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(b Jan 25, 1930; d Lomé, Jan 4, 2010).

Togolese painter, sculptor, engraver, stained glass designer, potter and textile designer. Beginning in 1946, he received his secondary education in Dakar, where he also worked in an architecture firm. He travelled to France and received his diplôme supérieur from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A versatile artist, Ahyi is best known for his murals and for monumental stone, marble and cement public sculptures. His work reflects the fusion of his Togolese roots, European training and an international outlook, and he counts among his influences Moore, Braque, Modigliani, Tamayo, Siqueiros and Tall. His work combines ancient and modern themes and materials, maternity being a prominent topic. The messages of his larger, public pieces operate on a broad level to appeal to the general populace, while smaller works often reflect his private engagement with challenges confronting the human condition. His compositions are both abstract and figurative and evoke the heroism and hope of the two world wars, Togo's colonial period and the struggle for independence from France, as well as the political efforts of the peoples of Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Ahyi has won numerous international prizes, including the prize of the city of Lyon (...

(b ?Milan, 1527; d Milan, July 11, 1593).

Italian painter, draughtsman and tapestry designer, active also in Austria and Bohemia. He came from a distinguished Milanese family that included a number of archbishops of the city; his father was the painter Biagio Arcimboldo. Giuseppe is first documented in 1549, working with his father for Milan Cathedral; he received payments until 1558 for supplying paintings, designs for an altar baldacchino and stained-glass windows for the cathedral: the Story of Lot and the Life of St Catherine in the south transept windows are usually attributed to him. He collaborated with Giuseppe Meda in designing the gonfalone of St Ambrose in Milan, probably sometime soon after 1558. In 1556 he received a commission to paint the south wall and vault of the south transept of Monza Cathedral, also in Lombardy, a work that must have been completed by 1562. Portions of a fresco of the Tree of Jesse on the south wall there can be attributed to him. In ...

(b Brussels, Aug 20, 1848; d Ixelles, Brussels, Dec 13, 1914).

Belgian architect, designer, painter and writer . He came from a family of artists: one brother, Charles Baes, was a glass painter and two others, Henri Baes and Pierre Baes, were decorative painters. Jean Baes studied decorative design at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and, from 1867 to 1871, in the firm of Charle-Albert. He subsequently trained in architecture in the studios of Emile Janlet, Wynand Janssens and Alphonse Balat. Baes devoted most of his professional career—which was cut short in 1895 by a debilitating illness—to architecture but he also worked as an interior designer, a graphic designer, an architectural draughtsman and, especially, as a watercolourist of architectural subjects. In 1872 he was a founder-member of Belgium’s Société Centrale d’Architecture and after 1874 he collaborated on its journal, L’Emulation. In 1886 he became Assistant Director of the newly established Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, Brussels, where his pupils included Paul Hankar and ...

Italian family of artists, architects and collectors . Pietro Bagatti Valsecchi (b Milan, 15 April 1802; d Milan, 27 Nov 1864) was adopted by Baron Lattanzio Valsecchi and assumed the latter’s surname and inherited his estate. He gained a degree in mathematics and physics but later devoted himself to painting miniatures on ivory, enamel, glass, metal and porcelain, specializing in these techniques in Paris and Geneva. Returning to Milan, he soon gained considerable recognition for such work and took part in major exhibitions. In 1837 he presented a group of works at the Salon in Paris, including a miniature copy on ivory of Francesco Hayez’s Mary Queen of Scots Mounting the Scaffold (1827; Milan, Bagatti Valsecchi Col.) and a copy on porcelain of Francesco Podesti’s Raphael’s Studio (Milan, Bib. Ambrosiana). In 1842 he was made a noble of the Austrian Empire for his artistic achievements, and the Emperor Ferdinand acquired one of his paintings on porcelain, ...

(b ?Schwäbisch Gmünd, 1484 or 1485; d Strassburg [now Strasbourg, France], 1545).

