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[Fernandez, Armand]

(b Nice, Nov 17, 1928; d New York, Oct 22, 2005).

American sculptor and collector of French birth. Arman lived in Nice until 1949, studying there at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs from 1946 and in 1947 striking up a friendship with the artist Yves Klein, with whom he was later closely associated in the Nouveau Réalisme movement. In 1949 he moved to Paris, where he studied at the Ecole du Louvre and where in an exhibition in 1954 he discovered the work of Kurt Schwitters, which led him to reject the lyrical abstraction of the period. In 1955 Arman began producing Stamps, using ink-pads in a determined critique of Art informel and Abstract Expressionism to suggest a depersonalized and mechanical version of all-over paintings. In his next series, the Gait of Objects, which he initiated in 1958, he took further his rejection of the subjectivity of the personal touch by throwing inked objects against the canvas.

Arman’s willingness to embrace chance was indicated by his decision in ...

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....

Italian, 19th century, male.

Active in Livorno (Tuscany).

Died after 1873.

Sculptor, art dealer.

Torello Bacci produced the monument to his father at the Santa Croce convent in Florence and the statue of Pier Capponi in a portico at the Uffizi Gallery.

(b Venice, Sept 22, 1518; d Venice, July 4, 1595).

Italian Statesman and amateur artist, brother of Daniele Barbaro. In a letter of 1546 Aretino remarked on Marc’Antonio’s skill in stuccowork, as well as in painting and engraving (see Aretino, ii, 1957, pp. 158–9). In c. 1554–6 Marc’Antonio and his brother Daniele commissioned Palladio to build their family villa at Maser. Marc’Antonio’s particular responsibility seems to have been the garden nymphaeum, where he is said by Ridolfi to have worked for recreation (per ricreazione) on the rich sculptural decoration. He may also have contributed to the stuccowork in the pediment of the façade. In 1558–9 Marc’Antonio and Daniele attempted to secure Palladio’s employment in Venice, supporting his design for a new façade for the cathedral of S Pietro di Castello. During the last two decades of his life Marc’Antonio used his political status and his position as a senator to influence public architecture in Venice, although with limited success. In ...

(b Bellefonte, PA, May 24, 1863; d New York, April 24, 1938).

American sculptor and collector. Son of a Presbyterian minister, Barnard grew up in the Midwest and began studying at the Chicago Academy of Design in 1880 under Douglas Volk (1856–1935) and David Richards (1829–97). Here he was first introduced to plaster casts of Michelangelo’s works and to the casts of Abraham Lincoln made by Leonard Volk (1828–95) in 1860, both clearly influential on his subsequent career. In 1883 he went to Paris, where he enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and worked with Pierre-Jules Cavelier. Barnard’s sculptures are noted for their spiritual, allegorical, and mystical themes and were done in the expressive modelling style of the period.

Alfred Clark, wealthy heir to the Singer fortune, became Barnard’s patron in 1886. Through Clark and his Norwegian companion Lorentz Severin Skougaard, Barnard was introduced to Nordic themes. Clark commissioned important marble pieces including Boy (1884...

(Stefano)

(b ?Venice, 1757; d Paris, Aug 25, 1821).

Italian engraver, draughtsman and print-seller, son of Francesco Bartolozzi. He was presumably taught by his father, whom he assisted in London. By 1785, when he published his father’s engraving of the portrait of Maria Cosway by her husband Richard Cosway, he was evidently attempting to become a print-seller. However, his dedication to the visual arts was limited. His main interest was music—he was a talented violinist—and in 1795 he married the pianist Therese Jansen. Later that year Gaetano issued his father’s print of Gainsborough’s Earl Camden and tried to set up seriously as an independent engraver and publisher. However, in 1797 he sold his stock of prints, drawings and plates, ostensibly to go and look after his mother’s property in the Veneto, threatened by the revolutionary war. This trip, which included visits to Paris and Vienna, took two years.

In 1800, back in London and virtually penniless, Gaetano advertised as a drawing-master. He resumed his activities as an engraver, producing a fine plate after ...

