wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
A young man reclines in a rocky landscape, filling a bowl with water spouting from a rock. With his naked torso he looks more like a classical god than a biblical figure, but this is Saint John the Baptist: he has a fine gold halo, and holds a cross made of two reeds bound together. On the scroll around the cross is written: 'Ecce Agnus Dei' ('Behold the Lamb of God'). These are the words with which John recognised Christ as the Messiah when he baptised him in the river Jordan.

The Gospels describe how John, a forerunner of Christ, lived as a hermit in the desert, preaching to and baptising the people of Judea and Jerusalem. He wore camel skin -- the hair side directly on his flesh so that it was scratchy and uncomfortable -- and foraged for food, eating locusts and wild honey. In this picture the spring and pool, which can be glimpsed behind the saint's foot, allude to his role as a baptiser, while the dramatic rocky landscape is the wilderness in which he lived. Close observation reveals that his red robe, although not much like a camel skin, is indeed lined with hair.

This is clearly not first-century Palestine, however, and this is not a wild desert prophet. The saint's nakedness, his recumbent pose and the cup he holds up all recall classical depictions of the god Bacchus rather than the ascetic figure in earlier Renaissance representations, such as Carlo Crivelli's.

Although no longer attributed to Annibale Carracci, the picture was probably painted by someone quite close to him, maybe a direct pupil rather than just a follower. The artist was interested in showing the landscape, which is arguably better painted than the figure. Interestingly, when the painting was cleaned in the 1960s, another landscape was revealed underneath this one: the artist had reused a canvas on which a picture had already been painted.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Several episodes of the story of the Passion of Christ are packed into this busy painting. The narrative begins in the background on the left, where Christ is scourged. In the next scene he has been crowned with thorns and dressed in a purple (now blue) robe; he holds a reed in his right hand and is mocked by the soldiers.

In the foreground, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate leads Christ out and says 'Ecce Homo' ('Behold the man'). On seeing him, the chief priests and officers called for Christ's crucifixion; Pilate replied, 'Take ye him and crucify him: for I find no fault in him' (John 19:6). The foremost figures are presumably the chief priests, with the 'officers' behind them.

We don't know the identity of the artist but he is named after an altarpiece showing scenes of Christ's Passion in the cathedral of Saint Salvator in Bruges. He was an eclectic painter and borrowed extensively from other artists. His principal source was an engraving of the 'Ecce Homo' by  Martin Schongauer, from which come the foreground figures of Christ and Pilate. He also took figures from a number of other Schongauer prints, as well as details from Albrecht Dürer's work. The small scenes of the Flagellation and the mocking of Christ are taken, probably indirectly, from  Hans Memling. The 'antique' frieze on the praetorium -- the building we see behind Christ -- must be based, directly or indirectly, on an Italian model.

Infrared reflectograms reveal extensive underdrawing for Christ, Pilate and the two men in turbans, but other figures are less detailed. The underdrawing tends to follow the artist's sources more faithfully than the final painted version, and the artist made various adjustments while painting: the man to Christ's right is drawn with longer hair and a moustache, while the man second from the bottom originally wore a helmet. Some of the architecture was underdrawn then incised, not always in exactly the same place, and a divider was used to make the two roundels -- the discs containing heads -- we see above the arcade. The scenes of the Flagellation and the mocking of Christ were not strictly underdrawn but were outlined in azurite, a blue pigment.

The artist shows considerable skill in manipulating the slow-drying oil paint, working wet into wet paint in many areas and using sgraffito (scratching through the surface to reveal a layer of a contrasting colour beneath) to produce the wiry effect in the men's beards, stubble and eyebrows.

The panel was once the left wing of an altarpiece. Its format is unusually tall and was once taller still, but both top and bottom edges have been trimmed. Some of the colours have changed: Christ's robe was possibly brighter purple and in the mocking scene it has changed from purple to blue, as the red lake pigment has faded. The back was possibly once painted in grisaille. There are traces of chalk ground and grey paint on the reverse, but whatever image was there was lost when the panel was thinned.

Style: High Renaissance
Margaretha de Geer was the wife of Jacob Trip and their two portraits were made to hang together, almost certainly in one of the grand reception rooms of a palatial new residence, the Trippenhuis, which was being built in Amsterdam for their two sons from 1660 to 1662.

Jacob and Margaretha’s marriage seems to have been of economic advantage to both their families. Trip was a young Dordrecht merchant, and his brother was in business with Margaretha’s arms- and iron-dealing brother. They were together nearly 60 years and had 12 children, at least five of whom were still alive when these paintings were made.