German painter, printmaker, draughtsman and stained-glass designer. Such contemporaries as Jean Pélerin (De artificiali perspectiva, 1521) and the Alsatian humanist Beatus Rhenanus in 1526 counted him among the greatest artists of his time. In the opinion of specialists today, Baldung’s work places him only half a step behind Grünewald, Dürer and Hans Holbein the younger. A prodigious and imaginative artist of great originality, versatility and passion, Baldung was fascinated with witchcraft and superstition and possessed a desire for novelty of subjects and interpretation that sometimes borders on the eccentric. The new themes he introduced include the supernatural and the erotic. He was the first to show the erotic nature of the Fall in his chiaroscuro woodcut of Adam and Eve (1511; Hollstein, no. 3) and illustrated the successive stages of mating behaviour of horses in his woodcut series of Wild Horses in the forest (1534; Hollstein, nos 238–40); and he is remembered especially for his images of witches. Dürer influenced him only in an early stage but not lastingly. Baldung had a very different sensibility and lacked Dürer’s sense of decorum. Grünewald, whose monumental ...

(b in or near Kufstein, Tyrol, ?June 16, 1712; d Augsburg, before Sept 7, 1761).

German draughtsman and painter. Kilian, his earliest biographer, stated that after training as a blacksmith with his father, he learnt the art of glass painting in Salzburg. Following travels through Austria, Hungary and Italy, Baumgartner was authorized in late 1733 to live in Augsburg, on condition that he only worked as a glass painter.

Only a few examples of Baumgartner’s own glass paintings have survived; however, he must have meanwhile worked intensively on drawings for copperplate engraving. There are hundreds of these drawings; they were made with extreme care, often on tinted paper and often on a very large scale, for publishers in Augsburg such as Klauber, Engelbrecht and Kilian. Designs in oil on canvas for engravings, such as Moses Ordering the Killing of the Midianite Women (1760; Augsburg, Schaezlerpal.), were a particular speciality of Baumgartner. By far the largest series numerically is for a calendar of saints, the ...

(b Aelst [now Aalst], Aug 14, 1502; d Brussels, Dec 6, 1550).

South Netherlandish painter, sculptor, architect and designer of woodcuts, stained glass and tapestries. Son of the Deputy Mayor of the village of Aelst, he was married twice, first to Anna van Dornicke (d 1529), the daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Mertens, who may have been his teacher; they had two children, Michel van Coecke and Pieter van Coecke II (before 1527–59), the latter of whom became a painter. He later married Mayken Verhulst, herself a painter of miniatures and the mother of three children, Pauwel, Katelijne and Maria; they are shown with their parents in Coecke’s Family Portrait (Zurich, Ksthaus). Mayken is credited with having taught the technique of painting in tempera on cloth to her son-in-law, Pieter Bruegel the elder, who married Maria in 1563. (For family tree see Bruegel family.) Van Mander also stated that Bruegel was Coecke’s apprentice, an allegation no longer universally accepted in view of their substantial stylistic differences. Although the names of other students of Coecke’s, including ...

(b Utrecht, Aug 30, 1883; d Davos, Switzerland, March 7, 1931).

Dutch painter, architect, designer and writer. He was officially registered as the son of Wilhelm Küpper and Henrietta Catharina Margadant, but he was so convinced that his mother’s second husband, Theodorus Doesburg, was his father that he took his name. Little is known of his early life, but he began painting naturalistic subjects c. 1899. In 1903 he began his military service, and around the same time he met his first wife, Agnita Feis, a Theosophist and poet. Between about 1908 and 1910, much influenced by the work of Honoré Daumier, he produced caricatures, some of which were later published in his first book De maskers af! (1916). Also during this period he painted some Impressionist-inspired landscapes and portraits in the manner of George Hendrik Breitner. Between 1914 and 1915 the influence of Kandinsky became clear in such drawings as Streetmusic I and Streetmusic II (The Hague, Rijksdienst Beeld. Kst) and other abstract works....

(bapt Liège, May 23, 1614; d Liège, July 10, 1675).

