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Article

Addison, Joseph  

Frank Felsenstein

(b Milston, Wilts, May 1, 1672; d London, June 17, 1719).

English writer and politician. He was educated at Charterhouse School and Queen’s College, Oxford, receiving his MA in 1693. Between 1699 and 1703 he travelled on the Continent; in his Remarks upon Several Parts of Italy (1705) he noted that Italy was ‘the great school of Musick and Painting’, and a primary purpose of his tour was ‘to compare the natural face of the country with the Landskips the [classical] Poets have given us of it’. His Remarks became a vade-mecum on artistic matters for 18th-century British travellers.

Although he was active as a politician (he was appointed Under-Secretary of State in 1706 and was an MP, 1708–19), Addison’s greatest influence was as an educator and popularizer of ideas on taste and culture, which he achieved through the periodical essay. He contributed to The Tatler, a thrice-weekly half-sheet founded by his friend Richard Steele (1672–1729), which ran from ...

Article

Aigner, Chrystian Piotr  

Andrzej Rottermund

(b Puławy, June 1756; d Florence, Feb 8, 1841).

Polish architect and writer, also active in Italy. He probably studied in Rome in the late 1770s and returned to Italy in 1785–6 under the aegis of Stanisław Kostka Potocki, a collector and amateur architect with whom he collaborated throughout his life. In 1786 Aigner and Potocki refronted the church of St Anna, Warsaw, using a giant composite order on high pedestals. The political turmoil of the 1790s disrupted Aigner’s career, but during his second phase of creativity (1797–1816) he won fame through his work on the great estate of the Czartoryski family at Puławy, on the Vistula west of Lublin, the most important centre of cultural life in Poland during the Enlightenment. Aigner had already erected the Marynka Palace there in 1790, a variation on the Petit Trianon at Versailles, France, and from 1798 he began to add ornamental buildings to go with the new Picturesque layout of the Puławy gardens: a Chinese pavilion, a Gothick house and a peripheral Temple of the Sibyl with a shallow dome. 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

André, Yves-Marie de l’Isle  

Alexandra Skliar-Piguet

[Père André]

(b Châteaulin, Finistère, May 22, 1675; d Caen, Feb 26, 1764).

French priest, philosopher and writer. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1693, studied theology in Paris, then philosophy at the Collège de Clermont, and he was ordained a priest in 1706. He was a great scholar, who knew Greek, Latin and Hebrew; he devoted himself to philosophical research and poetry, at the same time teaching for the Society of Jesus in numerous institutions of learning in France. A staunch Cartesian, Père André inevitably incurred the hostility of the Society, which was wedded to Scholastic doctrines and Aristotelian philosophy. His innovative philosophical opinions and his suspect theology caused him to suffer various penalties, including imprisonment (1721). Under duress, he made a submission and in 1726 was appointed Royal Professor of Mathematics at Caen, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Père André is best known for his Essai sur le beau (1741), one of the earliest ...

Article

Anglés, Juan Carlos  

Pilar Benito

(b Barcelona, 1755; d Barcelona, Sept 7, 1822).

Spanish writer and painter. He was a member of the Real Escuela de la Junta de Comercio in Barcelona, where he was primarily active in a political capacity rather than as an artist and professor in its Escuela de Nobles Artes. He was expelled from the Junta in 1814 because he had taken the oath of loyalty to the usurper King Joseph Bonaparte, and as a result of accusations of favouring the French he spent his last years in total isolation from public life. His work as a writer on art is of considerable interest. He strongly defended French Neo-classicism and, in particular, the artists François Gérard and Jacques-Louis David. In a lecture he gave to the Junta de Comercio in 1810 he proclaimed the absolute validity of academic classicism, and this belief also pervades such manuscript pamphlets as the Discurso sobre la enseñanza del dibujo, Máximas generales para la pintura...

Article

Antal, Frederick  

Deborah J. Haynes

[Frigyes]

(b Budapest, Dec 21, 1887;d London, April 4, 1954).

Hungarian art historian. He studied art history in Vienna with Max Dvořák and wrote a thesis on French Neo-classical and early Romantic painting. After residing for brief periods in Budapest, Florence, Vienna and Berlin, he settled in London in 1933. He never held a regular teaching position but lectured occasionally at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He wrote on Florentine painting in relation to its social setting, on the origins and evolution of Mannerism and on the interaction of Romanticism and Classicism from the French Revolution to the death of Gericault. His interpretative stance, as set forth in ‘Remarks on the Method of Art History’ (1949), was Marxist. Style, for Antal, was not restricted to formal features but included subject-matter and the social, political and economic context of the artist and work of art. His outlook enabled him to give such artists as Hogarth and Fuseli, who had previously been considered of only limited interest, a context in art history. For instance, he demonstrated how Hogarth’s thematically and formally innovative art revealed the views and tastes of a broad cross-section of English society. He followed Aby Warburg in his rejection of a view that valued ‘art for art’s sake’....

