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(b Copenhagen, Sept 11, 1743; d Frederiksdal, Copenhagen, June 4, 1809).

Danish painter, designer and architect. His paintings reveal both Neo-classical and Romantic interests and include history paintings as well as literary and mythological works. The variety of his subject-matter reflects his wide learning, a feature further evidenced by the broad range of his creative output. In addition to painting, he produced decorative work, sculpture and furniture designs, as well as being engaged as an architect. Successfully combining both intellectual and imaginative powers, he came to be fully appreciated only in the 1980s.

He studied at the Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi in Copenhagen (1764–72), and in 1767 he assisted Johan Edvard Mandelberg (1730–86) in painting the domed hall of the Fredensborg Slot with scenes from the Homeric epic the Iliad. In 1772 he was granted a five-year travelling scholarship from the Kunstakademi to study in Rome. During his Roman sojourn he extensively copied works of art from the period of antiquity up to that of the Carracci family. His friendships with the Danish painter Jens Juel, the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel and the Swiss painter Johann Heinrich Fuseli placed him among artists who were in the mainstream of a widespread upheaval in European art. In these years Abildgaard developed both Neo-classical and Romantic tastes; his masterpiece of the period is ...

(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 ...

(b Paris, Sept 18, 1760; d Thiais, Dec 31, 1834).

French architect, teacher and writer. He was one of the most influential teachers of his time, and his radically rationalist approach, which emphasized priority of function and economy of means, was expressed in analytical writings that remained popular into the 20th century. He studied under Pierre Panseron (fl 1736) and from 1776 in the office of Etienne-Louis Boullée. He also took courses with Julien-David Le Roy at the Académie d’Architecture and participated in competitions under the guidance of Jean-Rodolphe Perronet. He twice came second in the Prix de Rome: in 1779 for a museum and in 1780 for a school. During the 1780s he worked as a draughtsman for Boullée and for the engraver Jean-François Janinet. In 1788 construction began in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, Paris, of his Maison Lathuille, a building with Néo-Grec decoration but with a layout characterized by its extreme simplicity. About 1790 he executed a series of drawings entitled ...

(b Alava, Spain, 1810; d Mexico City, 1872).

Spanish architect, painter, and teacher, active in Mexico. He graduated as an architect from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, but also worked in painting, sculpture, and pastel miniatures. In 1836 he worked in Paris under Henri Labrouste, and in 1838 he went to Mexico City, where he opened a school of drawing. As one of the outstanding architects in Mexico at the time, he was made an académico de mérito of the Academia de San Carlos and its director of architecture. His chief work was the Teatro de Santa Anna (1842–1844; later Teatro Nacional; destr. 1901), Mexico City, a neoclassical building that was for a long time the most costly in the city. The principal façade had a portico with four large Corinthian columns rising through two tories. He also rebuilt the dome (1845–1848) of the side chapel of the church of S Teresa la Antigua, Mexico City. His solution was a neoclassical dome supported by a double drum, producing interesting light effects in the interior. The windows of the upper drum, concealed by an incomplete vault rising from the lower one, illuminate paintings around the bottom of the dome. Few of his other works have survived....

(b Thessaloniki, 1811; d Athens, Oct 5, 1886).

Greek architect and teacher. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome (1826–36), and in 1833 he was awarded the first prize in the architectural competition for the design of the Università di Milano. In 1838, after two years in France, he returned to Greece to live in Athens. He exhibited his designs and projects there, among them the monument to the Heroes of the War of Independence of 1821 (unexecuted), for which he had won an award at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. After a period in Turkey (1839–43), he was appointed Director of the Royal School of Fine Arts in Athens in 1844 (later the National Technical University). He was promoted by the wealthiest and most influential of the Greek bourgeoisie, the expatriate merchants who financed most public projects. He contributed enormously to the development of the University and the establishment of Neo-classicism in Greece, both as an ideology and as a viable form of architecture. The austerity and rigour of the Greek version of Neo-classicism corresponded well with his attachment to the classical canon, which he used effectively to create an urban morphology of rhythmical volumes and regulatory grids, an orderly environment that would represent the freedom and progress of modern Greece....

(b Nieuwpoort, Jan 3, 1786; d Ghent, April 5, 1864).

Belgian architect. He was the son of a carpenter; from 1803 he trained at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent, where he was awarded a first prize in 1808. He went to Paris, where he worked in the important studio of Charles Percier(-Bassant) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine. Together with L. Renard, Tieleman-Frans Suys and others, he contributed to the Choix des plus célèbres maisons de plaisance de Rome et de ses environs (1809–12), with drawings by Fontaine and Percier. In 1811 he won the Prix de Rome but did not go to Italy for health reasons. The fall of the Empire brought him back to Belgium in 1815, and he was appointed City Architect and professor at the Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Antwerp. His entry for a competition in London to make a monument commemorating the Battle of Waterloo, and above all his design (1816) for the auditorium of Ghent University, instantly established his reputation. He returned to Ghent, where he held the post of City Architect from ...

(b Enguera, Valencia, 1757; d Mexico City, Dec 24, 1816).

Spanish architect, sculptor, and teacher, active in Mexico. He studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Carlos, Valencia, at a time when Baroque forms were being rejected in Spain and Neo-classicism was being promoted. He was apprenticed to the sculptor José Puchol Rubio (d 1797), who also taught him extensively about architecture. In 1780 Tolsá moved to Madrid, where he studied under Juan Pascual de Mena and at the Real Academia de Bellas-Artes de S Fernando, where his subjects included painting. There he also designed several reliefs, including the Entry of the Catholic Kings into Granada (1784; Madrid, Real Acad. S Fernando). He was selected as an academician in 1789.

Following the endorsement of Juan Adán and Manuel Francisco Alvarez de la Peña, in 1790 Tolsá succeeded José Arias (c. 1743–88) as director of sculpture at the Real Academia de S Carlos de la Nueva España in Mexico City. He took with him a collection of plaster casts for sculptures, many books, and 154 quintals (7 tonnes) of plaster for the Academia. He arrived in ...