In the 20th century, discussion of the relationship between Byzantine art and the art of the Latin West evolved in tandem with scholarship on Byzantine art itself. Identified as the religious imagery and visual and material culture of the Greek Orthodox Empire based at Constantinople between ad 330 and 1453, studies of Byzantine art often encompassed Post-Byzantine art and that of culturally allied states such as Armenian Cilicia, Macedonia, and portions of Italy. As such fields as Palaiologan family manuscripts and wall paintings, Armenian manuscripts, and Crusader manuscripts and icons emerged, scholars identified new intersections between Western medieval and Byzantine art. Subtle comparisons emerged with the recognition that Byzantine art was not static but changed over time in style and meaning, although most analyses identified Byzantine art as an accessible reservoir of the naturalistic, classicizing styles of antiquity. Scholars considering the 7th-century frescoes at S Maria Antiqua and mosaics at S Maria in Cosmedin, both in Rome, and the 8th-century frescoes at Castelseprio and Carolingian manuscripts such as the Coronation Gospels of Charlemagne (Vienna, Schatzkam. SCHK XIII) used formal comparisons with works such as pre-iconoclastic icons at St Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai, along with the history of Byzantine iconoclasm, to argue for the presence of Greek painters in the West. Similarly, Ottonian and Romanesque painting and luxury arts, such as ivories, provided examples of the appropriation of Byzantine imperial imagery. Yet the study of works such as the great 12th-century ...

[Foppa, Cristoforo]

(b Mondonico, nr Pavia, c. 1452; d between Dec 6, 1526 and April 1, 1527).

Italian goldsmith, coin- and gem-engraver, jeweller, medallist and dealer. Son of the goldsmith Gian Maffeo Foppa, from 1480 he served at the Milanese court with his father, eventually becoming personal goldsmith and jeweller to Ludovico Sforza (il Moro), Duke of Milan. In 1487 Caradosso was in Florence, where his appraisal of an antique cornelian was highly esteemed. He worked in Hungary in the service of King Matthias Corvinus, probably in August 1489; a later visit to the court was cut short by the King’s death (1490). Between 1492 and 1497 Caradosso travelled to various Italian towns to buy jewels and other precious objects for Ludovico il Moro. He visited Rome, Viterbo and Florence early in 1496, when the Medici family’s possessions were sold off after the expulsion of Piero de’ Medici (1471–1503) from Florence.

After the fall of Ludovico il Moro in 1500, Caradosso remained for some years in Lombardy. In ...

(b Rome, ?1716; d Rome, Dec 9, 1799).

Italian sculptor, restorer, dealer, collector and antiquary. He lived and worked all his life in the artists’ quarter of Rome. He was apprenticed to the French sculptor Pierre-Etienne Monnot from c. 1729 to 1733, and by 1732 had become a prize-winning student at the Accademia di S Luca. From the early 1730s he appears to have worked for Cardinal Alessandro Albani on his collections of antiquities, renovating sculptures with Carlo Antonio Napolioni (1675–1742).

In 1733 Clement XII bought most of Albani’s earlier holdings of antique sculpture in order to prevent their sale and export to the court of Augustus the Strong in Dresden. He housed them in the Museo Capitolino, Rome, where Cavaceppi worked as a principal restorer, with Napolioni and his nephew Clemente Bianchi, under the direction of Marchese Gregorio Capponi and Cardinal Giovan Petro Lucatelli, until the end of the papacy (1740–58) of Benedict XIV. By mid-century, after renovating Early Christian antiquities in the Lateran, Cavaceppi’s reputation extended beyond Italy and with the aid of Albani he had become an independent dealer. He was in great demand among the major collectors and agents of central Europe and England—including ...

(fl c. 1513).

Netherlandish sculptor or dealer. His name appears in the records of the Abbey of Averbode in connection with the acquisition of three carved and polychromed wooden altarpieces for the abbey church in 1513 and 1514. He is not referred to specifically as a painter or carver in the Averbode accounts, and it is possible that he acted in the capacity of dealer in altarpieces to be sold on the open market.

The third altarpiece mentioned in the Averbode records has been tentatively identified with a small Lamentation altarpiece (1.61×1.70 m; Antwerp, Mus. Vleeshuis) that is stamped with the Antwerp carvers’ mark of quality and bears the arms and device of Gerard van der Scaeft, abbot of Averbode in the early 16th century; it also has a painted figure of a donor, identified in an inscription as Nicolaas Huybs, the porter of the abbey. The painted wings and the costumes of the carved figures show the impact of ...