It would have been conventional to portray the couple in symmetrical, mirrored poses -- each turned slightly towards the other. But here Rembrandt is inventive. Jacob, who was close to death or may even have recently died when his portrait was made, sits askew, his face and hands half in shadow. He doesn’t meet our gaze but instead stares down and out of the picture with, perhaps, a slight air of melancholy. Margaretha, however, is presented face-on and looks directly at us with determination. She seems to perch upright and intent, somewhat uneasily even, slightly to one side of the chair. Rembrandt had to work on this pose before he got it right: X-ray images show that her left hand at first rested in her lap, but was then repositioned, gripping the arm of the chair. This not only makes her seem more active -- about to rise towards us -- but pushes the hand forwards, into our space.

And what a hand. Rembrandt had many extraordinary skills, but in his ability to depict flesh, and most especially ageing skin, he has no equal. He used the semi-transparent qualities of oil paint to build up layers, textures, colours -- the blue veins and dry yellowy sheen of an old woman’s fingers and the back of her hands. On her brightly lit face, the pinks and greys, and the furrows of her brow, are worked with similar intensity, and this marks another contrast in Rembrandt’s approach to the two portraits. He used quicker, much more sparing brushwork to paint Jacob’s shadowy features.

There is difference too in their clothing. While Jacob’s is suggested with minimal efficiency -- look at the long, simple brushstrokes used to suggest his scarf -- Margaretha’s splendid collar, a millstone ruff, is depicted with extreme delicacy. It is the centrepiece of the portrait. The starched precision of the pleats fills the painting with light which glows around her face. The ruff, highly fashionable in the 1620s, is, by now, 40 years out of date, but its crisp resilience seems to reflect her own inner vitality. Margaretha was 79 years old, and had another ten years to live; her husband was dying, or had already died. The white handkerchief in her right hand may simply be fashion accessory, or it may a sign of mourning added by Rembrandt after Jacob's death.

The National Gallery also has another smaller portrait of Margaretha at about the same age and dressed in similar clothes, although its attribution to Rembrandt is not entirely secure.

Style: Baroque
This thoughtful man, probably in his late twenties, is richly dressed in a padded maroon jacket with dark blue stripes on the puffed sleeves. Over this he wears a brown fur cape. He holds a rosary and his left hand rests on a book tied with blue ribbons. He wears one leather glove and holds the other in the right hand. Round his neck is a type of fine gold chain worn by the minor nobility.

The book and the laurels behind the man suggest that he may have been a poet. The laurel tree was the attribute of Apollo, Roman god of poetry and music. Poets were traditionally crowned with laurel leaves, hence the title 'poet laureate'. The rosary suggests that the man's artistic interests are balanced by his spiritual concerns. The dark background and olive leaves recall Giorgione's Laura of 1506, now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

On the basis of the clothing, the painting probably dates from about 1516. This was when the epic poem Orlando Furioso was first published and achieved instant fame, and it has been proposed that the portrait is of the author, Lodovico Ariosto (1474--1533). However, Ariosto would have been 41 or 42 in 1516, which seems too old for the man in this painting. There is no evidence that Ariosto, who was from Ferrara, ever sat for Palma Vecchio, who worked in Venice. Equally, although Ariosto mentioned the contemporary Venetian painters Titian, Sebastiano del Piombo and Giovanni Bellini in the Orlando Furioso, he did not mention Palma Vecchio, which suggests that he was not familiar with him.

The expanded 1532 edition of Orlando Furioso contains a woodcut portrait of Ariosto based on a drawing by Titian, which does not look like the sitter in the National Gallery's painting. Nor does the description of Ariosto in the 1562 edition -- as a man with black curly hair, olive skin, thin lips, a thin beard which didn't cover the chin as far as the ears and a big curved, aquiline nose -- seem to fit this man.

The sitter in the portrait looks similar in appearance and mood to one in a bust-length portrait thought to be by Titian in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. However in that painting the sitter is turned to the side and probably once had his arm resting on a parapet in a pose similar to that in Titian's Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo. The Metropolitan Museum portrait has been significantly cut down. It does not include either the laurels or the book that appear in Palma Vecchio's picture. Although the sitters look similar, the relationship between these two paintings, if any, is unclear.

