Search Results

(b Cologne, 1552; d Prague, March 4, 1615).

German painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and Bohemia. One of the foremost painters of the circle gathered at the Prague court of Emperor Rudolf II (see Habsburg, House of family, §I, (10)), he synthesized Italian and Netherlandish influences in his portraits and erudite allegories.

Hans’s surname is derived from his father’s native town. According to Karel van Mander, he probably studied c. 1567–73 with the portrait painter Georg Jerrigh, who had trained in Antwerp. Von Aachen subsequently became a member of the Cologne guild of painters. He travelled to Italy c. 1574, first working in Venice as a copyist and for the painter Gaspar Rem (1542–1615/17), before going in 1575 to Rome, where he copied antique sculptures and the works of Italian masters; he also painted an Adoration of the Shepherds for the church of Il Gesù in Rome (1580s; untraced, but known from an engraving (...

[Abbate, Niccolò dell’]

(b Modena, 1509–12; d ?Fontainebleau, 1571).

Italian painter and draughtsman. He was one of the most important artists of the first Fontainebleau school, which was developed at the French court by Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio, and he introduced the Italian Mannerist landscape into France.

He was almost certainly trained by his father, Giovanni dell’Abate (d 1559), a stuccoist, and by the sculptor Antonio Begarelli. Apparently after a period as a soldier, by 1537 he was working in Modena as a painter under Alberto Fontana (fl 1518–58). There the two artists decorated the façade of the Beccherie (Slaughterhouse) from which certain paintings survive (e.g. St Geminian and an allegory of the Wine Harvest; both Modena, Galleria e Museo Estense). His early paintings clearly show the influence of Correggio and of such Ferrarese artists as Dosso Dossi. They also display a love of the picturesque and the pastoral, with frequent variations on the theme of the concert, as in the fragment of a concert scene (Reggio Emilia, Mus. Civ. & Gal. A.) from the façade decorations of the Palazzo Pratonieri in Reggio Emilia. Around ...

(b Città di Castello, c. 1600–05; d Rome, 1656).

Italian painter and mosaicist. He trained in the Roman studio of Cavaliere d’Arpino. He is principally known for executing fresco decorations in several chapels in Rome to designs by Bernini. Independent commissions, such as the frescoes depicting the Life of Charlemagne (1635–7; Rome, Vatican, Sala di Carlo Magno), reveal, however, that despite his collaboration with Bernini and later with Cortona, his preference was for a restrained classical style, close to that of more conservative contemporaries such as Andrea Camassei and Giovanni Francesco Romanelli. He assisted Bernini with the vault of the Raimondi Chapel in S Pietro in Montorio (1642–4) and that of the Pio Chapel in S Agostino (c. 1644–5). He also painted the vision of clouds and angels in the vault above Bernini’s marble group of St Teresa in Ecstasy (c. 1647; Rome, S Maria della Vittoria, Cornaro Chapel). In 1650 he executed independently the decorative frescoes on the ceiling and side walls of the sacristy of S Spirito in Sassia, Rome. He also executed mosaics in St Peter’s, after his own designs and those of ...

Term applied to a drawn or painted representation of the human figure, most commonly made as part of the instruction in an academy or art school. Although the practice of making drawings from nude models had developed during the Renaissance and was commended by such theorists as Alberti, it was only with the foundation of academies of painting in the 17th century that such drawing became formalized as part of a rigorous programme of training. Indeed, by the mid-18th century, the word ‘académie’ was defined in Diderot’s Encyclopédie as ‘a public school where painters go to draw or paint, and sculptors to model, after a nude man called the model’. In France one of the principal means by which the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture asserted its predominance was by maintaining a monopoly on life classes. After the student had mastered the difficulties of copying engravings and plaster casts, he was set to draw from the nude figure under the supervision of the professor. The model was almost invariably male because female models were forbidden at the Académie Royale, and elsewhere they were extremely expensive to hire. Classes lasted two hours, and the pose was usually changed twice a week. The student began by drawing with red chalk on white paper and later progressed to black chalk on tinted papers, applying white chalk for highlights. Such drawing was an exercise in shading, hatching, graining and stumping, and increasingly the results became so homogeneous in style that unsigned examples are almost impossible to attribute. Painted academy figures (...

