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Illuminated manuscript of the first five books of the Old Testament (now incomplete), dating from the late 6th or early 7th century (Paris, Bib.N., MS. nouv. acq. lat. 2334) and named after the English collector Bertram Ashburnham. Also known as the Pentateuch of Tours, the Ashburnham Pentateuch is one of the oldest surviving pre-Carolingian Vulgate manuscripts of the Old Testament. In its present condition, it lacks the last verses of Numbers and all of Deuteronomy; while 18 pages of illustration and 1 frontispiece survive from the original 65 pages with illustrations. The illustrated pages comprise several scenes generally arranged in two or three bands, although some pages have one or two large scenes, others combine illustration and text. Painted tituli that follow the Vulgate accompany the miniatures; however, beneath the painted titutli are preliminary inscriptions penned in ink that follow the Vetus latina text.

Based upon stylistic, iconographical and codicological evidence, the Pentateuch appears to have been made in a late 6th- to early 7th-century Italian scriptorium. Twelve pages were added in the 8th century by scribes from Fleury; an additional restored page (fol. 33) was added in the 7th century by a Touronian scribe. The illustrations often deviate from the exact retelling of the biblical text. The column of smoke and fire, for example, in the story of the Crossing of the Red Sea is depicted as a large candle held in two hands, a reference to Easter Vigil liturgical ceremonies (fol. 68...

French, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 16 January 1834, in Mirabeau, Provence; died 28 December 1912, in Brignoles, Provence.

Painter, writer. Religious subjects.

Jules Marie Béguin was ordained in 1857, and became a canon in 1902. That same year, he published a book on St Mary Magdalene. He left a corpus of over 400 paintings in a number of churches in Provence including Cuers, Camps-la-Source, Puget-sur-Argens....

British, 18th – 19th century, male.

Born 28 November 1757, in London, United Kingdom; died 12 August 1827, in London.

Painter, draughtsman, engraver, illustrator, poet. Religious subjects, figure compositions.

William Blake was the son of a draper. He showed a strong artistic tendency from an early age and, at the age of 10, started to study drawing at Henry Par’s Academy in the Strand. He learnt engraving under Ryland and was then apprenticed to James Basire. During his seven years with Basire (1772–1779), Blake was made to copy the sculptures of Westminster Abbey and of London’s old churches, thus stimulating his fascination with Gothic art. He studied briefly at the Royal Academy in 1779, where he made friends with Barry, Fuseli, Mortimer, Flaxman, and Stodhart. While there, his studies concentrated on Michelangelo....

Belgian, 19th century, male.

Born 1816, in Courtrai; died 1878, in Antwerp.

Painter, writer. Religious subjects, genre scenes.

This Flemish artist was a pupil of Gustave Wappers and Nicaise de Keyser in Antwerp.

Courtrai: Praying Monk (1841)

Italian, 19th century, male.

Born 1814, in Sondrio; died 1878, in Milan.

Painter, art writer. Religious subjects, historical subjects, portraits.

Caimi was a pupil of Giuseppe Diotti in Bergamo and of Luigi Sabatelli at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, where he later (between ...

[CESCM]

French organization founded in Poitiers in 1953. The Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale (CECSM) is affiliated with the Université de Poitiers, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. The founders, among them historian Edmond-René Labande and art historian René Crozet, began CESCM as a month-long interdisciplinary study of medieval civilization, inviting foreign students to participate. CESCM has since developed into a permanent organization but maintains the international and interdisciplinary focus of its founders.

CESCM continues to hold its formative summer session, known as ‘Les Semaines d’études médiévales’, and invites advanced graduate students of all nationalities. The summer session spans two weeks and includes sessions on a variety of topics, each conducted by a member or affiliate of CESCM. CESCM supports collaborative research groups and regularly holds colloquia attended by the international scholarly community.

Since 1958 CECSM has published ...

French, 19th century, male.

Born 1808 ou 1813, in Paris; died 1881, in Paris.

Painter, sculptor, poet. Religious subjects, portraits, genre scenes.

A pupil of Guillon-Lethère at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1827, Chatillon exhibited at the Salon from 1831. He published collections of poems illustrated by his collaborator and friend André Gil, with prefaces by Théophile Gautier, ...

[ho Ch’usa, among others]

(b Yesan, Ch’ungch’ŏng Province, 1786; d Kwach’on, Kyŏnggi Province, 1856).

Korean calligrapher, painter, scholar and poet. He was also a lay Buddhist. Born into a family related by marriage to the imperial household, from an early age he showed his talent for calligraphy, studying with Pak Che-ga. Kim had an extremely successful civil service career before being exiled in 1840 and again in 1848.

In 1809 he accompanied his father on a mission to China and went to Beijing, where he met such eminent scholars as Wen Fanggang (1733–1818) and Ruan Yuan. The scholarship of the Qing period (1644–1911), in particular the northern stele school of calligraphy (see China: Calligraphy), which chose as its calligraphic models the stelae of the Han (206 bc–ad 220) and Northern Wei (ad 386–534) dynasties, made a deep impression on Kim. His own style of calligraphy was characterized by vigorous strokes with a strong contrast between thick and thin lines. This style, known as the Ch’usa (i.e. Kim Chŏng-hŭi) style, was highly influential in Korea and well respected in China (...