The National Gallery painting is one of Palma Vecchio's earliest successful portraits and may have inspired Titian's Man with a Glove (Louvre, Paris). The portrait is damaged in several places, which have been repainted. The surface is also rubbed, meaning that the some of the subtleties of the paint texture and fine details have been lost, for example in the hair and the golden chain.

Style: High Renaissance
A young couple sit on the grass in a shady glade. The woman's hair is unbound, and her dress disturbed to reveal her breasts and leg. In one hand she holds an imaginary musical instrument of four attached reed pipes, with the other she either restrains her lover or encourages him to move the crimson cloak over her lap. His simple robe, which reveals the knotted muscles of his arm and torso, is tied with a braid about his waist. The couple gaze toward a naked, winged cupid who crowns them with a wreath. A wooden water cask lies next to the man's thigh and a simple wooden instrument -- perhaps a recorder -- rests above it.

The subject of the painting is uncertain.The musical instruments and setting suggest this may be a pastoral scene of a shepherd and his love, but the woman's clothes are neither plain nor rural. Her chemise (a simple garment worn next to the skin to protect the clothes) is of the finest linen and her dress is made of elaborately patterned silk. Her cloak, possibly of silk velvet, is crimson -- the most expensive colour. Her hair, although loosened, could only have been dressed with the help of a maid and a mirror. Mirrors were difficult to make and expensive.

This may be a scene from classical mythology or an allegory of love. It has sometimes been interpreted as Daphnis and Chloe, although the woman's rich clothes argue against this, as Chloe was raised as a simple shepherdess. The couple may be Venus and Adonis. In which case, the episode would be the goddess Venus trying to restrain her lover, Adonis, from joining the hunt by removing his bow. This subject was popular during the 1550s due to the international success of Titian's Venus and Adonis painted for Philip II, King of Spain. But Bordone has not included a bow here and the young man doesn't show any interest in going hunting. The subject might be Dido and Aeneas who consummated their love while seeking refuge from a storm. However, there is no sign here of a storm. Perhaps the picture is just an erotic image of a nymph (nature goddess) and her lover being crowned by Cupid.

The painting is very minutely finished. One can see tiny brushstrokes of black and red in Cupid's wing, the separate pale hairs of the man's beard and threads of fabric at the borders of his garment. Bordone has created a sumptuous colour effect by using two blues on top of each other in both the drapery and the sky. The copper pigments have darkened in the brown leaves at top right and the black areas on the left -- they would originally have been greener. Over time, the paint has become slightly translucent in places: we can now see the woman's dress and cloak through the pipes she holds.

Paris Bordone may have painted this work during his stay in France in 1559. He made two other versions of the painting (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; and Cultural Historical Museum, Dubrovnik). The figures in those paintings are identical in size to this one and may have been made from the same cartoon.

Style: High Renaissance
This panel once formed part of the uppermost tier of a large altarpiece. It shows the Virgin Mary with her arms crossed in front of her -- a gesture of humility -- looking towards a central image of the 'Apocalyptic Christ'. John the Baptist appeared to the right, opposite the Virgin.

The Virgin sits on a gold cushion, painted with the sgrafitto technique. This involved gilding over a layer of coloured paint and then scratching through the gold with a sharp tool to create patterns.

The theme of the whole altarpiece was divine judgement at the apocalypse, as described in the Book of Revelation (the biblical text that describes the end of the world). John the Baptist and Mary might be paired here because they are both traditionally thought to intervene on behalf of humanity at the Last Judgement.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
The Virgin's cousin Saint Elizabeth kneels to present the infant Saint John the Baptist to the Christ Child, who is held by the standing Virgin. With its warm colours, golden light and sweet interaction between two infants, this intimate scene is very touching. As an adult, Saint John will baptise Jesus, revealing Christ as the Son of God.

Saint Joseph watches as the cousins meet. He leans on what looks like a long ruler, and on the stone block behind him is a wooden T-square, a draughtsman's tool for drawing accurate vertical and horizontal lines. These objects allude to his skills in mathematics and architecture rather than his traditional, modest role as a carpenter.

With its columns and crumbling stonework, the setting of this scene evokes the classical past. The poses of the figures and their large, solid bodies and drapery folds recall antique statues. The Virgin rests a foot on a stone block reinforcing her sculptural appearance. The cracks in the stone columns and wall symbolise the collapse of pagan worship and the triumph of Christianity. The Virgin's youthful features are contrasted with the frown lines on her older cousin's forehead, while Joseph's careworn appearance reveals the hardship of manual labour.

