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Spanish palace that stands beside the rivers Tagus and Jarama in the province of Madrid, 47 km south of the capital. It was intended as a spring and summer residence for the royal family and is renowned for its gardens and fountains. The summer residence built at Aranjuez in 1387 by Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa, Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, became royal property under Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile and León. In the reign of Charles V improvements were carried out by Luis de Vega (from c. 1537) and the palace was extensively enlarged by Philip II. The chapel was designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo and completed by Jerónimo Gili and Juan de Herrera. It was built in a combination of white stone from Colmenar de Oreja and brick, giving a two-toned effect that was adopted for the rest of the palace. In ...

(b Rome, March 4, 1750; d Rome, Dec 8, 1799).

Italian painter and draughtsman. He was an important history painter and decorator, whose paintings and drawings vary in manner from the Baroque to Neo-classical, and who anticipated Romantic historicism. His subjects are taken from Greek and Roman literature, 16th- and 17th-century religious history and Italian literature of the early and High Renaissance; his many drawings include preparatory studies, caricatures, genre scenes and portraits. He trained under Domenico Corvi at the Accademia di S Luca, where he won prizes with drawings such as the mannered and brilliant Tobias Healing his Blind Father (1766; Rome, Accad. N. S Luca). However, Cades had to leave Corvi’s studio c. 1766, as Corvi apparently resented his pupil’s excessive independence (Lanzi).

In the early 1770s Cades started to receive important commissions. His first large canvases were the Martyrdom of St Benignus (1774; San Benigno Canavese, Fruttuaria Abbey), which continues the classical tradition of late 17th-century Italian painting, and the ...

(b Mataró, April 12, 1771; d Barcelona, July 7, 1855).

Spanish sculptor and teacher. He began studying at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de la Lonja in Barcelona at the age of 14, and he worked in the studio of Salvador Gurri (fl 1756–1819), a late Baroque sculptor with Neo-classical tendencies. Campeny left the studio after he was attacked by Gurri, who, as a teacher at the Escuela (1785), continued to persecute him and threw him out. Campeny then worked in Lérida, Cervera and Montserrat. He produced his first major work, St Bruno (1795; destr. 1831), in carved polychromed wood. He also trained with Nicolás Traver and José Cabañeras, both late Baroque artists. Stylistically, Campeny began with a moderate and personal naturalism, later assimilating some of the Baroque influences from his Catalan teachers. Readmitted to the Escuela, in 1795 he won a scholarship to complete his studies in Rome, where he went in 1796...

(Paris)

(b Paris, March 19, 1716; d Paris, July 13, 1777).

French sculptor, son of Guillaume Coustou (Lyons). Having studied with his father, he won the Prix de Rome in 1735 and was at the Académie de France in Rome in 1736–40. In 1742 he was received (reçu) as a member of the Académie Royale, presenting a seated statue of Vulcan (marble; Paris, Louvre), and he went on to pursue a successful official career. His eclectic style mirrored the evolution of French sculpture in the mid-18th century, ranging from the Baroque of the Apotheosis of St Francis Xavier (marble, c.1743; Bordeaux, St Paul) to the cold classicism of his statue of Apollo commissioned by Mme de Pompadour for the park at the château of Bellevue, Hautes-de-Seine (marble, 1753; Versailles, Château). He worked fluently but without great originality in various sculptural forms, producing portrait busts and religious and mythological works. Among his most important sculptures are the statues of ...

[Daisenberger.]

German family of masons and architects. Thomas Daisenberger (1642–81), his son Matthias Daisenberger (d 1712) and his nephew Joseph Dossenberger (i) (b Wollishausen, nr Augsburg, 17 Feb 1694; d Wollishausen, 22 May 1754) were masons active in the region of Augsburg. In 1732 Joseph Dossenberger worked on the parish church in Agawang, near Augsburg, to the design of Joseph Meitinger, as well as the parish church at Reinhartshausen (begun 1739), a simple hall church with a chancel narrower than the nave. Joseph’s sons, Hans Adam Dossenberger (b Wollishausen, 25 Dec 1716; d Wollishausen, 5 April 1759) and Joseph Dossenberger (ii) (b Wollishausen, 9 March 1721; d Wettenhausen, nr Günzburg, 15 May 1785), also followed their father’s trade.

Hans Adam Dossenberger probably received his first training from his father and is thought to have served an apprenticeship with Dominikus Zimmermann. He is first mentioned in connection with the building of the church at Reinhartshausen, where his father was in charge. He and his ...