French, 19th century, male.

Born 1787, in Toulon; died 1880, in Paris.

Painter, writer.

He studied under Lebarbier the Elder and Girodet, and exhibited Christ on the Cross at the Paris Salon of 1841. Among his other works are Healing of the Paralysed Man, Sons of Zebedee...

(b Marseille, Nov 26, 1787; d Marseille, Feb 8, 1879).

French architect and writer. The designer of many of the principal public buildings of Marseille, he also published the first accurate records of the Islamic monuments of Cairo, North Africa and the Middle East—a central interest of mid-19th-century architectural theorists and ornamentalists.

After studying both engineering and drawing in Marseille, Coste began his career in 1804 as site inspector and draughtsman for the Neo-classicist Michel-Robert Penchaud, a municipal and departmental architect, for whom he worked for a decade. In 1814, on the recommendation of the architects Percier & Fontaine, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the ateliers of Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer and Jean-Baptiste Labadye (1777–1850). An encounter in Paris with the geographer Jombert, who had been a member of the scientific mission that accompanied Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, was to influence his subsequent career. In 1817 Jombert recommended Coste to Muhammad ‛Ali, Khedive of Egypt (...

(b Vienna, Oct 22, 1878; d Hamburg, July 30, 1960).

Austrian printmaker, painter, decorative artist and writer. He studied painting with Christian Griepenkerl (1839–1916) at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna (1894–9). From 1899 to 1900 he renovated the Patronatskirche of Emperor Francis Joseph in Radmer an dem Hasel, decorating it with frescoes. At the same time he received his first illustration commissions from the publishers Gerlach & Wiedling in Vienna. From 1900 he was a member of the Vienna Secession (see Secession, §3). In 1902 he became an assistant tutor in draughtsmanship at the Kunstgewerbeschule (now Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst) in Vienna, and in 1905 he took over a class in painting and draughtsmanship, being one of Oskar Kokoschka’s first teachers.

In Autumn 1905 Czeschka joined the Wiener Werkstätte. Under their auspices he produced jewellery, fabrics, wallpaper, enamelled pictures and furniture, and repoussé work and glass windows for the Palais Stoclet, Brussels (...

(b Birkenfeld, Rheinland-Pfalz, April 29, 1789; d Ispringen, nr Pforzheim, Feb 6, 1863).

German painter and printmaker. From 1805 to 1809 he studied under Jakob Becker and the engraver Christian Haldenwang (1770–1831) at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe. In 1809 he went on a study trip to Paris, where Empress Josephine commissioned him to paint a series of 12 landscapes in watercolour. In 1813 he went to Rome on a scholarship, remaining there until 1817 and becoming, with Friedrich Gmelin (1760–1820), part of the Nazarene circle. He also visited Sicily with the architects Friedrich Gärtner and Daniel Ohlmüller. After his return to Karlsruhe he became Professor of Painting and Engraving at the Akademie in 1817. He executed numerous etchings (e.g. Ponto Lupo in Tivoli, 1815), engravings and paintings from his drawings and watercolours of the Italian landscape, and many of these were published in such folios as Arriccia (1820), Tivoli (1822), Ätna...

French, 19th century, male.

Born 25 March 1813, in Paris; died 16 January 1880, in Montigny-lès-Cormeilles (Val d'Oise).

Painter, pastellist, draughtsman, lithographer, art critic. Religious subjects, allegorical subjects, still-lifes. Designs for stained glass.

He studied initially under his uncle Auguste Hesse before going on to complete his artistic education in the studios of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Denis Foyatier. He exhibited at the Paris Salon ...

Richly illuminated manuscript of the Passover liturgy together with a series of liturgical poems to be read during the Passover week (London, BL, Add. MS. 27210), possibly made in Barcelona, c. 1320. This text was to be recited during the seder ceremony at the eve of the Passover holiday. Like most medieval Haggadot (see Haggadah), the Golden Haggadah has no colophon, and its scribe and patrons are unknown. It contains both marginal decorations and a series of full-page miniatures preceding the text and displaying a fully fledged cycle of biblical illustrations following the books of Genesis and Exodus from the Creation of Man to the Crossing of the Red Sea. Stylistically both types of decoration are indebted to early 14th-century Catalan Gothic art.

Similarly, the imagery of the biblical picture cycle also draws on Christian Old Testament iconography and reflects a familiarity with Christian art. The artists and patrons of the Golden Haggadah adopted Christian pictorial sources in a complex process of adaptation and modification, translating the Christian models into a Jewish visual language meaningful in its messages to the Jewish readership. Avoiding themes and iconographic features of a particular Christological concern, the imagery also reflects a close affinity with the traditions of late antique Bible interpretation (Midrash). This points to a specific circle of scholars active in Iberia during the 13th and early 14th centuries as being responsible for the imagery of the cycle. The use of traditional midrashic Bible exegesis is typical for Sephardic Rabbis of anti-rationalist standing, who opposed earlier philosophical trends and followed, rather, scholarly trends common among the Tosafists of northern France. It has also been observed that some images adopt a more specific anti-Christian stance and address polemical issues....