(von)

(b Stuttgart, Oct 15, 1758; d Stuttgart, Dec 8, 1841).

German sculptor and collector. He received his initial artistic training (1771–80) at the Militärische Pflanzschule in Stuttgart, where he revealed a talent for drawing and sculpture. His most important tutors were the Belgian sculptor Pierre François Lejeune (1721–90) and the French painter Nicolas Guipal, an admirer of Mengs. Also of great importance to Dannecker were friendships with his fellow sculptor and rival Philipp Jakob Scheffauer (1756–1808), with the painter Philipp Friedrich Hetsch, and above all with the German writer Friedrich Schiller, who had a decisive influence on Dannecker’s intellectual development. In 1780 Dannecker was appointed court sculptor at Stuttgart and was thus obliged to decline later offers to work in Dresden, St Petersburg and Munich. His first undertaking was to complete sculptural sketches by others, for example Lejeune. From 1783 to 1785 Dannecker visited Paris to study with Augustin Pajou and there came to know the virtuoso portrait sculpture of artists working under Louis XVI. He then went on foot to Rome, where he remained for four years. Because of his enthusiasm for antique art, he was soon known as ‘il Greco’. He cultivated the acquaintance of the Swiss sculptor Alexander Trippel, the antiques restorer and dealer Capvaceppi, and, most important of all, the already well-established Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. The classical outlook favoured by Canova had a decisive effect on Dannecker’s subsequent work....

(b Somerset, c. 1753; d London, Jan 12, 1841).

English art dealer, painter and medallist. He spent much of his early life in Italy and in 1774 was in Rome, where he was detained by the French during their war with Naples. While in Italy he studied and made copies of paintings, and he also made portrait medallions showing only the head of the sitter. On his return to London in 1800 he worked as a picture dealer, achieving brief public prominence in 1816 when he was called to give evidence before the Parliamentary Committee set up to investigate the merits of the Elgin Marbles. Of the many paintings he bought from abroad several were for the National Gallery, London, including Gaspard Dughet’s Landscape with Abraham and Isaac Approaching the Place of Sacrifice, Raphael’s St Catherine of Alexandria (c. 1507), Correggio’s Ecce homo (late 1520s), Anthony van Dyck’s Emperor Theodosius Forbidden by St Ambrose to Enter Milan Cathedral...

(b Paris, July 19, 1834; d Paris, Sept 27, 1917).

French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, pastellist, photographer and collector. He was a founder-member of the Impressionist group and the leader within it of the Realist tendency. He organized several of the group’s exhibitions, but after 1886 he showed his works very rarely and largely withdrew from the Parisian art world. As he was sufficiently wealthy, he was not constricted by the need to sell his work, and even his late pieces retain a vigour and a power to shock that is lacking in the contemporary productions of his Impressionist colleagues.

The eldest son of a Parisian banking family, he originally intended to study law, registering briefly at the Sorbonne’s Faculté de Droit in 1853. He began copying the 15th- and 16th-century Italian works in the Musée du Louvre and in 1854 he entered the studio of Louis Lamothe (1822–69). The training that Lamothe, who had been a pupil of Ingres, transmitted to Degas was very much in the classical tradition; reinforced by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which he attended in ...

(b Chatou, nr Paris, June 17, 1880; d Garches, Sept 8, 1954).

French painter, sculptor, illustrator, stage designer and collector. He was a leading exponent of Fauvism. In early 1908 he destroyed most of his work to concentrate on tightly constructed landscape paintings, which were a subtle investigation of the work of Cézanne. After World War I his work became more classical, influenced by the work of such artists as Camille Corot. In his sculpture he drew upon his knowledge and collection of non-Western art.

Derain abandoned his engineering studies in 1898 to become a painter and attended the Académie Carrière. He also sketched in the Musée du Louvre and painted on the banks of the Seine. On a visit to the Louvre in 1899 he met the painter Georges Florentin Linaret (1878–1905), who had been his companion at school, and who was copying Uccello in an extraordinary manner; he was studying under Gustave Moreau and later introduced Derain to a fellow pupil, Henri Matisse. Derain’s painting was already influenced by the work of Cézanne, and in ...

American, 20th century, male.

Born 7 June 1931, in Eatonton (Georgia).