Italian family of artists. The work of the brothers Ubaldo Gandolfi and Gaetano Gandolfi and of the latter’s son, Mauro Gandolfi, reflects the transition from late Bolognese Baroque through Neo-classicism and into early Italian Romanticism. During their period of collective productivity, from c. 1760 to c. 1820, the Gandolfi produced paintings, frescoes, drawings, sculptures and prints. Their drawings (examples by all three artists, Venice, Fond. Cini) made an outstanding contribution to the great figurative tradition of Bolognese draughtsmanship that had begun with the Carracci. Their prolific output and their activity as teachers gave them considerable influence throughout northern Italy, except in Venice. One of Ubaldo’s five children, Giovanni Battista Gandolfi (b 1762), trained at the Accademia Clementina, Bologna, but apart from a vault fresco signed and dated 1798 in the church of S Francesco in Bagnacavallo nothing is known of his adult career. A drawing (Paris, Fond. Custodia, Inst. Néer.) is signed ...

(b Mechelen, Sept 18, 1756; d Antwerp, Jan 24, 1830).

Flemish sculptor. His work was essentially part of the late Flemish Baroque tradition; yet he was aware of the emerging Neo-classical movement, as is revealed by certain details in his religious works and, above all, by the spirit of his secular commissions. He was a pupil first of the painter Guillaume Herryns and then of the sculptor Pierre Valckx. In 1784 van Geel was appointed an assistant teacher at the academy of art in Mechelen and subsequently devoted himself consistently to teaching, first in Mechelen and then at the Académie in Antwerp. Among his pupils were Jean-Baptiste de Bay (1802–62), Guillaume Geefs, Lodewijk Royer, Joseph Tuerlinckx (1809–73) and his own son Jan Lodewijk van Geel (b Mechelen, 28 Sept 1787; d Brussels, 10 April 1852), also a sculptor. Jan Frans’s first important commission was for statues (1780–90) of St James, St Andrew...

(b Lucena, Córdoba, Feb 6, 1669; d Priego, Córdoba, June 30, 1725).

Spanish architect. He was one of the leading Baroque architects active in southern Spain in the early 18th century. His use of decoration earned him criticism as a ‘heretic’ by Neo-classical writers (e.g. Llanguno y Amirola). He started as an ensamblador, a carver of wooden retables, such as that of the high altar of S Lorenzo, Córdoba (1696). He was practising as an architect almost simultaneously, however: his first attributed work is the camarín—a small chapel behind the altar for the display of the sacrament—in the church of La Virgen de la Victoria, Málaga (begun 1693). The octagonal walls and vault are covered with foliated stucco decoration; in a crypt beneath is the rectangular burial chamber of the counts of Buenavista, with groin vaults supported by four central columns. The sacristy (1703) of Córdoba Cathedral, also octagonal but with a dome, has a more modest and architectonic version of the same decoration, which became influential in Andalusia....

(b Lacima [now Cima], Lake Lugano, Jan 22, 1669; d Vicenza, Feb 21, 1747).

Italian architect, architectural editor and expositor, landscape designer, draughtsman and cartographer. His work represents the transition from late Venetian Baroque to Neo-classicism, which his studies of Palladio did much to promote in its early stages. His style, however, was never entirely free of the Baroque elements acquired during his formative years.

Muttoni was the son of a builder, and in 1696 he went to work in Vicenza, as members of his family had done since the 16th century, enrolling that year in the stonemasons’ guild. From the beginning of the 18th century he was active as an expert consultant (‘perito’) and cartographer, as is exemplified by the plan of the fortifications of Vicenza that he drew in 1701 for the Venetian government (Vicenza, Archv Stor. Mun.). Throughout his life he continued to undertake various small professional commissions for surveys and on-site studies. His first major commission, however, was the majestic Palazzo Repeta (...

(b Rome, March 25, 1663; d Rome, June 6, 1731).

Italian painter. He was a prolific painter who created many altarpieces and frescoes and whose increasingly restrained art marks the transition from Late Baroque to Neo-classicism. After a brief and unimportant apprenticeship with the engraver Cornelius Bloemaert, he entered the workshop of Ciro Ferri, and after Ferri’s death (1689) became the pupil and assistant of Giovanni Battista Gaulli. He lived almost entirely in Rome and the Lazio. His art developed evenly, without abrupt changes of direction, continuing the traditions established by Ferri and Gaulli. Ferri encouraged the development of his natural facility in drawing, enabling him to create harmonious, although sometimes rather elementary, compositions for his many altarpieces.