[Hans von Ulm]

(fl Ulm, 1413–61).

German painter. He belonged to an artist family of which several generations were documented in 15th-century Ulm. According to municipal tax lists, ‘Ackerlin, painter’ was a master by 1413. He received payments from the masons’ lodge of Ulm Cathedral from 1415. In 1441 the cathedral lodge in Berne paid ‘Master Hans of Ulm’ for the production and delivery of stained-glass windows: this Hans is identified with Acker (see also Gothic, §VIII, 5). The Berne Passion window (1441; Berne Cathedral, chancel), his only surviving documented work, demonstrates the capabilities of mid-15th-century German glass painting in dealing with box-shaped hall-church interiors. Its Apostle figures still belong to the tradition of the ‘Soft style’, inspired by Bohemian art, while the style of their robes is reminiscent of those in the chancel windows of Ulm Cathedral. The appearance of a landscape background reveals the influence of the glass paintings (c....

[Lange Pier]

(b Amsterdam, 1507/8; d Amsterdam, bur June 3, 1575).

Dutch painter and draughtsman, active also in the southern Netherlands. He probably trained in his native Amsterdam but early on moved to Antwerp, where he enrolled in the Guild of St Luke as a master in 1535. In 1542 he was granted citizenship of the city. Among his pupils in Antwerp were Johannes Stradanus and later Joachim Beuckelaer, a cousin of the artist’s wife and his most loyal follower. The earliest known work by Aertsen is a triptych with the Crucifixion (c. 1545–6; Antwerp, Maagdenhuismus.) for the van den Biest Almshouse in Antwerp. From 1550 Aertsen’s development can be traced through a large number of signed and dated paintings. Religious works, mostly intended for churches, must have formed an important part of Aertsen’s output. His early paintings seem to have been strongly influenced by other Antwerp artists, as can be seen in the van den Biest triptych, where the figures are close to those in Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s background scenes. Van Hemessen’s influence is also strong in the pair of triptychs showing the ...

(b ?1470–75; d Lisbon, before June 23, 1540).

Portuguese painter. He held a key position in Portuguese art of the first half of the 16th century. He was the brother-in-law of Francisco Henriques, uncle of Cristóvão de Figueiredo and Garcia Fernandes, father-in-law of Gregório Lopes, and friend of the leading painter of Viseu, Vasco Fernandes. In his workshop, painters of the succeeding generation served their apprenticeships and completed their training, interpreting Afonso’s Renaissance ideas in Mannerist style. By 1504 Afonso was living in Lisbon with a workshop close to the Monastery of S Domingos. In 1508 Manuel I appointed him pintor régio (court painter) and examinador de todas as obras de pintura do reino (examiner of all work in painting in the kingdom), appointments that were re-confirmed by John III in 1529. In this capacity he surveyed and evaluated work carried out at Tomar and various churches in Lisbon. Documents refer also to the execution of banners (...

(b Sassoferrato, c. 1470; d Cupramontana, c. 1540).

Italian painter and possible woodcutter. He spent his early years in Sassoferrato, where his family owned a ceramics workshop. Around 1497 he probably visited the Veneto region, since his Virgin and Child with Saints (Padua, Mus. Civ.) painted that year shows the strong influence of painters active there such as Cima da Conegliano. The painting also reflects the Bolognese style of Francesco Francia and that of the Romagnian Marco Palmezzano. In Venice, Agabiti may have made woodcuts after the illustrations for Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499). By 1502 he had returned to the Marches, where he executed a painting (untraced) for S Rocco, Jesi, the town where in 1507 he is documented as residing. After 1510 he was again in Sassoferrato, where in 1511 he signed and dated both the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints (Sassoferrato, Gal. A. Mod. & Contemp.) and the Nativity in S Maria del Piano. In ...

(b Regensburg, 1667; d Regensburg, 1719).

