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Article

Bakhuizen [Backhuysen; Bakhuisen; Bakhuyzen], Ludolf  

B. P. J. Broos

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Emden, East Frisia [now Germany], Dec 28, 1630; d Amsterdam, 6–7 Nov, bur Nov 12, 1708).

Dutch painter, draughtsman, calligrapher and printmaker of German origin. He was the son of Gerhard Backhusz. (Backhusen) of Emden, and he trained as a clerk in his native town. Shortly before 1650 he joined the Bartolotti trading house in Amsterdam, where his fine handwriting attracted attention. He practised calligraphy throughout his life (examples in Amsterdam, Rijksmus.; Dresden, Kupferstichkab.; London, BM). During his early years in Amsterdam he also displayed his skilled use of the pen in drawings, mainly marine scenes, done in black ink on prepared canvas, panel or parchment. He probably derived this technique and subject-matter from Willem van de Velde (ii) the elder’s pen drawings of the 1650s. Bakhuizen continued to produce pen drawings until the 1660s, some depicting recognizable ships and existing views, such as his Ships Leaving Amsterdam Harbour (Amsterdam, Kon. Coll. Zeemanschoop), others depicting unidentified locations, as in the View of a Dutch Waterway (Amsterdam, Ned. Hist. Scheepvaartsmus.)...

Article

Bălăcescu, Lucia Dem.  

Ioana Vlasiu

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Bucharest, Jan 22, 1895; d 1979).

Romanian painter, illustrator, watercolourist, draughtsman and pastellist . She studied at the School of Fine Arts in Bucharest (1913–16) and had private lessons with the painters Eustaţiu Stoenescu (b 1885) and Gheorghe Petraşcu. Between 1919 and 1922 she studied in Paris at the Académies Julian and Ranson, and the Academia Pedro Correja d’Aranjò with Paul-Albert Laurens (b 1870), Othon Friesz, Maurice Denis, Paul Sérusier and Edouard Vuillard. During this period she showed works at the Salon des Artistes Français and the Salon d’Automne. In Romania between the World Wars she exhibited at the official Salon and with the groups New Art (Arta Nouă) and the Association of Women Painters (Asociaţia Femeilor Pictore). She was awarded prizes in Romania and abroad, for example at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris, 1937. Her work included illustrations for books by Tudor Arghezi, ...

Article

Baldovinetti, Alesso  

Ailsa Turner

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[Alessio]

(b Florence, Oct ?14, 1425; d Florence, Aug 29, 1499).

Italian painter. Belonging to the generation of Florentine painters that followed Domenico Veneziano and Fra Filippo Lippi, he worked all his life in Florence and kept a notebook of commissions. He experimented with painting techniques, sometimes with unfortunate results. His sense of pattern and decoration was particularly suited to the design of mosaic, intarsia and stained glass.

Baldovinetti was the eldest son of a wealthy merchant and rejected the prospect of a career in commerce to become an artist. In 1448 he enrolled in the Compagnia di S Luca and the following year began to keep a notebook of commissions and transactions. His earliest attributable works, c. 1449, form part of the decoration of the doors of the silver cupboard (Florence, Mus. S Marco) formerly in the chapel of the Annunciation in SS Annunziata, Florence, for which Baldovinetti painted the Marriage at Cana, the Baptism and the Transfiguration; their traditional iconography was possibly determined by ...

Article

Ballester, Pedro Juan  

Lynette Bosch

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[Pere Joan]

(fl 1477–92).

Spanish illuminator . He is known chiefly for his miniatures of Christ in Majesty (fol. 143v) and the Crucifixion (fol. 144r) in a Missal of Valencian use (Valencia, Archv Catedral, Cod. 97). This has been identified with a document of 1479 in which ‘Pere Joan’ was paid for his work on ‘la sede majestatis en el nuevo misal bisbal’. In the miniatures executed by him in this manuscript the Gothic style practised in Spain into the late 15th century has been abandoned in favour of a more naturalistic representational manner that incorporates Netherlandish elements. This more modern style has also been identified in other manuscripts attributed to Ballester. Among these are a Valencian Missal dated 1477 (London, BL, Add. MS. 34663) and a Missal of the use of Toledo (Toledo, Archv & Bib. Capitulares, MS. Res. 1). The latter was commissioned for Archbishop Alfonso Carrillo who died in ...