(b Christiania [now Oslo], March 13, 1825; d Berlin, Aug 17, 1903).

Norwegian painter. He was the most renowned Norwegian landscape painter of his time. At the age of 12 he was enrolled as a pupil of Johannes Flintoe (1787–1880). After attending evening classes at the Kongelige Tegneskole in Christiania, he went to Düsseldorf in 1841 to study privately with the landscape painter Andreas Achenbach (1815–1910). In 1842 Gude was admitted to the landscape class at the Akademie under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. He was later appointed an assistant teacher at Schirmer’s private studio, and he succeeded his master as Professor of landscape painting both at the Düsseldorf Akademie (1854–62) and at the Karlsruhe Akademie (1864–80). In the 1840s Gude established his reputation in Norway and on the Continent with powerful images of the Norwegian mountains. These were shown in the Kunstforening galleries in Düsseldorf and Christiania and at the Berliner Akademische Kunstausstellung, where Gude exhibited throughout his life. ...

[Edhem, Osman HamdiHamdi Bey]

(b Istanbul, Dec 30, 1842; d Eskihisar, Gebze, nr Istanbul, Feb 24, 1910).

Turkish painter, museum director and archaeologist. In 1857 he was sent to Paris, where he stayed for 11 years, training as a painter under Gustave Boulanger and Jean-Léon Gérôme. On returning to Turkey he served in various official positions, including two years in Baghdad as chargé d’affaires, while at the same time continuing to paint. In 1873 he worked on a catalogue of costumes of the Ottoman empire, with photographic illustrations, for the Weltausstellung in Vienna. In 1881 he was appointed director of the Archaeological Museum at the Çinili Köşk, Topkapı Palace, in Istanbul. He persuaded Sultan Abdülhamid II (reg 1876–1909) to issue an order against the traffic in antiquities, which was put into effect in 1883, and he began to direct excavations within the Ottoman empire. As a result he brought together Classical and Islamic objects for the museum in Istanbul, including the Sarcophagus of Alexander, unearthed in Sidon in ...

Belgian, 19th century, male.

Born 8 March 1821, in Liège; died 15 February 1906, in Liège.

Painter, engraver, art restorer, art critic. Religious subjects, historical subjects. Church decoration.

He was a pupil at the academies in Liège and in Düsseldorf. He worked on the decoration and restoration of numerous paintings in churches in Liège and along the Meuse. He was the director of ...

(b Belgern, nr Leipzig, 1741; d c. 1806).

German cabinetmaker. By 1770 he was established as a master cabinetmaker in Leipzig. An important early patron was the art dealer Karl Christian Heinrich Rost (1742–98), who commissioned furniture closely based on French and English models. In 1788 Hoffman obtained a loan to extend his business in Leipzig and a subsidiary workshop at Eilenburg; his total workforce was 16 tradesmen. In 1789, after a dispute with the local guild of cabinetmakers, he published his first pattern book, Abbildungen der vornehmsten Tischlerarbeiten, welche verfertiget und zu haben sind bey Friedrich Gottlob Hoffmann, wohnhaft auf dem alten Neumarkt in Leipzig, an anthology of designs for household furniture, mostly inspired by the Louis XVI Neo-classical style. In 1795 he produced a second catalogue, Neues Verzeichnis und Muster-Charte des Meubles-Magazin, in which English design types are dominant. A number of pieces corresponding to plates in these two pattern books have been identified (e.g. sofa, ...

(b Lyon, May 21, 1814; d Lyon, June 1, 1892).

French painter and poet. He belonged to the Lyon school of painting, characterized by idealistic and mystical tendencies similar to those of the Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites. His Christian beliefs, which are very apparent in his art, were strongly influenced by neo-Catholic apologists. From 1831 Janmot studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. In 1833 he went to Paris, where he became a student of Victor Orsel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He also attended Ingres’s studios in Paris and Rome. His technique was deeply indebted to Ingres, but emotionally and intellectually he was more closely allied with Delacroix, whose enthusiasm for the literature of Dante and Shakespeare he shared. Janmot’s style combined the precision of Ingres with the meditative devotion of Orsel. His predilection for heraldic compositions, based on symmetry and repetition, his use of profile and flattened form and his luminous colour were all influenced by a love of such early Italian painters as Giotto and Fra Angelico. Janmot’s style has much in common with that of fellow Lyonnais and pupil of Ingres, Hippolyte Flandrin....

German, 18th – 19th century, male.

Active in Aachen.

Born 1758; died 1834.

Painter, poet.

Ferdinand Jansen painted views of Aachen and the surrounding area in oils and watercolours. He also painted portraits, including a self-portrait, and religious works. In 1825, he restored paintings in the vault of the cathedral and furnished the west vault with a painting....