His first independent works are three frescoes, showing King David, the Adoration of the Magi and the Flight into Egypt, above the nave arcade in S Maria d’Aracoeli in Rome. They are magniloquent Late Baroque works that, in their bold and energetic compositions and facial types, continue the traditions of Pietro da Cortona and Ferri. A little later the altarpiece with ...

[Pizzano; Pizzoni]

Swiss family of architects and artists. Paolo Antonio Pisoni (i) (b Ascona, 22 May 1658; d Ascona, 27 Feb 1711), son of Pier Paolo of Ascona, was a sculptor in wood; his surviving work includes several richly carved reliquaries, a bust associated with a relic in the parish church at Ascona and altars in the parish church at Quinto. Gaetano Matteo Pisoni (b Ascona, 13 July 1713; d Locarno, 4 March 1782) is presumed to be the nephew of Paolo Antonio Pisoni (i); he trained as a mason in Lechtal, Tirol (1729–32), and as an architect at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (1735–40). He lived principally in Milan until 1750, when he was invited to practise in the Austrian Netherlands. There he designed Namur Cathedral (begun 1751), an Italian Baroque church on a Latin cross plan with apsidal-ended transepts and tribune, a high dome over the crossing and a convex projection to the façade; the interior, however, already displays a transition to Neo-classicism. From ...

(b Venice, c. 1698; d Zagreb, Jan 24, 1757).

Italian sculptor, active in Slovenia. He trained from 1711 to 1716 with Pietro Baratta (b 1668 or 1659), an exponent of Tuscan Neo-classicism in Venice who was also familiar with Roman Baroque sculpture. Through him Robba came into contact with Giuseppe Pozzo (brother of Andrea Pozzo) and his designs for altars, which influenced Robba’s early work, especially in Ljubljana (white marble monument to the Trinity, 1723; Ljubljana, Mun. Mus.; copy in front of the Ursuline church) and in Klagenfurt (white marble sculptures, 1725–6, in the chapels of St Ignatius and the Virgin Mary, Klagenfurt Cathedral). He was active in and around Ljubljana between 1721 and 1751, working in the studio of Luka Mislej (d 1722), whose daughter he married. After Mislej’s death he took over the studio and in 1730 became a citizen of Ljubljana. He was the most important Baroque sculptor in Ljubljana in the first half of the 18th century, creating marble altars (e.g. the high altar of the Ursuline church, ...

(b Ciempozuelos, Madrid province, July 14, 1717; d Madrid, Aug 26, 1785).

Spanish architect and teacher. He is a particularly controversial figure in Spanish art. Some critics and contemporaries considered his work Baroque, while others eventually saw it as Neo-classical. He was, along with Francesco Sabatini and Juan de Villanueva, one of the most important Spanish architects of the second half of the 18th century. The newly proclaimed Bourbon dynasty wished to introduce new influences into architecture, and Rodríguez was the first to facilitate this, fusing current European trends with a traditional Spanish classicism.

Rodríguez worked from 1731/2 as a draughtsman under Esteban Marchand (d 1733), a French military engineer, and Giovanni Battista Galluzzi (d 1735), a master craftsman in interior decoration and scene painting, in the construction of the royal palaces of Aranjuez and La Granja de San Ildefonso. This early apprenticeship put him in contact with the new modes of architectural expression practised only at the court, as opposed to the autochthonous Spanish Baroque tradition in which most contemporary Spanish architects were trained. In ...

(b Turin, March 17, 1690; d Madrid, Dec 3, 1764).

Italian architect, active also in Spain. He came from a family of goldsmiths who served the Savoy court in Turin. He was a pupil and follower of the architect Filippo Juvarra, whose drawings he meticulously catalogued. Sacchetti became a member of the Accademia di S Luca, Rome, in 1745 and was appointed honorary director of architecture at the new Academia de S Fernando, Madrid, in 1752.

In Turin Sacchetti assisted Gian Giacomo Planteri (1680–1756) on the Palazzo Saluzzo di Paesana, designed catafalques for the court, supervised work (1734) on the church of S Filippo for Juvarra and probably assisted him with the renovations of the royal palace. In 1735 Juvarra was commissioned by Philip V, King of Spain, to design a royal palace in Madrid to replace one that had been destroyed by fire the previous year. Juvarra died in January 1736, having recommended Sacchetti as his successor. On his arrival in Spain in ...

(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 ...

(b Naples, May 12, 1700; d Caserta, March 1, 1773).