Article

Balthus  

Jean Clair

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola]

(b Paris, Feb 29, 1908; d Rossimiere, Feb 18, 2001).

French painter, illustrator and stage designer. Appreciated for many years by only a handful of collectors, and ostensibly out of step with the modern movement, Balthus’s classically inspired work won the recognition and admiration of a wider public only late in his career. Although he received no formal training, he came from a highly artistic family background. His father, Erich Klossowski (1875–1949), was a painter and art historian, born to an aristocratic family in East Prussia and the author of a book on Daumier; his brother, Pierre Klossowski, was to become a painter and writer; and his mother, Elizabeth Spiro, was also a painter. Beginning in 1919, she engaged, under the name of Baladine, in a long-lasting relationship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, providing etchings to accompany many of his poems. In this environment Balthus met the writers André Gide and Pierre-Jean Jouve, as well as Pierre Bonnard, who gave him his earliest guidance. Rilke also acted as Balthus’s mentor, writing the preface for an album of drawings by the 13-year-old artist entitled ...

Article

Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, II  

Kirk Ambrose

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
16 September 2010

(b Moscow, May 7, 1903; d Paris, Jan 25, 1988).

Lithuanian art historian, scholar of folklore and Egyptology, and diplomat of Russian birth. Son of the celebrated Lithuanian Symbolist poet of the same name, Jurgis Baltrušaitis II studied under Henri(-Joseph) Focillon at the Sorbonne and earned the PhD in 1931. The concerns of his mentor are evident in La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane (1931), which reprises and extends arguments for the ‘law of the frame’ in Romanesque sculpture. Accordingly, the shapes of architectural members, such as capitals and tympana, determined the articulation of sculptural forms. This theory could account for the genesis of a wide array of monumental carvings, from foliate capitals to narrative reliefs, but ultimately it had a rather limited impact on the field of Romanesque sculptural studies. In a scathing critique, Schapiro argued that Baltrušaitis’s book—and by implication Focillon’s methods—robbed Romanesque sculptors of agency and neglected the religious and expressive meanings of this art form....

Article

Bamberg Apocalypse  

Richard K. Emmerson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
02 October 2012

Illuminated Ottonian manuscript (205×295 mm; Bamberg, Staatsbibl., MS. Bibl. 140) comprising 106 folios, divided into two halves, the first containing 50 miniatures illustrating the Book of Revelation, the second with 5 full-page miniatures illustrating Gospel readings from the Nativity to Pentecost. Separating the sections are two full-page images each with two registers. On the left St Peter and St Paul crown a young ruler, who is given obeisance by personifications of the four peoples of the empire, depicted below. They recall the personifications bringing gifts to the emperor in the Gospels of Otto III (Munich, Bayer. Staatsbib., Clm. 4453). Facing this imperial scene, on the right, Old Testament figures are paired with four personifications of the victorious virtues they model for the ruler: Abraham/Obedience, Moses/Purity, David/Repentance, and Job/Patience. The Apocalypse miniatures, of varying size and interspersed within the Latin text, are painted on gold grounds. Their iconography, descending from a Roman archetype, is related to the Carolingian Valenciennes Apocalypse (early 9th century; Valenciennes, Bib. Mun., MS. 99) and the contemporary Apocalypse fresco of Novara Baptistery. The vigorous colours and sumptuous execution of the miniatures, including an early detailed ...

Article

Bämler, Johannes  

Sheila Edmunds

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[Baemler, Johann; Bemler, Hans]

(fl 1453–1504).

German illuminator and printer . He is listed in the Augsburg tax rolls from 1453 as a scribe and from 1477 as a printer. Bämler belonged to the guild of painters, glassmakers, woodcut-makers and goldbeaters, eventually achieving the rank of Zwollfer (director). Examples of his youthful work are two signed miniatures dated 1457 (New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib., MS. M.45) and a signed historiated initial on a detached Antiphonal leaf (Philadelphia, PA, Free Lib., Lewis M 67:3). Between 1466 and 1468 he rubricated and decorated with calligraphic and painted ornament four books printed in Strasbourg: a Latin Bible (Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bib., Bibel-S.2°155), a copy of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologica (Munich, Bayer Staatsbib., 2° Inc. s.a.1146a) and two copies of St Augustine’s City of God (Chantilly, Mus. Condé, XXII.D.11, and Manchester, John Rylands U. Lib., no. 3218, Inc. 3A8).

