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[Edwardian Baroque; English Renaissance; Imperial Baroque]

Architectural style adopted widely in Great Britain and the British Empire from about 1885 until World War I, particularly for government, municipal and commercial buildings. Great Britain, with its nationalism, prosperity and extensive empire, was at this time boldly confident of its place in the world as a major power and adopted a style that reflected that confidence. Baroque Revival architecture is characterized by imposing classical façades, with much associated decorative sculpture, and it makes emphatic use of domes and towers, turrets and cupolas. Interiors are spacious and dignified and are also often decorated with sculpture and painting.

Known at the time as English Renaissance, Baroque Revival was a freely adapted version of the English Baroque architecture of the period 1700–20 by such architects as Christopher Wren, John Vanbrugh, Nicholas Hawksmoor and Thomas Archer. Its immediate source was perhaps Kinmel Park, Denbs, a country house designed by W. E. Nesfield (R. Norman Shaw’s partner) in ...

(b Milan, 1847; d Magreglio, 1927).

Italian silversmith. He was known for his complex designs of flatware, chalices and inkwells. His flatware designed c. 1885 was Renaissance Revival in style, while that designed c. 1887 (Milan, Castello Sforzesco) is more reminiscent of the Mannerist style of Benvenuto Cellini and Antonio Gentile, the handles being adorned with the forms of nymphs and satyrs. Bellosio is also well known for his work exhibited at the Turin Exhibition of ...

(Aleksandrovich)

(b St Petersburg, Nov 28, 1880; d Petrograd [now St Petersburg], Aug 7, 1921).

Russian poet and critic. Italian Renaissance painting and the work of contemporary Russian and foreign artists of the modern school greatly influenced Blok’s poetry, which in turn was exceptionally suggestive for masters of the fine arts as well as for many Symbolist poets. Blok belonged to the second generation of Russian Symbolist poets, who saw literature as a powerful theurgic force, capable of revealing the true, ideal world through temporal symbols. Symbolism in Russia was strongly influenced by the mystical philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), who initiated the cult of the divine Sophia—the image of Eternal Woman as the soul of the universe and the link between the human and the divine. Blok reflected this cult in his Stikhi o prekrasnoy dame (‘Verses about the beautiful lady’). The beautiful lady whom Blok described is both a real woman and a transcendental figure, unattainable Beauty, the Ideal. She assumes an unearthly aspect, revealing herself to the poet in an atmosphere of dreams that are like fairy tales or medieval visions....

(b Edgcote, Northants, Nov 7, 1851; d Oxford, April 24, 1924).

English critic and historian. In her writing she combined the results of methodical scholarship with a passionate enthusiasm to give a vivid picture of her subjects. She respected the new ‘scientific’ approach to art led by Giovanni Morelli, and her favourable reviews of Bernard Berenson’s early publications were partly responsible for the warm reception some of the new ideas received in England. Among 19th-century artists, she wrote a monograph on Jules Bastien-Lepage (1894), a biography of Jean-François Millet (1896)—possibly under the influence of her one-time editor and friend W. E. Henley—and articles on other French painters. She was a fervent admirer of the Arts and Crafts Movement and her monographs on Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1894), G. F. Watts (1896) and Lawrence Alma-Tadema were greatly admired, not least by the artists themselves, who became her firm friends. She also championed the Italian landscape artist Giovanni Costa....

(b 1819; d 1903).

Italian metalworker, active in Vicenza. Some of his early work imitated Renaissance metalwork so adeptly that it was sold by dealers as Renaissance metalwork. His virtuoso display pieces in gold, silver, enamel and steel attracted wealthy buyers in Europe and America. He designed for Lady Layard an elaborate metal belt, decorated with onyx cameos and miniature glass mosaics (...

(b Karlsruhe, Feb 14, 1837; d Karlsruhe, April 3, 1919).

German architect and teacher. His preference for the Renaissance Revival style was apparent from his student days at the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule and was influenced by the writings of Jacob Burckhardt and Gottfried Semper. Graduating in 1860, he was immediately given a post working for the Grand Duchy of Baden. In 1867 he argued in print in favour of a study of the Italian Renaissance as the basis for a proper architectural training, and the following year he was appointed professor at the Technische Hochschule. At about this time he designed the Vierordtbad (opened 1873) in the Italian Renaissance style in Karlsruhe. As a large, secular, public building, it typified Durm’s later commissions, which included about 30 buildings for the Grand Duchy. As the most senior officer in the building administration of Baden (1887–1902), architect of its most important buildings and a university professor (1868–1919), he was a dominant influence on the architecture of Baden. The style of monumental historicism that he originated, drawing on the idioms of the Italian, German, French and Netherlandish Renaissance, typifies late 19th-century German taste for display. His work includes the Städtische Festhalle (...

