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Article

Alberti, Leon Battista  

Paul Davies and David Hemsoll

(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....

Article

Alberti, Leon Battista degli  

Italian, 15th century, male.

Born 14 February 1404, in Genoa, illegitimate son of a noble Florentine banking family (in exile at the time of his birth); died 1472.

Architect, theorist, painter, sculptor.

Leon Battista Alberti was a leading scholar and architect of the fifteenth century. After receiving his doctorate in canon and civil law from Bologna University in ...

Article

Amato, Paolo  

Helen M. Hills

(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 ...

Article

Amighetti, Francisco  

José Miguel Rojas

(b San José, June 1, 1907; d 1998).

Costa Rican engraver, painter, illustrator, draughtsman, writer and critic. He studied for a year from 1931 at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes but was otherwise initially self-taught, using Louis Gonse’s L’Art japonais (Paris, 1883) as a source. He produced a series of caricature drawings, influenced by Cubism, in the Album de dibujos de 1926. During 1929 he met the sculptors Juan Manuel Sánchez and Francisco Zúñiga (the latter was also a printmaker), and through his interest in German and Mexican Expressionist printmakers, he developed a passion for wood-engraving. His first wood-engravings were published in the periodical Repertorio Americano (1929). He went on to contribute wood-engravings and drawings to collections of short stories and poetry, educational books, periodicals and newspapers. In 1931 he taught drawing and wood-engraving at the Escuela Normal in Heredia. He exhibited at the Salones Anuales de Artes Plásticas in San José (1931–6...

Article

Ardemans, Teodoro  

(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 (...

Article

Astrology in medieval art  

Sophie Page

Astrology is the art of predicting events on earth as well as human character and disposition from the movements of the planets and fixed stars. Medieval astrology encompassed both general concepts of celestial influence, and the technical art of making predictions with horoscopes, symbolic maps of the heavens at particular moments and places constructed from astronomical information. The scientific foundations of the art were developed in ancient Greece, largely lost in early medieval Europe and recovered by the Latin West from Arabic sources in the 12th and 13th centuries. Late medieval astrological images were successfully Christianized and were adapted to particular contexts, acquired local meanings and changed over time.

Astrology developed into a scientific branch of learning in ancient Greece, but because of the opposition of the Church Fathers it was transmitted to early medieval Europe in only fragmentary form in technically unsophisticated textbooks and popular divinatory genres. Literary and scientific texts provided more general ideas about the nature and attributes of the planets which were influential on later iconography. The first significant astrological images appear in 11th-century illustrated astronomical texts (e.g. London, BL, Cotton MS. Tiberius BV), which were acquired and produced by monasteries to aid with time-keeping and the construction of the Christian calendar....

Article

Ávila, Hernando de  

Isabel Mateo Gómez

(b ?Toledo; d 1595).

Spanish painter, miniaturist, sculptor, architect and writer. He belongs to the Toledan school of the second half of the 16th century. The son of the painter Lorenzo de Ávila, he developed a Mannerist style that is smooth and delicate and derives from his father’s and from that of Juan Correa de Vivar and of Francisco Comontes (d 1565). He worked as painter to Toledo Cathedral from 1565 to 1581 and was painter (Pintor del Rey) to Philip II from 1583. He acted frequently as a valuer for the work of other artists.

Between 1563 and 1564, in collaboration with Luis de Velasco, Hernando de Ávila painted the retable of the church of Miraflores (Madrid Province) with the Life of Christ and the Life of the Virgin (untraced); these are probably among his earliest works. He was commissioned to paint the retables of St John the Baptist and the ...

Article

Baglione, Giovanni  

Maryvelma O’Neil

(b Rome, c. 1566; d Dec 30, 1643).

Italian painter, draughtsman and writer . He executed canvases and frescoes of religious and mythological subjects, and portraits. He was given important commissions by popes and aristocrats and sold his works to patrons in Italy and abroad. Baglione’s arguably greater fame as a writer derives from Le nove chiese di Roma (1639) and especially from his Vite de’ pittori, scultori, architetti (1642), containing biographies of more than 200 artists who worked in Rome between 1572 and 1642.