Bämler’s knowledge of printing was probably acquired in Augsburg, in the shop of ...

Article

Muhammad Baqir (ii)  

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[Muḥammad Bāqir]

(fl 1750s–1760s).

Persian painter. He is known for decorations in the margins of manuscripts, copies of European prints and 17th-century paintings, and wash drawings. His subjects range from floral sprays to nudes, such as the watercolour of a sleeping nymph (1765; Dublin, Chester Beatty Lib., cat. no. 282.VI). He contributed paintings and marginal decorations to a sumptuous album (1758–9; St Petersburg, Hermitage), probably compiled for the Afsharid court historian Mirza Mahdi Khan Astarabadi. Muhammad Baqir’s punning signature there suggests that he was a pupil of ‛Ali Ashraf. Muhammad Baqir signed one of the finest marginal paintings in a smaller but similar album (1764; dispersed; sold Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 23 June 1982) and may have been responsible for all of them, which include rose sprays and copies of Susannah and the Elders. Muhammad Baqir is sometimes said to have continued to work under the Qajar ruler Fath ‛Ali Shah (...

Article

Baron, Henri  

Régis Marin

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(Charles Antoine)

(b Besançon, June 23, 1816; d nr Geneva, Sept 13, 1885).

French painter and illustrator . He was a pupil of Jean Gigoux in Paris c. 1835 and travelled through Italy with him and François-Louis Français. He made his début at the Salons of 1837 and 1838 with Under the Willows (1837; Tours, Mus. B.-A.) and Macbeth and the Witches in collaboration with Français and showing the paintings under Français’ name. Baron emerged as a reputable painter of genre and idyllic scenes, painting fanciful scenes, often set in Renaissance Venice. His rather precious style and romantic, dashing subject-matter won him lasting success with a clientele much enamoured of facile compositions. Such works included Sculpture Studio (1840), Fêtes galantes (1845) and the Mother of the Family (1847; Marseille, Mus. B.-A.). Baron paid homage to several famous painters in such anecdotal works as An Evening with Giorgione (1844) and Andrea del Sarto Painting (1847). Among other works were the spirited ...

Article

Bas-de-page  

Robert G. Calkins

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[Fr.: ‘bottom of the page’]

The area of an illuminated manuscript page beneath the block of text, containing figures or scenes, usually framed by border decoration but sometimes occupying the entire bottom margin of the page. The bas-de-page first appeared in Psalters, Books of Hours, and other manuscripts for personal devotion in the second half of the 13th century and became a frequently used field for the antics of lively creatures or fanciful hybrid animals in the 14th century. Sometimes the activities of these grotesques or drolleries refer to the subject-matter of a miniature or the content of the text on the same folio, but often they depict humorous or satirical secular themes. In the Belleville Breviary (1323–6; Paris, Bib. N., MSS lat. 10483–4), the bas-de-pages of the calendar are used to develop intricate iconographical themes of the triumph of the Church and the fall of the Synagogue over the 12-month sequence, while the ...

Article

Basaldúa, Héctor  

Nelly Perazzo

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Pergamino, Buenos Aires, Sept 22, 1894; d Buenos Aires, Feb 21, 1976).

Argentine painter, stage designer, and illustrator. He studied drawing in Buenos Aires under the Italian painter Augusto Bolognini (b 1870) and at the Academia Nacional before moving in 1923 to Paris, where he worked in Charles Guérin’s studio and at the Académie Colarossi. He also studied in the studios of André Lhote and Othon Friesz and became associated with other Argentine artists based in Paris. Like others of his generation and nationality, he sought in the 1920s to escape from pictorial provincialism by rejecting academic norms, as in Still Life (1926; Rosario, Mus. Mun. B.A.). He learned how to paint while living in France and developed a range of imagery typical of Argentine art without showing any great originality.