Article

Antiquaries and antiquarian societies  

Ilaria Bignamini

An antiquary (Lat. antiquarius) is a lover, collector and student of ancient learning, traditions and remains. Antiquarianism originated from the revived interest in Classical antiquity during the Renaissance and became a scientific and historical method in the 17th century. The difference between literary and non-literary sources distinguishes humanism from antiquarianism, the latter being based on those tangible remains of antiquity (inscriptions, coins and ruins) related to literary sources. From the 16th century new attitudes towards antiquity were discussed in antiquarian circles, later giving rise to antiquarian societies. Thereafter, antiquarianism was firmly linked to archaeological excavations and to the study and collecting of ancient art. It was also linked to the search for a national identity in the arts and for the origins of Western culture and was sustained by a curiosity about civilizations outside Europe. Antiquarianism, in fact, was associated with the Grand Tour and with travel more generally. Antiquaries and artist–antiquaries were responsible for producing numerous drawings, prints and illustrated volumes. High-quality illustrations of archaeological sites and ancient sculpture contributed to the growth of art history as an autonomous discipline. They also contributed to the popularization of the Antique and to the transformation of commercial dealing in objects associated with antiquarian interests (...

Article

Antolini, Giovanni Antonio  

Lucio Franchini

(b Castel Bolognese, Ravenna, 1756; d Bologna, March 11, 1841).

Italian architect, engineer and theorist. He graduated from the University of Bologna in engineering and architecture. From 1775 to 1796 he was in Rome, where his design for the new sacristy of St Peter’s (1775) was admired by Pius VI, although the commission was awarded to Carlo Marchionni. Antolini took part in the scheme to drain the Pontine Marshes (1776–7), but caught malaria and resigned his appointment. Devoting himself to the study and practice of architecture, he became involved in the artistic controversies of the day, including the debate on the use of the Doric order (see Piranesi, Giovanni Battista) and the changing attitudes towards the restoration of ancient monuments, his own position becoming progressively more conservative. He published his first important archaeological work on the Temple of Hercules at Cori in 1785 and began his studies on the Temple of Minerva at Assisi. During this period he also produced schemes for palaces, chapels and other buildings for noble foreign clients, including a design for the façade of the palace and court chapel of the Duke of Courland at Mitau (now Jelgava, Latvia). During the French intervention in Italy (...

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

Art adviser  

Molly K. Dorkin

[art consultant]

Paid adviser employed by collectors to recommend and facilitate the purchase of works of art. There is a long history of recruitment of art experts by wealthy patrons for advisory purposes. In the 18th century art historians such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann were actively advising leading collectors like Cardinal Alessandro Albani. In the early 20th century the English dealer Joseph Duveen earned a knighthood for his philanthropic efforts on behalf of British galleries. Enlisted by the so-called American Robber Barons for advice in forming collections, Duveen brokered the sale of many notable Old Masters from English aristocrats to American millionaires, including Henry Clay Frick, J. P. Morgan, Henry E. Huntington, and Andrew Mellon. Their collections ultimately formed the nuclei of many great American museums. Duveen’s contemporary Bernard Berenson was an American scholar and expert on Renaissance painting who turned his hand to art advising. Berenson assisted Isabella Stewart Gardner in forming her renowned collection of Renaissance art. His legacy as an academic is controversial thanks to his habit of accepting payment in exchange for favorable ...

Article

Attribution  

Molly K. Dorkin

Prior to the 20th century, the attribution of works of art was not governed by rigid regulations, and art dealers and auctioneers assigned attributions based purely on aesthetic grounds. Works were attributed to the artist whose manner they most closely resembled, but they were not further distinguished on the basis of quality; as a result, many paintings purchased as Renaissance masterpieces in the 18th or 19th century have since been downgraded to studio works or even much later pastiches.

Historically, the patrons who commissioned Old Masters placed a premium on subject matter rather than originality, and popular narratives were requested by multiple patrons, creating conditions in which the demand for copies could flourish (see Copy). Popular compositions were often reproduced many times: by the master himself, an apprentice in his workshop, or even a later follower or imitator. A master trained his apprentices to approximate his manner as closely as possible, and sold the finished work under his own name. In some cases a master would paint the most important part of a work (such as the faces of the central figures) before delegating the rest to apprentices (...