(b Löcse, Hungary [now Levoča, Slovakia], Sept 3, 1839; d Oct 5, 1910).

Hungarian engineer and art historian. He trained as an engineer and became a senior manager in the Hungarian railways. Following a two-year study trip to Italy (1876–8), he resigned his post and embarked upon a new career as an art historian. He visited Paris and London and in 1880 settled in Stuttgart.

Fabriczy devoted the greater part of his life to the study of Italian, and in particular Florentine, Renaissance art. In 1892 he published a major study of the life and work of the Florentine architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi. At the same time, after research in the Biblioteca Nazionale of Florence, most notably on 16th-century documents (the Codice Strozziano and Codice Petrei) containing notes on Florentine artists of considerable art historical value, he published the so-called Libro di Antonio Billi (1891; see Billi, Antonio) and the Codice dell’Anonimo Magliabechiano (1893). Fabriczy’s research had been undertaken in consultation with the Florentine art historian ...

(b Baden, nr Vienna, May 16, 1843; d Vienna, Feb 22, 1927).

Austrian collector. During the late 19th century he assembled an extensive collection of approximately 6000 works of art, primarily from the medieval and Renaissance periods, most of which were in an excellent state of preservation. His collection was considered to be one of the most comprehensive in Austria before World War II. As well as simple but skilfully crafted objects for domestic and ecclesiastical use, there were pieces of higher quality, including metalwork, ivories, tapestries and ecclesiastical objects. The collection was particularly noted for its fine chairs. The paintings represented the major European schools, with the greatest concentration on the period from the 15th century to the early 16th. The most significant painting was Hieronymus Bosch’s Vagabond (c. 1510; Rotterdam, Mus. Boymans–van Beuningen;. After Figdor’s death in 1927, his niece and heiress Margarete Becker-Walz was forbidden by a newly enacted Austrian law to export and sell the collection, except in its entirety. She eventually sold its entire contents to the art dealer ...

(b Philadelphia, PA, Jan 9, 1877; d Framingham, MA, 1968).

African American sculptor. Fuller combined her interest in the modernism of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin with a consideration of the personal and emotional expressivity of the Symbolist movement and the naturalistic handling of the human form of the Beaux-Arts tradition. Born Meta Vaux Warrick in Philadelphia, she studied at the Pennsylvania Museum and School for Industrial Art from 1893 to 1899. In September 1899 she traveled to Paris and for three years she pursued her studies at the Académie Colarossi. In the spring of 1902 she visited Rodin at his studio in Meudon and received praise from him for Silent Sorrow (c. 1900; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA). While in Paris she exhibited a group of her sculptures at Siegfried Bing’s La Maison de l’Art Nouveau, and she showed The Impenitent Thief (c. 1900; lost) and The Wretched (c. 1902; Goldendale, WA, Maryhill Mus. A.) at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She returned to Philadelphia in October 1902 and continued to model clay, plaster, and wax. At the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition she was awarded a gold medal for the Warwick Tableaux (1907; lost), twelve dioramas with plaster figurines that traced black history from slavery to the modern period. In 1909 she married Solomon Carter Fuller and settled in Framingham, MA. A year after her marriage, a devastating warehouse fire destroyed nearly all of her sculpture. Heartbroken, she began the process of creating new work, much of it focused on Black, political, and religious subject matter. At the request of W. E. B. Du Bois, she created ...

(b Gräfentonna, Thuringia, July 13, 1841; d Tegernsee, Bavaria, March 28, 1916).

German writer, publisher and editor. In 1875 he co-founded the publishing company Knorr & Hirth based in Munich. Werke unserer Väter, an exhibition of German Renaissance arts and crafts held in Munich in 1876, stimulated his interest in art, and in that year he began to edit and publish a series of handsomely produced art books and prints in affordable editions. In 1881 he took over the printing of the Münchner neuesten Nachrichten, developing it into one of Germany’s leading daily newspapers. He himself wrote on a wide range of issues. In Ideen über Zeichenunterricht und künstlerische Berufsbildung (1887), for example, he advocated a democratizing reform of the teaching of art; in Das plastische Sehen als Rindenzwang (1892) he took issue with the optical theories of Hermann von Helmholtz by propagating the idea that the optical function was physiologically inborn. Although he initially favoured German Gothic and early Renaissance art, by the 1890s he had become interested in contemporary art. In ...

