...