1-20 of 33 Results  for:

  • Art History and Theory x
Clear all

Article

Aguilonius [de Aguilón; Aguillon], Franciscus  

Frans Baudouin

[François]

(b Brussels, ?Jan 4, 1567; d Antwerp, March 20, 1617).

Flemish scientist and architect. His father was a Spaniard, Pedro de Aguilón; his mother, Anna Pels, was of Flemish origin. Aguilonius studied at the Jesuit Collège de Clermont in Paris and at Douai. He entered the novitiate of the Jesuits in Tournai. After a brief visit to Salamanca in 1596 he was ordained. He taught philosophy at Douai for five years, and in 1598 moved to Antwerp, where he became confessor to the Spaniards and Italians and a teacher at the city’s Jesuit college. In 1614 he was appointed rector of the college.

Aguilonius’s reputation rests on his book on optics, illustrated by Peter Paul Rubens, and on the part he played in building the Jesuit church in Antwerp (S Carlo Borromeo), which contributed to the popularity of Italian Baroque architecture with Flemish Jesuits. By December 1611 Aguilonius had written Opticorum libri sex, which was published by the Plantin press 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

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

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

Bartoli, Papirio  

Louise Rice

(fl Rome, 1620).

Italian jurist and amateur architect . A learned dilettante active during the reign of Pope Paul V, he wrote and illustrated a series of proposals for the improvement and embellishment of St Peter’s, Rome. His Discorso was composed in 1620, and in 1623, following the election of Urban VIII, his designs were published at the expense of his nephew Simone Bartoli in a set of four engravings by Matthäus Greuter. Bartoli proposed the construction of an elaborate pontifical choir in the crossing of St Peter’s, to be built in the form of a navicella (a ship symbolic of the Church) and to encompass within its complex iconography the tomb of the Apostles, the papal high altar and the chair of St Peter. He also advocated transforming St Peter’s from a three-aisled to a five-aisled basilica by modifying the chapels on either side of the nave; demolishing the attic storey of Carlo Maderno’s façade in order to restore a view of Michelangelo’s drum and dome; and regularizing the piazza in front of the church by means of a vast three-storey arcuated portico built on an elongated rectangular plan. Bartoli’s projects, costly and impractical, were never executed and are chiefly of interest as precedents to Bernini’s great works at St Peter’s....

Article

Bourbon del Monte, Francesco Maria  

Pietro Roccasecca

(b Venice, July 5, 1549; d Rome, Aug 17, 1626).

Italian cardinal and patron. He was the younger brother of Guidobaldo (1545–1607), the scientist, mathematician and patron of Galileo Galilei, who wrote a treatise on perspective (1600). Francesco was educated at the della Rovere court at Urbino, where he probably studied with the poet Agostino Gallo (1499–1570) and the mathematician Federico Commandino (1509–75); certainly he developed a passion for music and for art. It is traditionally believed that he left the della Rovere court while still very young to join that of Cardinal Alessandro Sforza (1534–81) in Rome. When Sforza died Francesco entered the service of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, who, on his succession as Grand Duke of Tuscany, renounced his cardinalate and persuaded Pope Sixtus V to confer it on Francesco (1588).

Francesco was a man of wide culture and varied interests: he was a connoisseur of music and painting, he practised alchemy and had a great interest in science. Politically, he was always a partisan of the French, and the writers who described him as an uncultured libertine (for Dirck Amayden’s biography see Spezzaferro) were adherents of the pro-Spanish party and intended to block his election to the papacy. His collection contained about 700 paintings, ancient statuary, the ...

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

Carvalho, Pedro Alexandrino  

Luisa Arruda

(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 ...

Article

Castelli, Domenico  

Alessandra Anselmi

(b Melide, Ticino, c. 1582; d Rome, Oct 12, 1657).

Italian architect, surveyor and writer. The earliest documents on him concern his work in Rome as superintendent, together with Giovanni Fontana, of the construction of the Acqua Paola and the monumental fountain on the Janiculum (1607–14; see Fontana, Giovanni). Between 1614 and 1621 he was employed as superintendent architect on drainage works in the Romagna. In 1619 he also designed the monumental fountain (completed 1621) in the main square of Faenza and in 1620 the iron gate that was meant to complete it; this was made by Domenico Gamberini but never installed. When Castelli returned to Rome his technical knowledge together with the backing of the Barberini family enabled him to obtain numerous public and private commissions. In 1621 he was appointed curator of the Acqua Paola, and in 1624 he became superintendent of the Camera Apostolica, the papal office of works, serving there until 1657 as superintendent, surveyor or both together. This enabled him to work with such architects as ...

