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(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 ...

(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...

(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 (...

(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 ...

(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 ...

[Baynbrigg]

(b Northall, Herts, 1668; d Hackney, Middx, Jan 1, 1733).

English writer and painter. The son of an East India Company merchant, he graduated from St John’s College, Oxford, in 1695, intending to be a physician. Instead he took up drawing and painting and travelled to the Netherlands to pursue his interest in art. He was later employed by John Sheffield, 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1648–1721), but the nature of his work is unknown. In 1704 he wrote a poem praising the Duke’s pictures at his newly built Buckingham House, London; he addressed another to Antonio Verrio, suggesting a decorative programme for Blenheim Palace, Oxon, to be built for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, and begun by John Vanbrugh the following year (see Poems, v, pp. 158–76). Buckridge’s most important contribution to art is his collection of lives of painters, published in 1706 as part of the first English translation of Roger de Piles’s Abrégé de la vie des peintres...

(b Milan, 1791; d Milan, March 28, 1872).

Italian painter and art historian. He was trained as a painter in the Neo-classical school of Giuseppe Bossi, and by Vincenzo Camuccini and Pietro Benvenuti. He was the author of Notizie sulla vita…e degli Sforza, the first great history of Milanese art of the 14th to the 16th century, which largely established the canon of early Milanese artists. Calvi’s book was founded on his perceptive connoisseurship of painting and sculpture, and a good understanding of secondary literature. He made a thorough, intelligent use of primary sources including lapidary inscriptions, documents from the archives of Milan and Pavia, and also the then unpublished manuscript (compiled c. 1775) of Antonio Francesco Albuzzi. This work consisted of a collection of notes on the lives of Milanese artists, its author being the first secretary of the Accademia Braidense, where Giuseppe Bossi taught. Both Bossi and Calvi possessed copies of Albuzzi’s manuscript.

[il Sordino]

(b Bologna, Feb 23, 1740; d Bologna, May 5, 1815).

Italian painter, biographer, draughtsman and engraver. He was a pupil of Giuseppe Varotti (1715–80). While a student at the Accademia Clementina, Bologna, he received two awards, including the Premio Marsili for the Sacrifice of Noah (1758; Bologna, Accad. B.A. & Liceo A.). He pursued literary interests throughout his life and became a member of the avant-garde Accademia Letteraria degli ‘Ingomiti’ in Bologna in 1763. His early paintings, notably the St Francis de Sales (1764; Bologna, Ospizio dei Preti), continue the strict classical strain within the Bolognese figurative tradition; they show the influences of Ercole Graziani, Marc Antonio Franceschini and Donato Creti. Calvi primarily painted sacred subjects, receiving numerous, mainly local, commissions. From about 1770 onwards many pictures, including his superb Self-portrait (1770; Bologna, Pin. N.), became increasingly austere and Raphaelesque in both style and design, anticipating 19th-century Bolognese Neo-classicism. In 1766 he frescoed an Assumption of the Virgin...

(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 ...

[Tanomura Kōzō; Chikuden; Chikuden Rōho; Chikuden Sonmin; Kujō Senshi]

(b Takeda, Bungo Prov. [now Ōita Prefect.], Kyushu, 1777; d Osaka, 1835).

Japanese poet, painter and theorist. He was born into a family of physicians in service to the Oka clan of Bungo Province. He first studied medicine, but later became an instructor in Confucian studies at the clan school, the Yūgakukan. In 1801–2 Chikuden studied the verse of China’s Song period (960–1279) in Edo (now Tokyo). During this time he was also painting landscapes in the style of Dong Qichang, a painter of the Ming period (1368–1644). From 1805 to 1807 he continued his literary training in Kyoto, where he befriended Uragami Gyokudō and Okada Beisanjin, who were exponents of literati painting (Bunjinga or Nanga; see Japan §VI 4., (vi), (d)), and from this time he was determined to establish himself as a literati poet and painter.

Chikuden continued painting after his arrival in Kyoto, and his style became more experimental as a result of his contact both with Japanese painters who copied Chinese painting and woodblock-printed books and with original works by Chinese artists. He executed portraits of beautiful women (...

(b Dijon, March 2, 1733; d Paris, March 2, 1803).

French painter, architect and writer. He was apprenticed to his father, Jean-Baptiste Gilles, called Colson (1686–1762), who copied the work of the portrait painters Charles Parrocel and Jean-Baptiste van Loo and also painted miniatures, mainly for a provincial clientele. Jean-François got to know many studios, and worked for the portrait painters Daniel Sarrabat and Donat Nonnotte, among others. One of his liveliest early works is the informal, intimate and meditative portrait of The Artist’s Father in his Studio (Dijon, Mus. B.-A.). Through the acting career of his brother Jean-Claude, Jean-François also came into contact with the theatrical world, as in his portrait of the actress Mme Véron de Forbonnais (1760; Dijon, Mus. B.-A.). The manner of this painting—with its subject looking up as if disturbed from reading a letter—is attuned to contemporary developments in portraiture. Later theatrical work includes Mlle Lange in the Role of Silvie (...

(b Lisbon, July 19, 1639; d Lisbon, 1712).

Portuguese painter and theorist. He belonged to a family concerned with theoretical ideas at a time when there was little interest in artistic theory in Portugal, and he described himself as ‘pintor teorico e practico’ (A antiguidade da arte da pintura). His father, the painter Luis da Costa, translated the work of Albrecht Dürer and Paulus Galarius Saludianus, and his brother, Brás de Almeida, was the author of two treatises on geometry. Félix da Costa wrote the most important theoretical work on painting in Portuguese of the second half of the 17th century, A antiguidade da arte da pintura (1696; MS., New Haven, CT, Yale U. Lib.), which is a valuable source for the study of Portuguese painting of the late 16th and the 17th centuries.