Italian architect, draughtsman and painter. His work represents the transition from Baroque to Neo-classicism, and his correspondence and the number of his extant drawings make him perhaps the best-documented Italian architect of the 18th century. Vanvitelli’s father was the Dutch vedute painter Gaspar van Wittel, and his mother was Roman. Luigi began his career as a history painter, and from 1724 he was employed as a copyist in the fabbrica of St Peter’s in Rome. The extent of his academic training is not clear, but under Antonio Valeri (1648–1736), who succeeded Carlo Fontana as architetto soprastante, Vanvitelli discovered his talent as an architect. Ultimately, however, Valeri was a less significant influence on his work than Fontana or Filippo Juvarra. His first patron was the prefect Cardinal Annibale Albani. As a member of the latter’s retinue, in the 1720s, Vanvitelli went to Urbino, where he participated in the decoration of the Albani Chapel (...

(b Madrid, 1763; d Madrid, Jan 31, 1834).

Spanish painter, son of Antonio González Velázquez. He studied in Mariano Salvador Maella’s studio and at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, of which his father was then director. He received several prizes there and was elected to membership of the Academia in 1790, later becoming court painter. In 1819 he became director of painting at the Academia and in 1828 its director-general.

Zacarías’s output was wide-ranging. He collaborated with the Real Fábrica de Tapices in Madrid, painting such cartoons for tapestries as Fisherman Drawing in his Net (1785; Madrid, Prado), and was the last artist to produce cartoons for the factory. He was a skilled fresco painter, trained in the Baroque style of the 18th century but combining this with Neo-classical traits. He executed several mural paintings for the Palacio de El Pardo, near Madrid, including Spain Triumphant, as well as murals on agricultural and mythological themes with allegorical figures for the ...

[Jacob]

(b Antwerp, Feb 24, 1704; d Paris, Dec 9, 1771).

Flemish sculptor and ornamentalist. He studied in Antwerp with his uncle, Michiel van der Voort I, but left for Paris c. 1716 and by 1727 was working for the Bâtiments du Roi as an ornamental sculptor and virtuoso carver of wooden panelling and picture frames. He gained favour with the Premier Architecte du Roi, Jacques Gabriel V, and his son Ange-Jacques Gabriel and worked on many of the royal châteaux. He was approved (agréé) by the Académie Royale in 1733. He collaborated with Jules Degoullons (c. 1671–1737) on decorations at Versailles (e.g. the Chambre de la Reine, 1730; in situ), and for the apartments of the Dauphin and for the Petite Galerie of the king’s apartments (both 1736; in situ). The style of this work, which accorded equal importance to the carving of the border mouldings and to the fields of the panels, later influenced the work of François de Cuvilliés I at the Munich Residenz and of Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff at Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. Between ...

(Jos)

(b Antwerp, March 17, 1706; d Antwerp, Nov 10, 1778).

Flemish silversmith, brother of Jacques Verberckt. He was apprenticed in 1726 to Jan Carel II van Beughen and became a master in 1734. In the same year he married a daughter of the silversmith Jan Baptist Buijssens I. He was dean of the goldsmiths’ guild (1740–42; 1758). Michiel Verberckt specialized in the production of silverwork for churches in Antwerp and the surrounding region but he also made some domestic silver, decorated with excellent chasing, first in the late Baroque style but later in a Neo-classical style....

(b Montpellier, June 18, 1716; d Paris, March 27, 1809).

French painter, draughtsman and engraver. He was one of the earliest French painters to work in the Neo-classical style, and although his own work veered uncertainly between that style and the Baroque, Vien was a decisive influence on some of the foremost artists of the heroic phase of Neo-classicism, notably Jacques-Louis David, Jean-François-Pierre Peyron, Joseph-Benoît Suvée and Jean-Baptiste Regnault, all of whom he taught. Both his wife, Marie-Thérèse Reboul (1738–1805), and Joseph-Marie Vien fils (1762–1848) were artists: Marie-Thérèse exhibited at the Salon in 1757–67; Joseph-Marie fils earned his living as a portrait painter and engraver.

After spending his youth in various forms of employment, including work as a painter of faience and as an assistant to the artist Jacques Giral, Vien travelled to Paris and entered the studio of Charles-Joseph Natoire in 1740. Three years later he won the Prix de Rome and in 1744 went to the Académie de France in Rome. His participation in the energetic reappraisal of form, technique and purpose taking place in French art from the mid-1740s onwards is well demonstrated by paintings executed before and during his time in Italy. These include the ...