(b Dublin, 1865; d Nice, France, 1941).

Irish sculptor. He entered the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1878, attending as a part-time student for ten years. His influences were mainly from the Italian Renaissance, and he retained his love for the work of Jacopo della Quercia throughout his life. In 1890 he won a scholarship to the South Kensington School of Art, London, where he studied under Edouard Lanteri. A period of study followed in Paris and Italy, and after a year teaching at Plymouth Technical School he was appointed to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1894 and became Professor of Sculpture in the Royal Hibernian Academy Schools. Napoli (1900; Dublin, N. Mus.), a small bronze also known as the Mandolin Player, shows his continual preoccupation with Italian models and makes particular reference to Donatello’s David.

In 1901 Hughes resigned his teaching post to start work on two of his most successful commissions, the ...

(b Eemnes, June 11, 1859; d Zeist, Oct 28, 1922).

Dutch architect. He was the son of a Dutch Reformed Minister and studied at Delft Polytechnic, where he was influenced by the Renaissance Revival doctrines of Eugen Gugel. For a long time Posthumus Meyjes himself worked in this style, most notably in his design for the administrative office (1882–4) of the Dutch Iron Railway Company at Droogbak 1A, Amsterdam. In 1882 he became architect to the railway company, in which position he designed the station in Delft, and in 1888 he established himself as an independent architect in Amsterdam, where he was appointed architect of the church buildings of the Dutch Reformed community. In this capacity he built several churches and supervised the restoration over several years of the medieval Nieuwe Kerk on the Dam in Amsterdam. Around 1900 Posthumus Meyjes’s style changed and began to show similarities to the work of H. P. Berlage, for example in the office building (...

Term in use from the mid-19th century to describe a style of architecture and the decorative arts that flourished in the West from the early 19th century to early 20th. It was based on the arts of the Renaissance, initially of Italy (15th–16th centuries), and later on its regional manifestations (16th–17th centuries), principally of France and Germany.

Julius Fekete

The first impetus for the revival came from France, with the publication of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s Précis de leçons d’architecture (1802–5) and Auguste-Henri Grandjean de Montigny’s L’Architecture de la Toscane (Paris, 1806–19), both of which cited examples from the Italian Renaissance. Early French buildings in a Roman Renaissance palazzo style include those in the Rue de Rivoli (begun 1802) by Charles Percier and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, and the Ministère des Relations Extérieures (begun 1810; destr. 1871) in Paris by Jacques-Charles Bonnard (1765–1818). In Germany, where the Renaissance Revival was exclusively taken from Italian models until the mid-19th century, ...

(b Dresden, Jan 7, 1847; d Lugano, Aug 25, 1937).

German art historian, collector and dealer. The son of a Lutheran clergyman, he first studied theology at Leipzig but while travelling in Italy in 1869 became interested in early Christian archaeology, in which field he determined to continue. His first publications were on the sources of Byzantine art history and the mosaics of Ravenna. In 1876 he met Giovanni Morelli, whose disciple he became. Their lengthy correspondence constitutes an important source for the early history of connoisseurship. Richter published a short biography of Leonardo in 1880, then a series of articles in the Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst and finally his edition of the Literary Works of Leonardo (1883), the work that established his reputation as a scholar. This was the first scholarly edition of Leonardo’s writings, illustrated, moreover, with a selection of mostly authentic drawings at a time when books on Leonardo were normally illustrated by his pupils’ works....

(b Montalto delle Marche, July 5, 1854; d Collegigliato, Pistoia, Sept 24, 1905).

Italian architect. He began his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome in 1874. After completing them he drew up plans for the Renaissance-style reconstruction of the church of S Francesco at Force, near Ascoli Piceno, executed between 1882 and 1903. He then submitted a design for the second competition (1882) for the monument in Rome to Victor-Emanuel II, King of Italy. This immense architectural commission by the Italian government had begun with a competition announced in 1880, but the winning entry by Henri-Paul Nénot was set aside and a second competition announced. In June 1884 the adjudicating committee selected Sacconi’s scheme, although it subsequently had to be modified as work progressed because of the instability of the site and the discovery of the ruins of the ancient Capitoline fortress, which prevented the building being set back against the Capitoline hill. The monument was Sacconi’s major work and occupied him for the rest of his life: the first stone was laid on ...