Although born in Rome, where he spent most of his life, Baglione claimed descent from a noble Perugian family. His only acknowledged training (in the autobiography appended to Le vite, 1642) was an apprenticeship with Francesco Morelli, a little-known Florentine painter in Rome. However, drawings for works from the late 1580s and 1590s (such as the Finding of Moses, the Denial of St Peter and the Arrest of Christ...

Article

Berlepsch-Valendas, Hans Eduard von  

Swiss, 19th – 20th century, male.

Active in Germany.

Born 31 December 1849, in St Gall; died 1921, in Planegg.

Architect, painter, decorative designer, theorist. Designs (furniture/fabrics/metal objects/ceramics).

Jugendstil.

From 1868 to 1871 Hans Eduard von Berlepsch-Valendas was a student of architecture with Gottfried Sempers in Zurich. After graduating he abandoned architecture while he was living in Frankfurt, to go and train as a painter in Munich (...

Article

Beshkov, Il’ya  

Mariana Katzarova

(b Dolni Dŭbnik, nr Pleven, July 24, 1901; d Sofia, Jan 23, 1958).

Bulgarian cartoonist, illustrator, draughtsman, painter, teacher, editor and critic. In 1926 he studied painting at the Academy of Art, Sofia, and although he was later known for his paintings, he achieved greater fame as a political and social cartoonist and newspaper and magazine illustrator. His early cartoons are courageous commentaries on political events in Bulgaria from 1925 to 1934, wittily satirizing the monarchy and dictatorships. He also mocked the machinations of the various bourgeois political parties as they fought for power. Among his most celebrated cartoons are the Kidnapping of the Constitution and the Tsar’s Family, published in the Sofia newspapers Zemedelsko Zname and Sturetz, as well as Suvremennik and other left-wing publications. He also illustrated the series Spanish Chronicle (1936). In 1940 he began freelancing for the anti-Fascist satirical newspaper Sturshel (Sofia) and in 1941 became its editor. During World War II he executed many political cartoons opposing Fascism and Nazism (e.g. ...

Article

Bill, Max  

Hans Frei

(b Winterthur, Dec 22, 1908; d Zurich, Dec 9, 1994).

Swiss architect, sculptor, painter, industrial designer, graphic designer and writer. He attended silversmithing classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich from 1924 to 1927. Then, inspired by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (1925), Paris, by the works of Le Corbusier and by a competition entry (1927) for the Palace of the League of Nations, Geneva, by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer (1894–1952), he decided to become an architect and enrolled in the Bauhaus, Dessau, in 1927. He studied there for two years as a pupil of Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky, mainly in the field of ‘free art’. In 1929 he returned to Zurich. After working on graphic designs for the few modern buildings being constructed, he built his first work, his own house and studio (1932–3) in Zurich-Höngg; although this adheres to the principles of the new architecture, it retains echoes of the traditional, for example in the gently sloping saddle roof....

Article

Caletti, Giuseppe  

Ugo Ruggeri

[il Cremonese]

(b ?Cremona, c. 1595; d Ferrara, 1660).

Italian painter, draughtsman and etcher. His artistic formation was complex. He knew contemporary Emilian art, from Giacomo Cavedoni to Lionello Spada and Guercino, and was intensely interested in 16th-century painters from Venice and the Po Valley, ranging from Giorgione to Titian, from Altobello Meloni to Romanino and of course Dosso Dossi. Caletti was mainly interested, as was Pietro della Vecchia, in a revival of 16th-century Venetian art, and, like della Vecchia, although at times he produced forgeries of 16th-century pictures, he more often interpreted such sources with irony and powerful emotion, as in the St Sebastian (Cento, Taddei priv. col.), which is modelled on Titian’s figure of St Sebastian in the Averoldi polyptych of the Resurrection (1522; Brescia, SS Nazaro and Celso).

In a rare public commission, a depiction of St Mark (c. 1630; Ferrara, Pin. N.), Caletti grew closer to Guercino. He was attracted by the bold Venetian colour of Guercino’s early manner, the influence of which is apparent in this work and in ...

Article

Calvi, Jacopo Alessandro  

[il Sordino]

(b Bologna, Feb 23, 1740; d Bologna, May 5, 1815).