More than any other painter, Basaldúa depicted life in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, concentrating humorously and without sentimentality on the wide boys, dance-hall girls, loose women, and handsome, dangerous men of the tango in such pictures as the ...

Article

Basawan  

Milo Cleveland Beach

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[Basāwan; Basāvana]

(fl c. 1556–1600).

Indian miniature painter. One of the great talents to flourish under the emperor Akbar (reg 1556–1605), he was a prolific painter who contributed to virtually all the great illustrated manuscripts executed in the imperial workshops over a span of some 40 years. While most Mughal artists were concerned with the importance of line, colour and surface pattern, Basawan, with a greater understanding of the techniques of imported European works, developed a palette closer to that of European oil painting and dissolved outlines to create greater three-dimensionality. In his work, surface patterns are subservient to a dramatic spatial penetration of the picture plane. These traits were quite new within both Indian and Islamic traditions, and Basawan led the vanguard in adopting them. His work is remarkable also for the complexity of his compositions, his skill at giving roundness and density to his figures and his sensitive portrait-like faces. A contemporary assessment of Basawan is found in the ...

Article

Baskerville, John  

Laura Suffield

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Sion Hill, Worcs, Jan 28, 1706; d Birmingham, Jan 8, 1775).

English printer and publisher . He developed skills in calligraphy and monumental inscription–cutting apparently without an apprenticeship. Aged 19 he went to Birmingham to teach writing and bookkeeping and also to cut tombstones. Around 1740 he entered into business as a manufacturer of japanned goods, at which he proved highly successful. The proceeds enabled him to purchase a large house outside Birmingham and to start experimenting with type-founding c. 1750. Baskerville entered into partnership with the London bookseller Robert Dodsley (1733–64), and he published an edition of the works of Virgil as his first book in 1757; it met with praise but also with the criticism that was to follow him throughout much of his career: the print was too dazzling, the strokes too narrow and the paper too glossy. Baskerville’s types achieved their effect by his modification of the stress nearer the vertical; the transition between thick and thin strokes was more pronounced than in previous types, and the general effect was of greater precision. He may not have set up his own paper mill, as has been suggested, but he certainly exploited the properties of the newly developed wove paper and pressed it to achieve a crisp finish (...

Article

Baskin, Leonard  

Irma B. Jaffe

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b New Brunswick, NJ, Aug 15, 1922; d Northampton, MA, June 3, 2000).

American sculptor, illustrator and printmaker. Baskin studied at the New York University School of Architecture and Allied Arts (1939–41), the School of Fine Art (1941–3) and New School for Social Research (1949). He also studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris (1950) and the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence (1951). Inspired by the iconic, monolithic imagery of Ancient Egyptian and Sumerian art, and the similar stylistic qualities of Romanesque and Italian Gothic, he consistently and inventively made use of the archaic mode in such prints as the powerful woodcut Man of Peace (1952; see Fern and O’Sullivan, p. 61) as well as in his sculpture. A traditionalist, he carved in wood and stone, and modelled in clay, taking the human figure as his subject. He firmly believed that painting and sculpture should mediate between artist and viewer some moral insight about human experience, and he was convinced that abstract art could not do this. Throughout his career he rejected spatial penetration of form, preferring the holistic look of such works as the ...

Article

Bassa family  

Tanya Szrajber

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

Spanish family of painters and illuminators.

(fl 1324–48).

His workshop was in Calle Cucurulla, Barcelona, and commissions from a variety of patrons, mostly royal, are documented. In 1324 he was paid for painting two chapels and two crosses for the church at Sitges. Between c. 1333 and c. 1335 he illuminated a book on the Usages of Barcelona and Customs of Catalonia for Alfonso IV of Aragon, and in 1335 he was paid for an altarpiece. Further payments, in 1339 and 1340, were for two altarpieces for the chapel of the Aljafería Palace (a Moorish palace) in Saragossa. About 1340 he received a commission for an altarpiece of St Hilary for the diocese of Lleida (Sp. Lérida). In 1341 Bassa had begun work on three altarpieces for the Episcopal See at Lleida, commissioned by Ot de Montacada (c. 1290–1341). In 1342 Peter IV (the Ceremonious) of Aragon asked his wife, ...