(b Berlin, Aug 21, 1872; d Berlin, June 12, 1936).

German art historian and curator. She studied at the universities of Berlin (1899–1903) and Zurich (1903), where she wrote her thesis, Die Gestalt des Menschen in Donatellos Werk, under Heinrich Wölfflin. She then joined the staff of the Kaiser-Friedrich Wilhelm Museum (now the Bodemuseum), Berlin, where she spent the rest of her career apart from a short period (1917–18) in the Institute of Art History, Florence. The department of Italian Renaissance art at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum achieved world renown under Wilhelm Bode. One of Schottmüller’s first tasks was to compile an index for Bode’s Denkmäler der Renaissance-Sculptur Toscanas. She herself wrote on the art of the Italian Renaissance, mainly on sculpture but also on painting. Her wide-ranging scholarship exactly reflected the approach taken by the museum, which aimed to present art within a cultural context, bringing together paintings, sculptures and other artefacts of a period in what were known as ‘period rooms’. Schottmüller’s writings on the domestic culture of the Italian Renaissance remain exemplary. Her ...

(b Terre Haute, IN, Oct 27, 1873; d Rockport, MA, June 9, 1940).

American sculptor, active also in France. Scudder developed a lively style influenced by antique and Renaissance statuary as well as by the animated figurative work of Frederick William MacMonnies . The carefree spirit of her sculpture suited the tastes of wealthy Americans who ordered her bronzes for the grounds of their country estates, and her fountains helped garden sculpture achieve a new level of prestige. She had one of the most successful careers of any woman artist of the early 20th century.

A student of modest means, Scudder learned the practical trade of wood carving at the Cincinnati Academy of Art and briefly carved decorations for a Chicago furniture factory. Her first breakthrough came when Lorado Taft hired her as an assistant at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. Her experience as one of Taft’s “White Rabbits” (as Taft’s female sculpture assistants at the fair were known), gave her the training and financial means to travel to Paris where she secured a coveted position in MacMonnies’s studio. She bought a house at Ville d’Avrya outside of Paris in ...

(b Hamburg, June 13, 1866; d Hamburg, Oct 26, 1929).

German art historian. His research interests ranged widely, including the art of the Renaissance, costume, festivals, medicine, astrology and magic, but his primary contribution to cultural history is the Warburg Institute.

Warburg was born into a wealthy Jewish banking family and was never obliged to seek academic employment. He trained at the University of Bonn with scholars such as Hermann Usener (1834–1905) and Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), becoming interested in psychology, in a broad evolutionary perspective and in historical periods of transition. He continued his studies in Munich, Florence and Strasbourg, finally completing a dissertation in 1891 on how Botticelli’s Primavera and the Birth of Venus demonstrate the ‘afterlife of the Antique’. At this time Jacob Burckhardt’s interpretation of the Renaissance as a period of emancipation from medieval values and the rise of the modern individual was being challenged by scholars such as Henry Thode, who argued for an important role for Christian influences. Warburg can be seen as siding with Burckhardt in this disagreement; but whereas Burckhardt conceived of history as progress and the Renaissance as a cultural unity within that progressive movement, Warburg interpreted the Renaissance as a period of transition and uncertainty, viewing it as if abstracted from the course of time. For Warburg history was a vital and energetic tradition, communicated through images as well as words, but these documents could best be understood by looking for their non-temporal unity. Such themes were particularly evident in his dissertation and his writings of ...

(b Winterthur, June 24, 1864; d Zurich, July 19, 1945).

Swiss art historian . Starting as a student of philosophy he turned to art history under the influence of Jakob Burckhardt’s teaching at Basle. However, unlike Burckhardt, he was concerned not with detailed historical inquiry but with discovering general principles for interpreting the visual character of works. What he saw as requiring interpretation was, first, how the subject-matter of painting and sculpture took its particular forms in works of art and how building materials and structures took on meaningful forms in architecture, and, second, the way such modes or formulation changed through history. He wrote almost exclusively on Renaissance and Baroque art.

Wölfflin’s doctoral dissertation (1886) was on the psychological basis of our response to architectural forms. It sets out to account for the way in which what he conceives as literally present, the material of the building, can take on human significance or expressive force, employing a theory of empathy. He expanded on this approach in ...