German painter. He travelled to England, the Netherlands, France and Italy, working for longer periods in Rome, Naples and Augsburg. He was strongly influenced by French landscape painters active in Italy, such as Gaspard Dughet and Claude Lorrain. In Agricola’s paintings the balanced arrangement of the picturesque landscape elements creates a lucid pictorial structure, and unusual light effects, such as twilight or the darkness before a storm, are used to convey a particular mood. The small scale of his figures expresses the contrast between human frailty and the forces of nature. He painted with lively local colours, especially ochres and deep greens for the rich tones of earth and vegetation. The multicoloured costumes of his figural staffage provide pictorial accents and reveal the romantic orientation of his paintings. Scenes of country people at work, for example Landscape with a Millstone (Dresden, Gemäldegal. Alte Meister), express his yearning for a return to nature. Paintings representing the life of nomadic Orientals, such as ...

(b Cairnie, Forfar, Tayside, Oct 24, 1682; d London, June 4, 1731).

Scottish painter. He came from a professional background, and his maternal uncle, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, may have provided Aikman with an introduction to Sir John Baptist Medina, under whom he studied painting in London from 1704. In 1707 Aikman set out on travels to Italy, Constantinople (now Istanbul) and Smyrna, on the proceeds made from the sale of his estate at Cairnie. When he returned to Edinburgh in 1711, he adopted a heavy Baroque style for his portraits: Sir William Carstares (c. 1712–15; U. Edinburgh, Old Coll., Upper Lib.) shows bravura, although the handling is coarse. The three-quarter-length portraits of Patrick, 1st Earl of Marchmont (1720; Mellerstain, Borders) and Sir Hew Dalrymple, Lord North Berwick (1722; Edinburgh, Parliament House) show a greater sophistication, which he may have acquired during a further trip to London in 1720.

Aikman was widely patronized, especially by the Duke of Argyll and his circle; after the Act of Union in ...

[Alladio, Gian Giacomo d’]

(b Alba; fl 1495–1515; d before 1528).

Italian painter. Inscriptions on his altarpieces indicate he was born in Alba. He probably trained elsewhere; his early works, with the exception of the portrait of Andrea Novelli, Bishop of Alba (Isola Bella, Mus. Borromeo), cannot be traced to a precise location. His patrons were mainly from the Paleologo court at Casale Monferrato, where he was the official painter. His earliest signed and dated work is the triptych of the Virgin Enthroned between SS John the Evangelist, James the Greater, John the Baptist and Thomas Aquinas and Two Donors (1495; Turin, Mus. Civ. A. Ant.), and it and the Virgin and Child between SS Nicholas and Martin (Rome, Pin. Capitolina) show the influence of Lombard painters, particularly Ambrogio Bergognone; some writers have suggested that this may indicate a journey through central Italy, perhaps to Rome.

By 1496 Alba’s Virgin Enthroned between SS Hugh and Anselm had been placed in the Certosa di Pavia (...

(b Bologna, March 17, 1578; d Bologna, Oct 4, 1660).

Italian painter and draughtsman. He was a distinguished artist of the Bolognese school, deeply influenced by Annibale Carracci’s classicism, who worked in Rome as well as Bologna, painting altarpieces, frescoes and and cabinet pictures. His fame rests on his idyllic landscapes and small mythological pictures, the lyrical qualities of which earned him the soubriquet ‘the Anacreon of painters’.

The 12-year-old Albani began his studies in the Bolognese studio of the Flemish-born painter Denys Calvaert, after which he transferred (c. 1595) to the Carracci Accademia degli Incamminati, also in Bologna, where life drawing and theoretical discussion predominated. For the next four years he studied with Ludovico Carracci and through him obtained his first public commissions. These were for Bolognese palazzi and churches, such as the oratory of S Colombano, where his fresco of the Repentance of St Peter (c. 1597–8) closely imitates the dramatic and emotional qualities of Ludovico’s manner, particularly in the expressive figure of the apostle and in the nocturnal lighting. The oratory’s altarpiece, painted in the same period, showing the ...

(b Borgo San Sepolcro, March 9, 1551; d Rome, July 10, 1596).