Article

Bachaumont, Louis Petit de  

Christian Michel

(b Versailles, 1690; d Paris, April 28, 1771).

French memorialist and critic . He frequented the well-known literary and artistic salon of Mme Doublet de Persan, sister-in-law of the great collector Pierre Crozat, whose executor he became. He also befriended the most important artists of his time, Charles-Antoine Coypel, Jean-François de Troy, Hyacinthe Rigaud and Nicolas Largillière; and he was a protector of François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Pierre and Etienne-Maurice Falconet in the early stages of their careers. From 1737 his relations with the successive Surintendants des Bâtiments du Roi, Philibert Orry and Charles-François-Paul Le Normand de Tournehem, put him in an influential position. He overwhelmed the administration with memoranda on every conceivable subject (such as the completion of the Palais du Louvre, opening the royal collections to the public, preservation of the Medici column in the Hôtel de Soissons, and urban development plans for Paris). He took part in 1748 in reorganizing the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, with direct patronage from the king and the widest possible access for connoisseurs, as he had advocated. He gave advice to de Troy, Boucher and Pierre; through his old friend Pierre-Jean de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens, he attempted to advise Frederick II of Prussia on the arts, sending him lists of the best French artists. In ...

Article

Bachelier, Jean-Jacques  

Simon Lee

(b Paris, 1724; d Paris, April 13, 1806).

French painter, writer and administrator. A pupil of Jean-Baptiste Pierre, he was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in Paris in 1750 and received (reçu) as a painter of flowers in 1752 on presentation of a Portrait of the King in a Medallion Surrounded by a Garland of Flowers and Attributes of the Arts (untraced). He was essentially a flower and animal painter; as a successor to Jean-Baptiste Oudry he played a key part in the continuation of a precise and polished type of still-life painting. Yet Bachelier also had pretensions towards becoming a history painter, a status he achieved officially in 1763 when he was admitted to the category of history painters at the Académie on the strength of his Death of Abel (Auxerre, Mus. A. & Hist.), for which he substituted a Roman Charity (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.) in 1764.

Bachelier exhibited regularly at the Salon from ...

Article

Back, Jakob Conrad  

German, 18th century, male.

Active in Frankfurt am Mainc.1760.

Engraver (burin).

According to the German art historian Philipp Friedrich Gwinner ( Kunst und Künstler in Frankfurt am Main, 1862), Back lived for much of his life in Offenbach. His works are richly praised by Berny de Nogent in his book ...

Article

Baillet de Saint-Julien, Louis-Guillaume, Baron  

E. D. Lilley

(fl 1748–73).

French critic and poet . He was one of the earliest Salon critics, publishing between 1748 and 1757 his commentaries on the exhibitions of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture—often anonymously, because of harsh censorship. An abiding principle in his sometimes contradictory stance is that artists should base their work on nature rather than slavishly following Classical antiquity or the Old Masters: in this he sided with his immediate precursor, the Abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc, against the founder of French art criticism, Etienne La Font de Saint-Yenne. He believed that critics should develop an understanding of artists’ techniques and problems, here anticipating Denis Diderot and parting company with Le Blanc. He devoted as much attention to developing a critical methodology, often by attacking fellow critics, as to analysing works of art on exhibition; in this he was typical of his time. He particularly admired Jean-Siméon Chardin, Maurice-Quentin de Latour, Claude-Joseph Vernet and Jean-Baptiste Oudry, none of them an exponent of history painting, the genre that stood highest in the traditional academic hierarchy. He became increasingly ready to criticize adversely, but his comments on individual works tend to be banal, whether he is praising or blaming. He praised the efforts of the Direction des Bâtiments du Roi (the French government’s arts administration) to promote the visual arts through regular exhibitions and generous commissions, and he exhorted wealthy individuals similarly to provide worthwhile work for artists....

Article

Bardwell, Thomas  

Hugh Belsey

(b East Anglia, 1704; d Norwich, Sept 9, 1767).

English painter and writer . He began his career as a painter of decorative panels, and a number of poor quality overmantels from 1728 onwards survive. About 1738 his brother Robert Bardwell took over the family decorative painting business, which was based at Bungay, Suffolk; by then Bardwell was producing conversation pieces and portraits, perhaps influenced by the Norwich-based portrait painter John Theodore Heins. William Henry, 4th Earl of Rochford, with his Hunter and Groom (1741; Brodick Castle, Strathclyde, NT Scotland) is an example of his naive approach: the doll-like figures inhabit a clear, airless landscape, while the background view of Easton Park, Suffolk, painted with the same degree of clarity as the foreground figures, shows the influence of his early decorative work. In the 1740s and 1750s Bardwell visited London and painted several portraits there. In 1752 and 1753 he journeyed through Yorkshire to Scotland, carrying out a large number of commissions. His ...