Article

Battaggio [Battagio; da Lodi], Giovanni di Domenico  

Luisa Giordano

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(fl second half of the 15th century).

Italian master builder and architect. During 1465 and 1466 his name appears in the wages book of the Ospedale Maggiore of Lodi, for which he produced doors, oculi and windows in terracotta. In 1479 he was appointed engineer of the city of Milan, and in 1489 he is mentioned as ducal engineer. He worked on the fortifications at Biasca in 1481, and in the same year Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan (reg 1476–94), recommended Battaggio and Giovanni Antonio Amadeo to succeed Guinoforte Solari as architect to the Fabbrica del Duomo. Amadeo was appointed, but Battaggio did not manage to enter the conservative Milanese workshop either then or two years later, when Ludovico Sforza proposed him in preference to Hans Niesenberger. In 1484 Conte Manfredo Landi III (d 1491) commissioned Battaggio and Agostino Fonduli to finish and decorate the façade of his palazzo in Piacenza (now the Palazzo dei Tribunali). This work included the window-frames, the string course bearing heads of Roman emperors and scenes of the marine thiasos and the ...

Article

Bawden, Edward  

Stephen Stuart-Smith

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Braintree, Essex, March 10, 1903; d Saffron Walden, Essex, Nov 21, 1989).

English printmaker, graphic designer, illustrator and painter. He studied at the School of Art in Cambridge (1918–22) and at the Design School of the Royal College of Art (1922–6), where he was a contemporary of Eric Ravilious and was taught by Paul Nash. While still a student he and Ravilious were commissioned by Sir Joseph Duveen to paint a mural at Morley College (destr. 1940; repainted as the Canterbury Tales in 1958), London. After graduating he worked on a large variety of projects for the Curwen Press at Plaistow, London, and subsequently for many other publishers, producing book illustrations and cover designs, posters and advertisements, leaflets and calendars, including commissions for Shell-Mex, Westminster Bank and the London Transport Board. He held his first one-man show, mainly of landscapes showing the influence of Nash, at the Zwemmer Gallery in London in 1933. During World War II he served as an Official War Artist in the British Army, travelling to Belgium, France and the Middle East and portraying such places as ...

Article

Bayani, Mehdi  

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
02 July 2009

(b. Hamadan, 1906; d. Tehran, 1968).

Iranian librarian and scholar of Persian manuscripts. Bayani spent his early career as a teacher of Persian language and literature and as head of the public library of the Ministry of Education. He then directed the transferral of this library to the new National Library, which he founded and directed. He received his doctorate from Tehran University in 1945 and became head of the Royal Library in 1956, a post he held until his death. He also taught courses on the evolution of Persian scripts and codicology and founded a society for the support of calligraphers and the calligraphic arts. His biographical dictionary of Iranian calligraphers, Aḥwāl u āthār-i khushnivisān [Accounts and works of calligraphers] remains an invaluable research tool.

M. Bayani: Fihrist-i khaṭūṭ-i khwaṣ-i Kitābkhāna-yi Millī [Catalog of the special manuscripts in the National Library] (Tehran, 1949)M. Bayani with M. Bahrami: Rāhnamā-yi ganjīna-yi Qur‛ān [Guide to the Collection of Koran manuscripts...

Article

Beardsley, Aubrey  

Simon Wilson and Lin Barton

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(Vincent )

(b Brighton, Aug 21, 1872; d Menton, March 16, 1898).

English draughtsman and writer. He was brought up in Brighton, in genteel poverty, by his mother. She gave her children an intensive education in music and books, and by the time he was sent to boarding-school at the age of seven Beardsley was exceptionally literate and something of a musical prodigy. He was also already infected with the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. There is evidence that his talent for drawing was highly developed by the age of ten, and he was subsequently encouraged by his housemaster at Brighton Grammar School, Arthur William King. Beardsley left school at the end of 1888, and in January 1889 became a clerk at the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company in the City of London. Attacks of haemorrhaging of the lungs forced him to abandon his job at the end of 1889. On the strength of a short story sold to Tit Bits...