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(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 ...

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 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 ...

(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 ...

(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 ...