Italian painter. He was the oldest son of Alberto Alberti, whose diary documents his activities. Alessandro was the first member of the family to study painting, perhaps with Raffaello dal Colle. He first visited Rome in 1566 and travelled frequently between Rome, Borgo San Sepolcro and Naples. In Città di Castello he decorated the Bufalini Chapel in S Francesco (1576–7; in situ); in Rome he painted an altarpiece of St Susanna for S Susanna (untraced), known through an engraving of 1578 by his brother Cherubino Alberti. After some years in Naples and Borgo San Sepolcro, he was commissioned in 1586 by Vespasiano Gonzaga, Duke of Sabbioneta, to decorate the Galleria degli Antichi (in situ) in the Palazzo Ducale, Sabbioneta (nr Mantua). He painted the long walls with a fictive architectural scheme supporting decorative motifs derived from his Roman experience. His brother Giovanni Alberti later joined him to paint the end walls. In ...

(b Borgo San Sepolcro, Feb 24, 1553; d Rome, Oct 18, 1615).

Italian painter and printmaker, brother of Alessandro Alberti. The best known of the three sons of Alberto Alberti, he distinguished himself as a printmaker at an early age. One of his earliest prints, an etching of the Virgin and Child (1568; b. 149) shows his interest in Raphael as well as in contemporary Mannerist art. In Rome he studied with Cornelius Cort, whose swelling burin line he adopted to create pictorial effects of strong chiaroscuro. Between 1571 and 1575 he made several prints after Federico Zuccaro and Taddeo Zuccaro (b. 131, 136, 140, 159, 171, 176). During the next ten years he reached the height of his fame as a printmaker, producing engravings after Raphael, Michelangelo, Polidoro da Caravaggio and of ancient statues. His prints of Polidoro are particularly valued as documents of lost works. He also made prints from paintings by Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Marco Pino, ...

(b Borgo San Sepolcro, Oct 19, 1558; d Rome, Aug 10, 1601).

Italian painter, brother of Alessandro Alberti. He distinguished himself as an expert in perspective design, for which he was praised by Ignazio Danti (in his commentary on Vignola, 1583), Federico Zuccaro and Giovanni Baglione. He is thus usually credited with the design of the architectural perspectives in the fresco decorations he painted in collaboration with his brothers. He also painted putti and ornamental figures. He assisted Danti in the Sala dei Palafrenieri and Sala Vecchia degli Svizzeri in the Vatican (after Feb 1582) and was influenced by Danti’s belief that perspective decorations should be oriented for the most typical viewing point of the spectactor. In 1586 he went to Sabbioneta (nr Mantua) to assist his brother Alessandro at the Palazzo Ducale and painted the fictive colonnades on the end walls of the Galleria degli Antichi. This trip gave him the opportunity to study the illusionistic frescoes of Andrea Mantegna in Mantua and of Correggio in Parma....

(b Genoa, Feb 14, 1404; d Rome, April 1472).

Italian architect, sculptor, painter, theorist and writer. The arts of painting, sculpture and architecture were, for Alberti, only three of an exceptionally broad range of interests, for he made his mark in fields as diverse as family ethics, philology and cryptography. It is for his contribution to the visual arts, however, that he is chiefly remembered. Alberti single-handedly established a theoretical foundation for the whole of Renaissance art with three revolutionary treatises, on painting, sculpture and architecture, which were the first works of their kind since Classical antiquity. Moreover, as a practitioner of the arts, he was no less innovative. In sculpture he seems to have been instrumental in popularizing, if not inventing, the portrait medal, but it was in architecture that he found his métier. Building on the achievements of his immediate predecessors, Filippo Brunelleschi and Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, he reinterpreted anew the architecture of antiquity and introduced compositional formulae that have remained central to classical design ever since....

(di Biagio di Bindo)

(b Florence, Oct 13, 1474; d Florence, Nov 5, 1515).

Italian painter. Albertinelli’s contribution to the Florentine High Renaissance was inspired by the work of Fra Bartolommeo, and the two artists worked together in a partnership, their paintings appearing to be the product of a single hand. Albertinelli, however, always retained artistic independence, as is revealed in certain paintings that are eccentrically archaic and in others that show a preference for conventions more typical of the early Renaissance.