This painting is an copy of a seventeenth-century picture at the Musée Condé, Chantilly, usually considered to be by Nicolas Poussin. It was once attributed to Eustache Le Sueur, who worked in Paris and was inspired by Poussin and the classical world. However, Mary's drapery is painted with a Prussian blue pigment that was first used during the eighteenth century, so the picture can't be by Poussin or Le Sueur as they lived during the seventeenth century. It is mostly likely to be an eighteenth-century or nineteenth-century copy of a picture by Poussin.

Style: Baroque, Academic, Neoclassical
A dark-haired man gazes to his right in a picture that must once have formed the right wing of a diptych or triptych. He has not joined his hands in prayer, but his right is placed on his heart and he holds a rosary: he is clearly at his devotions.

In the underdrawing, the line of the chin is drawn well inside its painted contour; Gossart was perhaps trying to flatter his sitter, who evidently had a large nose and a receding chin. We don't know who the sitter is. The only indication of his identity is his clothing, which is unusual but so similar to that of two men in portraits attributed to Jan Mostaert (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) that all three may have been wearing official dress of some kind. The Brussels sitter has been identified as Abel van Coulster, councillor at the Court or Council of Holland, Zeeland and West Friesland; the Liverpool and London sitters were perhaps also officials of the Council of Holland, or possibly another council.

The asymmetrical architecture behind the man was probably continued in another panel. At least four versions are known of a Virgin and Child in the style of Gossart where the background complements and completes that of this painting (Philadelphia Museum of Art; Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg; and two in a private collection in Brussels). They are probably copies of the lost left wing of the diptych or triptych of which this painting was a part. The figures of the Virgin and Child recur, with a different background, in a painting in the Prado, Madrid, clearly by Gossart himself. It once belonged to Philip II of Spain, and appears not to be from a diptych but to have been designed as an independent image. It is difficult to say whether the Prado work was an adaptation by Gossart of his lost image of the Virgin, or vice versa. In either case, they were probably painted at much the same time.

Most art historians believe the picture was painted towards the end of Gossart's career. The sitter's clothes seem to include archaic as well as fashionable elements and are difficult to date, though his haircut suggests a date of around 1520.

Style: High Renaissance
The painting divides neatly down the middle. On the left side we have books and globes, then considered key repositories of knowledge. And on the right is the world of thought and reflection represented by the sitter, who adopts the classic thinker’s pose: hand on chin, eyes apparently unfocused, looking slightly upwards into the middle distance.

The original title of the painting isn’t recorded, but it is known as An Astronomer because the nearer of the two globes shows a celestial map of the stars and their constellations. Under high magnification it is possible to make out two figures on the globe. One has been identified as Bubuleus (or Bootes), a figure from ancient Greek myths; the other is not clearly defined but, given its position in the sky, must be Hercules. The other globe is a terrestrial one, which would have shown the known continents of the world.

As well as the constellations, there are other references to the classical world which underline the academic theme of the painting. Behind the sitter is the base of a stone column in Roman or Greek style, while the medallion in the centre of his belt probably depicts a Roman emperor. This combination of classical learning and scientific enquiry was then entirely conventional: the divide between artists and scientists was not as distinct then as it is today. Several Dutch artists engaged in scientific experiments around optics and the behaviour of light, for example, and may well have used lenses and pinhole cameras to help them with their work.

Some art historians have suggested that this painting may be a self portrait, but the sitter does not resemble other images believed to be of Bol. More likely, it is an idealised depiction of an astronomer as a scientist and thinker -- there are plenty of other examples in Dutch art around this time, like A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room and A Young Astronomer. The pose of Bol’s figure and his abstracted manner also suggests that the painting may belong to an artistic tradition of depicting melancholic philosophers. The implication behind the convention was that a scholar's research would inevitably lead to an awareness of the futility of human endeavour in the face of death.

If Bol was feeling melancholic when he painted this, it wasn’t because his career was going badly. The year this painting was made -- it is signed and dated 1652 on the scroll, bottom left -- was an important one for him. Having trained in Rembrandt’s studio, he left in 1642 to set up on his own. By the early 1650s he had developed a lighter, brighter palette and was making use of more obviously elegant poses, like we see here. As a result, his reputation as a portraitist and history painter was beginning to outshine that of his former master.

It was in 1652 that Bol became a citizen of Amsterdam, probably because he wanted to be considered for high status commissions to decorate Amsterdam’s new Stadhuis (town hall), which were available only to citizens.

Style: Baroque