Da Costa also wrote O Profeta Esidras e o Império Otomano, que há-de destruir o Rei Encoberto no seu regresso de Africa...

[Nino]

(b Rome, Oct 15, 1826; d Pisa, Jan 31, 1903).

Italian painter and critic. He was taught by one of the leading Neo-classical painters in Rome, Vincenzo Camuccini, from 1843 to 1847. He also studied under Francesco Podesti and Francesco Coghetti at the Accademia di S Luca, Rome. These painters instilled in Costa the basic academic techniques, in particular that of painting a scene or figure in mezza macchia, or half-tones, which he was to apply to great effect in his landscape paintings. In 1848 Costa joined Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Legione Romane; after the fall of the Roman Republic in 1849 he took refuge from the papal police in the Campagna, outside Rome. Between 1849 and 1859 Costa lived and worked in this region and met several foreign artists, including the Swiss painter Emile François David (1824–91) and the English painter Charles Coleman (1807–74), who encouraged his interest in landscape painting; the latter introduced him to Frederic Leighton and George Heming Mason, and they became lifelong friends. Costa recalled these years and described his working practices in his memoirs, ...

Portuguese, 17th – 18th century, male.

Born 19 July 1639, in Lisbon; died 1712, in Lisbon.

Painter, theorist.

Felix da Costa wrote the most important theoretical work on painting in Portuguese of the second half of the 17th century - A antiguidade da arte da pintura...

Italian, 18th century, male.

Born c. 1710, in Bologna; died 1779, in Bologna.

Painter, writer on art.

A pupil of his father Giuseppe Crespi, Dom Luigi is nonetheless best known as an art historian. He published a volume on the History of Bolognese Painters in ...

(b Aix-en-Provence, May 22, 1700; d Paris, April 13, 1783).

French painter, draughtsman and writer. Michel-François Dandré (he later added Bardon, the name of his maternal uncle and testator) left Aix-en-Provence in 1720 for Paris, where he intended to study law. He came from an eminent Aixois legal and consular family but turned to painting, entering the studios of Jean-Baptiste van Loo and Jean-François de Troy and enrolling at the Académie Royale. In 1725 he took second place in the Prix de Rome competition and journeyed to Rome at his own expense. On the way there he stopped in Aix-en-Provence, where he decorated the audience room of the Chambre des Comptes de Provence: he completed the vast Augustus Punishing the Extortioners (2.40×6.28 m; Aix-en-Provence, Mus. Granet) in Rome, according to his first biographer, D’Ageville; a Christ on the Cross (Aix-en-Provence, St Esprit) and allegorical figures (destr. after 1791) also decorated the room.

Although Dandré-Bardon was not an official student at the Académie de France in Rome, in ...

(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 ...

(b Reims, Oct 25, 1761; d Paris, Oct 25, 1833).

French writer and painter. He trained with the landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes and between 1793 and 1800 exhibited at the Salon such works as Moonlight on the Seashore (1793) and Landscape with Houses (1795). Personal circumstances forced him to abandon painting for government service, but he retained a wide range of cultural interests. His Théorie du paysage and Histoire de l’art du paysage are among a number of early 19th-century treatises that reflected and influenced a change towards a more naturalistic depiction of landscape. The Théorie follows Valenciennes’s seminal Eléments de perspective pratique (Paris, 1799–1800) in insisting on the necessity of studying from nature, although it pays lip-service to the traditional academic hierarchy of genres by preserving the primacy of historical landscape, where the figures, often heroes of Classical antiquity, are more important than the landscape background. Boime suggests that knowledge of a manuscript of Deperthes’s work influenced the Académie des Beaux-Arts towards instituting a Prix de Rome for historical landscape in ...

(b Dunkirk, June 14, 1715; d Rouen, July 14, 1791).

French painter, writer and dealer. He began his artistic training in Dunkirk, continuing it in Antwerp. In Paris, Descamps frequented the studios of Nicolas Lancret and Nicolas de Largillierre and drew at the Académie Royale. He later settled in Rouen and gathered around him a circle of pupils to whom he taught drawing. By 1749 teaching had become formalized on the model of the Académie Royale in Paris and Descamps’s institution was granted the title of Ecole Royale, Gratuite et Académique de Dessin, de Peinture, de Sculpture et d’Architecture. It became the model for other provincial academies.

In April 1764 Descamps was made a member of the Académie Royale in Paris on submission of the painting Peasant Girl in her Kitchen (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). He was admitted to the Académie as a ‘peintre dans le genre des sujets populaires’. His paintings, which typically depict scenes of daily life, were influenced by the work of Chardin and Greuze. He exhibited several genre paintings at the Salon of ...

(b Furna, c. 1670; d after 1744). Greek painter, writer and monk. Son of the village priest at Furna in the district of Agrafa, central Greece, Dionysios went to Constantinople at the age of 12, probably for further education; four years later he moved to Mt Athos. Wall paintings and icons (1701 or 1711; rest. 1731) by Dionysios are known at Karyes, in the kellion (cell) and parekklesion dedicated to St John the Baptist. In 1721 he painted the chapel of St Demetrios at Vatopedi and the west wall of the katholikon at Docheiariou on Mt Athos. There are six icons (1724–8) by him in the church of the Transfiguration at Furna; the wall paintings, which may have been his, were destroyed in 1821. He returned to Furna in 1734 and in 1740/41 obtained the patronage of the patriarch of Constantinople for the construction of a school in Agrafa; his letter to the patriarch Neophytos in ...