According to Vasari, Albertinelli and Fra Bartolommeo were both apprenticed to Cosimo Rosselli. The two young painters became friends and after their emancipation operated a joint workshop in the 1490s. Vasari also stated that in an interlude before 1494 Albertinelli worked exclusively for Alfonsina Orsini, the wife of Piero II de’ Medici (reg 1492–4), but the works made for her cannot be identified. Albertinelli initially specialized in small, elegantly framed paintings destined for the homes of sophisticated patrons. These works were produced independently of Fra Bartolommeo and are stylistically distinguishable. From Piero di Cosimo, the most creative personality in Cosimo Rosselli’s workshop, Albertinelli absorbed Flemish techniques, a spirited versatility in imitation and a tendency towards eccentricity. For example, the ...

(b Berg, nr Starnberg, Bavaria, Jan 3, 1687; d Munich, Aug 15, 1765).

German painter and administrator. He was the son of Augustin Albrecht, a carpenter, and he was probably taught in Munich by his uncle, the painter Benedikt Albrecht (d 1730), before he went to Italy, where he is thought to have stayed in Rome and Venice. Albrecht returned to Munich in 1719 and executed his first works (all 1723–4) for the former Hofmarkkirche (now Katholische Pfarrkirche; in situ) in Schönbrunn, near Dachau. These were a ceiling fresco, Celebration of the Cross, and three altar panels, Mourning Angel (high altar), Martyrdom of St Catherine (left altar) and St Anne (right altar). He also painted two altar panels, St John of Nepomuk and St Leonard (both 1724–5; untraced), for the Katholische Pfarrkirche Mariahilf in der Au in Munich. Unlike Cosmas Damian Asam, Matthäus Günther and Johann Baptist Bergmüller, he was influenced by 16th-century Venetian and Roman models, and both in these works and in later ones he continued to look to the past for inspiration. Between ...

(b Paderborn, 1502; d Soest, Westphalia, 1555–61).

German engraver, painter and designer. He was the most important graphic artist in Westphalia in the 16th century. His reputation rests largely on his ornamental designs, which make up about one third of his c. 300 engravings. They were principally intended as models for metalworkers but were also adapted by other craftsmen for such decorative arts as enamel, intarsia and book illustration. Aldegrever followed Dürer and the Nuremberg Little Masters, deriving models for his paintings and subject prints as well as a full repertory of Renaissance ornamental motifs: fig and Acanthus foliage, vases and cornucopia, combined with putti and satyrs, tritons, mermaids and dolphins, sphinxes, masks and medallions. From the beginning of his career Aldegrever was aware of the artistic trends of the time: the Dürer influence was strongest at its outset yielding somewhat in work of the 1530s to Mannerist tendencies under Netherlandish influence, though never waning entirely.

Aldegrever was the son of Hermann Trippenmeker (...

(b Göttweich, Austria, c. 1430; d Ascoli Piceno, the Marches, between Sept 18, 1497 and Nov 22, 1498).

Italian painter of Austrian birth. He is first documented in 1477 in his adopted home of Ascoli Piceno. A badly preserved fresco of the Virgin and Child with Saints in the church of the Madonna delle Rose in Torre San Patrizio, near Ascoli, has been attributed to him; it is dated 1466, providing possible evidence of his presence in the area two years before his master, Carlo Crivelli, was first documented there. Alemanno’s style was based on Crivelli’s work of the 1470s and hardly evolved at all throughout his career. His expressionistic, anatomical distortion may be derived from Giorgio Schiavone. The Virgin and Child Enthroned and the St Lucy (both Montefortino, Pin. Com.), which formed part of a dismembered polyptych dating from c. 1470, are typical of his work, with their dark outlines and strong hatching in both shadows and highlights.

Alemanno produced mostly polyptychs with the Virgin and Child enthroned, framed by standing saints on separate panels, or small-scale, half-length Virgin and Child pictures, ultimately deriving in form from similar compositions by Donatello. An exception is the ...