Article

Daret, Pierre  

(b Paris, c. 1604; d Laluque, Landes, March 29, 1678).

French painter, engraver and print publisher. Although it was as a painter that he was received (reçu) in 1663 by the Académie Royale, it is as an engraver that he is now remembered. His earliest known print is dated 1630, and he later made many plates, particularly reproductive engravings after his contemporaries Jacques Blanchard and Claude Vignon. He was one of Simon Vouet’s best interpreters, and Vouet himself commissioned from him at least 11 plates after his own paintings. Daret’s most important projects were the engraving of plates for and the publication of M. de Gomberville’s La Doctrine des moeurs (Paris, 1646) and the monumental collection of over 100 portraits in the Tableaux historiques où sont gravez les illustres français et estrangiers (Paris, 1652). His translation of Vasari’s life of Raphael, Abrégé de la vie de Raphael Sansio d’Urbin (Paris, 1651), is celebrated as the first monograph on an artist published in France....

Article

David, Ludovico  

Robert Enggass

(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 ...

Article

De Thurah, Laurids  

Hakon Lund

[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 ...

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. ...

Article

Franchi, Antonio  

Margherita Palatucci and Philip Sohm

[il Lucchese]

(b Villa Basilica, nr Lucca, July 14, 1638; d Florence, July 18, 1709).

Italian painter and theorist. After training in Lucca with Domenico Ferrucci, he settled for 12 years (1655–67) in Florence, where he studied with Felice Ficherelli and Baldassare Franceschini. His style unites classical and Baroque elements and reflects his study of the art of Reni, Cortona and Rubens. He returned to Lucca in 1668: most of his early work is to be found there or in the surrounding area (e.g. Saints Worshipping the Trinity, 1665; Lucca, S Maria dei Servi, and SS Lucy, John the Baptist, Francis Xavier and Others, c. 1670; Montecarlo, S Andrea). In 1674 he established himself in Florence, first under the patronage of the Strozzi family and later under the Medici. The Temple of Love and The Sacrifice (both Florence, Gal. Corsini) were probably painted in that year for the Marchese Pier Francesco Rinuccini and are among his most accomplished works, inspired by Cortona’s romantic vision of the ancient world. In ...

Article

García Hidalgo, José  

Ismael Gutiérrez Pastor

(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 ...

Article

Gibbs, James  

Roger White

(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 ...

Article

Gioffredo, Mario Gaetano  

Alice Dugdale

(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 ...

Article

Girardin, Louis-René [René-Louis], Marquis de  

Susan B. Taylor

(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 ...

Article

Gobert, Thomas  

Françoise Hamon

(b c. 1630; d 1708).

French architect and writer. He was the son of a Parisian master mason, Thomas Gobert (d c. 1644), who built houses on the Ile Saint-Louis (destr.), the Rue Saint-Paul (1641) and the Rue de la Bucherie. The younger Thomas Gobert was related by marriage to the Mansart family. It is not clear, however, if he was related to the painter Pierre Gobert. From 1660 to 1664 he was in the service of Louis II, Prince de Condé, and in 1662 qualified as Architecte des Bâtiments du Roi, building some houses near the Palais-Royal: 61, Rue de Richelieu (1668); 53, Rue Sainte-Anne; and 7, Rue du Mail. In the same district he worked on the library wing of the monastery of the Petits-Pères. In 1670 he collaborated with Antoine Le Pautre on the building of the château of Saint-Cloud (destr.), near Paris. He became Contrôleur Alternatif des Bâtiments du Roi in ...

Article

Guarini, Guarino  

Peter Stein

(b Modena, Jan 17, 1624; d Milan, March 6, 1683).

Italian architect, mathematician, astronomer, theorist, writer and priest. Together with Francesco Borromini, he is the most renowned exponent of the anti-classical, anti-Vitruvian trend that dominated Italian architecture after Michelangelo but increasingly lost ground from the late 17th century. His subtly designed buildings, crowned with daring and complex domes, were ignored in Italy outside Piedmont, but illustrations published in 1686 and again in Guarini’s treatise Architettura civile (1737) proved a fruitful source of inspiration in the development of south German and Austrian late Baroque and Rococo architecture.

Guarini came from a deeply religious family; he and his four brothers all joined the Theatine Order. At the age of 15 he became a novice and was sent to Rome (1639–48), where he was able to study High Baroque architecture, in particular the work of Borromini, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Pietro da Cortona. The details of Guarini’s architectural training are not known, but in the excellently equipped libraries of his Order he presumably studied such well-known treatises as those of Serlio and Jacopo Vignola. In ...