Article

Bartsch, Adam von  

Laura Suffield

(b Vienna, Aug 17, 1757; d Vienna, Aug 21, 1821).

Austrian museum administrator and writer . He studied at the University of Vienna and under Jacob Schmuzer (1733–1811) at the Viennese Academy of Arts, where he learnt printmaking and drawing. From 1777 he worked in the Imperial Library, cataloguing the contents. He expanded his knowledge of prints by travel in Europe: in 1784 he went to Paris to try to acquire the print collection of the miniaturist Johann Anton de Peters; he also studied Parisian collections and purchased 21 Rembrandt prints from Pierre-François Basan. At this time Bartsch began to formulate his approach to the study and classification of prints; as a model to his approach, he undoubtedly looked to the extensive lists and annotations made by Pierre Mariette (ii) of the albums of prints that formed the core of the imperial print collection. In June 1784 Bartsch visited Brussels, where he met the art dealer Domenico Artaria. He travelled in the Netherlands and built up an extensive knowledge of Rembrandt’s etchings, which he later put to use in his catalogue raisonné. In ...

Article

Baruffaldi, Girolamo  

Gian Lodovico Masetti Zannini

(b Ferrara, July 17, 1675; d Cento, March 31, 1755).

Italian priest, poet and art historian . He first studied at the Jesuit seminary in Ferrara and then with his father Nicolò Baruffaldi (1645–1748), a scholar and collector. He became a priest, a doctor of philosophy and a member of the literary Colonia Ferrarese dell’Arcadia, and published historical dissertations and poems under the name Cluento Nettunio. In 1704 he announced that he was working on his Vite de’ pittori e scultori ferraresi, on which he remained engaged throughout his life, although it was not published until 1844–6. It is the first example of a work on Ferrarese art history and is still valid despite certain inaccuracies (e.g. concerning the epigraph of Ferrara Cathedral) and examples of bias (in particular his judgement on Cosimo Tura). He also wrote other works on art in Ferrara and Cento. He was exiled to the Veneto for political reasons (1711–13) and returned home, where he took up a variety of university and ecclesiastical appointments. As arch-priest of Cento he devoted himself wholeheartedly to his pastoral duties, became a protector of artists and, with the architect Alfonso Torreggiani, he rebuilt the collegiate church (completed ...

Article

Batteux, Abbé Charles  

Juanita M. Ellias

(b Alland’huy, near Reims, 1713; d 1780).

French scholar and writer. Having completed his studies in Reims, he became a teacher of rhetoric there, and also took Holy Orders. In 1739 he moved to Paris, where he taught the humanities and rhetoric, first at the Collège de Lisieux and then at the Collège de Navarre (both in Paris); he then became professor of Greek and Latin philosophy at the Collège de France, Paris. His treatise, Les Beaux-arts réduits à un seul principe (1747), was a seminal work on aesthetics. Deriving his criteria from artists’ methods, Batteux contested the contemporary opinion that art was to be judged in non-artistic terms, such as the moral instruction it offered; he also replied to complaints that the fine arts were governed by too many rules. He argued that a single informing principle, the ‘imitation de la belle nature’, distinguished the fine arts from all other activities. Artists’ rules, he claimed, were not arbitrary, but derived from this principle. Batteux’s theory, included also in his ...

Article

Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb  

Howard Caygill

(b Berlin, June 17, 1714; d Frankfurt an der Oder, May 26, 1762).

German philosopher. He was educated at Halle University where he taught philosophy between 1735 and 1740; he then moved to the University of Frankfurt an der Oder, where he taught until his death. He is remembered for the invention of philosophical aesthetics (he introduced the term ‘aesthetics’), based initially on Cartesian principles. His writings also include works in logic, metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy. With the development of a philosophical aesthetics in the Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Reflections on Poetry; 1735) and the incomplete Aesthetica (1750–58), Baumgarten revolutionized both the dominant early Enlightenment philosophy of Christian Wolff (1679–1754) and the philosophy of art. In contrast to Joachim Christoph Gottsched’s reduction of the judgement and creation of works of art to the Wolffian notion of reason, Baumgarten extended the bounds of reason to include the experience of art. He did so by identifying beauty with sensible perfection, defining this as an aesthetic perfection that differs from the rational perfection of logic but is no less valid....