Franco-Flemish painter and architect. He was born into a family of artists, and his first apprenticeship was probably in Liège with his father, Renier Flémal (b 1585), a painter of stained glass. Bertholet was later a pupil of Henri Trippet (c. 1600–74) before completing his training during the 1630s with Gérard Douffet. In 1638 Flémal went to Rome and on the return journey visited Florence and stayed for some time in Paris. He had returned to Liège by 1646. Flémal had a successful career there, painting for private collectors, but he was also commissioned to work for the many religious establishments. His patron was Canon Lambert de Liverloo, Chancellor to the Prince-Bishop of Liège. In addition, Flémal made designs for religious buildings and fittings as well as for his own house, but none of this architectural work has survived. In 1670 he was at the peak of his career. He was painter to the Prince-Bishop, ...

(b Saint-Ouen, nr Amiens, Dec 5, 1911; d Orléans-La Source, Aug 1, 1993).

French painter and decorative artist. His earliest training was at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Amiens. In 1929 he moved to Paris, where he registered to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, although he did not complete the course. He made copies of Old Master paintings at the Louvre and frequented the Académies Libres. At the Académie Ranson in 1935 he met Roger Bissière, who was teaching there, and became friendly with a small group of his students: Jean Le Moal (1909–96), Jean Bertholle (b 1909) and the sculptor Etienne-Martin. He exhibited for the first time with them in 1938 at the Galerie Breteau in Paris. In 1943 he went on a Trappist retreat and became a believer, an event that was to leave its mark on all his work. He executed several commissions for stained-glass windows for churches in France and abroad, in 1948–50...

[Ange, Etienne Martel]

(b Lyon, 1568/9; d Paris, Oct 3, 1641).

French architect, painter and draughtsman. He was the grandson of a painter of stained glass and son of a painter from Lyon, and he began his own career as a painter. Martellange trained in Italy from 1586 to 1587 with François Stella (1563–1605), and in 1590 he entered the Jesuit Order at Avignon, with the title of Pictor, taking his vows as a coadjutor brother at Chambéry in 1603; he was not, however, ordained a priest.

Martellange worked throughout France, producing architectural plans and some competent watercolour views of Jesuit establishments where work was in progress. Drawings and estimates were sent to the Jesuit Order in Rome and served as a basis for decisions by the leaders of the Order on the building projects in hand. From the study of his drawings (Paris, Bib. N.) it is possible to reconstruct a list of more than 20 Jesuit houses and colleges on which Martellange worked. His active career began in ...

(b Lichtenheim, Lower Bavaria, Dec 3, 1818; d Munich, Feb 10, 1901).

German chemist. Although best known for his research into the causes of cholera and typhoid, he was also involved in art and architecture. In 1845, a year after completing his doctorate in chemistry, he obtained a post at the Royal Mint of Bavaria. Here he discovered a way of reproducing porporino, an antique red glass much used by the ancient Romans and admired by Ludwig I of Bavaria. In 1849, when a professor of medical chemistry at the university in Munich, Pettenkofer developed, at the request of the architect Leo von Klenze, a process of manufacturing a building cement that was the equal of Portland cement. Pettenkofer’s greatest contribution to art, however, lay in the restoration of paintings. In 1863 he was asked to find a way of reversing the growth of mildew on the varnishes of oil paintings in the various galleries of Munich. Through experimentation and microscopic analysis, he discovered that the varnishes could be cleared through the application of hot alcohol vapour. In this endeavour Pettenkofer introduced the use of the ...

[Aert Claessoon; Aernt Claesz.]

(b Leiden, 1498; d Leiden, 1564).

Dutch painter, draughtsman and designer of stained glass. Van Mander’s extensive biographical account forms the basis of knowledge of the life and work of this otherwise elusive artist. According to him, Aertgen was the son of a Leiden ‘fuller’ or cloth finisher, but in 1516 he chose to become a painter and apprenticed himself to Cornelis Engebrechtsz. Van Mander describes the uneven quality and vast stylistic changes within Aertgen’s work: at first he painted in the style of his master, then he was influenced by Jan van Scorel and later by Maarten van Heemskerck. Van Mander further reports that Aertgen’s paintings represented mainly biblical stories from the Old and New Testament and that they were often beautifully composed, though painted in a ‘loose and unpleasant manner’. Leiden city records confirm that a painter called Aert Claesz. was working in Leiden between 1521 and 1564 and living, as van Mander states, on the Zijdegracht (at least in ...