Italian painter, biographer, draughtsman and engraver. He was a pupil of Giuseppe Varotti (1715–80). While a student at the Accademia Clementina, Bologna, he received two awards, including the Premio Marsili for the Sacrifice of Noah (1758; Bologna, Accad. B.A. & Liceo A.). He pursued literary interests throughout his life and became a member of the avant-garde Accademia Letteraria degli ‘Ingomiti’ in Bologna in 1763. His early paintings, notably the St Francis de Sales (1764; Bologna, Ospizio dei Preti), continue the strict classical strain within the Bolognese figurative tradition; they show the influences of Ercole Graziani, Marc Antonio Franceschini and Donato Creti. Calvi primarily painted sacred subjects, receiving numerous, mainly local, commissions. From about 1770 onwards many pictures, including his superb Self-portrait (1770; Bologna, Pin. N.), became increasingly austere and Raphaelesque in both style and design, anticipating 19th-century Bolognese Neo-classicism. In 1766 he frescoed an Assumption of the Virgin...

Article

Cantacuzino, G(eorge) M(atei)  

Alexandru Beldiman

(b Vienna, May 23, 1899; d Iaşı Nov 1, 1960).

Romanian architect, urban planner, painter, theorist and restorer. Descended from a Wallachian family of statesmen and scholars, he studied (1920–29) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, with Gustave Umbdenstock and G. Gromort. His work consistently showed Neo-classical and Renaissance influences, from the Palladian-style Chrissoveloni Bank (1928; with A. Schmiedigen), Bucharest, to the substantial number of buildings he completed in Romania during the 1930s. In many of these the classicist forms overlaid a sophisticated functionality in the planning, for example the IAR aeroplane factory (1933), Braşov. He also designed houses (e.g. in Amza Square, Bucharest, 1935), hotels (e.g. the Hotel Bellona on the Black Sea coast, 1934) and churches, such as those at Tetcani and Flǎmânda (1939), and he participated in the production of the master plan of 1935 for Bucharest. He was commissioned to design the Romanian Pavilion for the World’s Fair, New York (...

Article

Colson [Gilles], Jean-François  

Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy

(b Dijon, March 2, 1733; d Paris, March 2, 1803).

French painter, architect and writer. He was apprenticed to his father, Jean-Baptiste Gilles, called Colson (1686–1762), who copied the work of the portrait painters Charles Parrocel and Jean-Baptiste van Loo and also painted miniatures, mainly for a provincial clientele. Jean-François got to know many studios, and worked for the portrait painters Daniel Sarrabat and Donat Nonnotte, among others. One of his liveliest early works is the informal, intimate and meditative portrait of The Artist’s Father in his Studio (Dijon, Mus. B.-A.). Through the acting career of his brother Jean-Claude, Jean-François also came into contact with the theatrical world, as in his portrait of the actress Mme Véron de Forbonnais (1760; Dijon, Mus. B.-A.). The manner of this painting—with its subject looking up as if disturbed from reading a letter—is attuned to contemporary developments in portraiture. Later theatrical work includes Mlle Lange in the Role of Silvie (...

Article

Delécluze, Etienne-Jean  

Paul Gerbod

(b Paris, Feb 26, 1781; d Versailles, July 12, 1863).

French writer and painter. The son of the architect Jean-Baptiste Delécluze, in 1796 he entered the studio of Charles Moreau (1762–1810), who introduced him to Jacques-Louis David. He tried to make a career as a painter between 1808 and 1814, exhibiting pictures, such as The Rape of Europa (exh. Salon 1808) and Augustus and Cinna (exh. Salon 1814; Barnard Castle, Bowes Mus.), that show his loyalty to the Neo-classical school. He also produced three watercolours depicting the events of 1814 (Versailles, Château).

In 1815 Delécluze abandoned painting in favour of writing art criticism. After travelling in Italy and England, he wrote his first article, published in the Lycée français, and he subsequently wrote an account of the Salon of 1822 in the Moniteur universel. In November 1822 he wrote an obituary of Antonio Canova for the Journal des débats and continued to contribute to that newspaper until his death. He wrote for several other journals, including ...

Article

Francesco (Maurizio) di Giorgio Martini  

Francesco Paolo Fiore and Pietro C. Marani

(Pollaiolo)[Francesco di Giorgio]

(b Siena, bapt Sept 23, 1439; d Siena, bur Nov 29, 1501).