Painter, draughtsman (including ink), collage artist, print artist, sculptor, collector, art historian. Religious subjects, figures, portraits, figure compositions, scenes with figures, landscapes. Designs for stained glass.

David C. Driskell earned a BFA at Howard University in ...

(b Le Havre, July 31, 1901; d Paris, May 12, 1985).

French painter, sculptor, printmaker, collector and writer (see fig.). He was temperamentally opposed to authority and any suggestion of discipline and devised for himself a coherent, if rebellious, attitude towards the arts and culture. For all his maverick challenges to the values of the art world, Dubuffet’s career exemplified the way in which an avant-garde rebel could encounter notoriety, then fame and eventual reverence. His revolt against beauty and conformity has come to be seen as a symptomatic and appreciable influence in 20th-century culture.

The son of a prosperous and authoritarian wine-merchant in Le Havre, Dubuffet left home for Paris at 17 to pursue irregular studies in the arts. But, growing sceptical of the artist’s privileged status and savouring an affinity with ‘the common man’, he abandoned painting in ...

Flemish School, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 1763, in Tournai; died December 1838.

Sculptor, art dealer.

Paul Dumortier was a pupil of Moitte in Paris.

From the time John Cassian established the first female foundation in Marseille in ad 410, monastic women lived in varying states of enclosure and were surrounded by diverse images and objects that contributed to their devotion, education and livelihood. The first rule for women, written in 512 by St Caesarius of Arles, emphasized their strict separation from men and the world, as did the Periculoso, a directive issued by Pope Boniface VIII (reg 1294–1303) in 1298. Various architectural solutions developed throughout the Middle Ages to reconcile the necessities of enclosure with the access required by male clerics to celebrate Mass and provide pastoral care. Nuns’ choirs, where the women would gather for their daily prayers, were often constructed as discreet spaces in the church, which allowed women to hear or see the Mass without interacting with the cleric, as in the 10th-century choir in the eastern transept gallery at St Cyriakus in Gernrode, Germany. In some Cistercian examples, the nuns’ choir appeared at the west end of the nave. Dominican and Franciscan architecture was largely varied. Double monasteries, which housed men and women, also required careful construction. A 7th-century text describing the church of St Brigida in ...

[Kao Feng-han; hao Nanfu Shanren]

(b Jiaozhou (modern Jiao xian), Shandong Province, 1683; d ?Shandong Province, 1748–9).

Chinese painter, calligrapher, seal-carver, collector and poet. The son of a minor official in charge of local education, Gao developed an interest in poetry, painting and seal-carving in his early youth, when he also began to collect old seals and inkstones. The great poet Wang Shizhen took a liking to him and left instructions before his death that Gao be admitted into the ranks of his disciples. A relative of the poet, Wang Qilei, also provided Gao with some formal instruction in the art of painting, beyond what he could learn from his father, an amateur painter of orchids and bamboo. Gao’s official career did not begin until 1729, when he took up an appointment as assistant magistrate of She xian, Anhui Province. In 1734 a new assignment took him to Taizhou, east of Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. In 1736, having become entangled in a legal dispute involving a chief commissioner of the salt gabelle, he was briefly imprisoned; this and his deteriorating health, which resulted in the paralysis of his right hand, inevitably led to his resignation from officialdom....

(b Paris, Aug 26, 1807; d Paris, July 25, 1852).

French sculptor, painter, decorative artist and collector. Son of the chaser Jacques-François Feuchère (d 1828) and a pupil of Jean-Pierre Cortot and Claude Ramey, he first exhibited at the Salon of 1831. Over the ensuing decade he won the reputation, later shared with his pupil Jean-Baptiste Klagmann (1810–67), of leader in the small-scale, domestic sculpture industry. He modelled statuettes in a variety of historical styles, though he preferred a Renaissance idiom, working for bronze-casters such as M. Vittoz (fl c. 1840) and Victor Paillard (fl 1840–51), and producing models for the goldsmith François-Désiré Froment-Meurice. One of his early Romantic subjects, a seated figure of Satan brooding after his expulsion from paradise, went through numerous editions from c. 1833 (bronze cast, 1850; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.), its Michelangelo-inspired posture prefiguring Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Ugolino (bronze version; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay) and Auguste Rodin’s ...