Italian architect, engineer, painter, illuminator, sculptor, medallist, theorist and writer. He was the most outstanding artistic personality from Siena in the second half of the 15th century. His activities as a diplomat led to his employment at the courts of Naples, Milan and Urbino, as well as in Siena, and while most of his paintings and miniatures date from before 1475, by the 1480s and 1490s he was among the leading architects in Italy. He was particularly renowned for his work as a military architect, notably for his involvement in the development of the Bastion, which formed the basis of post-medieval fortifications (see Military architecture & fortification, §III, 2(ii) and 4(ii)). His subsequent palace and church architecture was influential in spreading the Urbino style, which he renewed with reference to the architecture of Leon Battista Alberti but giving emphasis to the purism of smooth surfaces. His theoretical works, which include the first important Western writings on military engineering, were not published until modern times but were keenly studied in manuscript, by Leonardo da Vinci among others; they foreshadowed a number of developments that came to fruition in the 16th century (...

Article

Doesburg, Theo van  

Allan Doig

(b Utrecht, Aug 30, 1883; d Davos, Switzerland, March 7, 1931).

Dutch painter, architect, designer and writer. He was officially registered as the son of Wilhelm Küpper and Henrietta Catharina Margadant, but he was so convinced that his mother’s second husband, Theodorus Doesburg, was his father that he took his name. Little is known of his early life, but he began painting naturalistic subjects c. 1899. In 1903 he began his military service, and around the same time he met his first wife, Agnita Feis, a Theosophist and poet. Between about 1908 and 1910, much influenced by the work of Honoré Daumier, he produced caricatures, some of which were later published in his first book De maskers af! (1916). Also during this period he painted some Impressionist-inspired landscapes and portraits in the manner of George Hendrik Breitner. Between 1914 and 1915 the influence of Kandinsky became clear in such drawings as Streetmusic I and Streetmusic II (The Hague, Rijksdienst Beeld. Kst) and other abstract works....

Article

Errard [Erard], Charles, le fils  

Steven Adams

(b Nantes, c. 1606–9; d Rome, May 25, 1689).

French painter, draughtsman, architect and writer, active also in Italy. He first studied under Charles Errard le père (c. 1570–1630), a Mannerist portrait painter and engineer. From 1627 he was in Rome, working under the protection of François de Créqui, French Ambassador to the papal court. There he came into contact with an influential circle of scholars, artists and patrons, including Joachim von Sandrart, Paul Fréart, Sieur de Chantelou, secretary to the French Surintendant des Bâtiments du Roi, François Sublet des Noyers and Giovanni Pietro Bellori. During this period he made copies after paintings by Titian and Annibale Carracci and drawings of Roman antiquities, while learning the idealized, classicizing style that was upheld in academic circles. In 1633 he became a member of the Accademia di S Luca.

In 1643 Errard returned to Paris as a Peintre Ordinaire du Roi and became one of the most fashionable painters in the capital. Over the next two decades he undertook a series of commissions for the crown and for wealthy bourgeois patrons. In ...

Article

Francart [Franckaert; Francquart], Jacques  

J.-P. Esther

[Jacob]

(b ?Antwerp, ?1583; d Brussels, bur Jan 6, 1651).

Flemish architect, painter, draughtsman, engineer and writer. He was the son of an Antwerp painter, Jacques Francart (b before 1550; d 1601), and he was trained as a painter in Rome, where his father worked for some years. He greatly admired Michelangelo, Jacopo Vignola, Giacomo della Porta and Carlo Maderno. In 1599 the Flemish painter and architect Wenzel Coebergher married Francart’s younger sister in Rome. After Coebergher had been appointed Court Engineer in 1605 to the Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella in Brussels, Francart likewise returned to the Low Countries in 1608 to begin a career as a painter and architect in the service of the Archduke, where he remained until the death of Isabella.

In 1622, influenced by his Roman sojourn, Francart published his Premier livre d’architecture in November 1616, a work of great importance to the development of the early Baroque style in the southern Netherlands. One month after its publication he was given the task of completing the Jesuit church in Brussels (destr. ...