wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Christ sits upon a tree trunk, dressed in a sky-blue robe that contrasts with his ginger hair and beard. He wears a crown of thorns, which was placed on his head after he was sentenced to death to mock claims that he was King of the Jews. Around his neck is a rope, threaded through a loop, its torn end dangling on the ground. There are no wounds caused by the nails of the Crucifixion on his hands or feet.

It is unclear whether this picture is intended to represent a particular moment in Christ’s torture and death (known as the Passion). If so, it seems to be just before the Crucifixion and after the Flagellation (when he was tied up and whipped).

The setting may be intended to bring to mind a chapel within a church, where Christ’s body takes the place of an altar with a sculpture or painting above it. In the fifteenth century these chapels often had barrel-vaulted ceilings similar to the one we see here. Originally found in the architecture of classical Greece and Rome, this feature was revived by Renaissance architects. The artist has described the depth of this imaginary chapel by mirroring the ceiling coffers -- indicated by rectangular indentations, inlaid here with dark stone -- with the grid pattern of the paved floor. He scored the directional lines of the paving with a ruler to ensure their straightness; he must have painted Christ’s feet over the top, as the lines are now visible crossing them where the paint has worn away. The ‘chapel’ is set within a landscape, a lush Italian hillside, built up here and there with fortifications, houses, and churches with bell-towers. A stag roams to the right and two deer graze on the left.

The meaning of the image is unclear – it is highly unusual. It might be a vision of Christ’s sufferings, but we do not know of any written evidence of such a mystical event. The panel’s reverse is decorated with an abstract pattern intended to resemble marble, suggesting that it was a portable panel, perhaps carried on travels to aid prayers.

There is no clear consensus about who painted the picture but Cicognara is the latest suggestion. Cicognara’s work is relatively unknown as he signed very few pictures. He worked on manuscript illuminations as well as paintings. The miniature scale of some of the details and the precision of the drawing -- in the sculptural reliefs, for example -- fit well with an artist who was accustomed to working on a small surface like the page of a book. Cicognara was from Cremona, a town near Milan, in Lombardy. The exaggerated folds of Christ’s robe match his style, which was inspired by artists from nearby Ferrara. Similarly jagged draperies can be found in the work of the Ferrarese painter Cosimo Tura, who was painting at around the same time.

This painting once belonged to Austen Henry Layard. Layard was an archaeologist, diplomat and MP and a trustee of the National Gallery.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
Two tall, slender olive trees stand on the rough ground at the top of a hill overlooking the sea. Their trunks are crooked and gnarled, the brittle bark catching the sun and glinting here and there. Small branches and twigs are stark silhouettes but the tiny, pale leaves make a filigree, fine as confetti fluttering against the sky.

More trees frame the picture -- there's another olive on the left and a fine, bushy conifer on the right. A row of dark green pines and cypresses make a barrier at the bottom of the hill, between us and the Mediterranean Sea. All is still on the hillside, but out on the deep blue water the wind whips up white waves and, in the distance, a long spit of land reaches outward like a grey shadow.  The olive trees close to us are painted in minute, loving detail, and the earth in which they grow is almost palpable in its chunky, crumbly reality. Small scrubby plants, twigs and a few meagre flowers are painted in myriad subtle shades of green, grey, brown, ochre and gold, giving texture and richness. The sky too is textured. Far from a solid blue as it first appears, the small puffy clouds float on dabs of different blues and greys, softening to a pale gleam across the horizon.

Harpignies seldom gave his pictures titles, but in this case he did. This is Menton, on the Côte d'Azure in southern France -- in Harpignies' time, a fashionable resort where elegant people went to see and be seen. But he chose to ignore the villas and restaurants among coloured umbrellas and palm trees, instead showing us the tougher side of the Mediterranean, high up where plants and people had more of a struggle to live than down at the coast.

Painted in 1907, this is Harpignies at his most delicate and sensitive. At the age of 87, he used light and colour to achieve a picture of great charm and delicacy (not always present in his much earlier work, for instance A River Scene, painted some 30 years before). He was not an artist to break new ground, perhaps; he preferred to hark back to the idyllic landscapes of Claude, painted in Rome nearly three centuries before, but without the setting of a Greek or Roman myth. In this he was in accord with his great friend and fellow artist, Camille Corot, whose Avignon from the West also looks out at the Mediterranean, complete with an olive tree. They depicted what they saw around them, as other modern painters, like Monet, were doing, but with a smoother, more classical technique -- artists of their day but with a firm link to the past.

Style: Impressionist
Venus, the goddess of love, leans against a tree while her son, Cupid, tries to get her attention. He clutches a stolen honeycomb in one hand and raises the other to his forehead in anguish as bees swarm and sting him. The pair stand on a gravel path in a verdant and rocky landscape, and grand steepled buildings are visible in the distance.

Despite Cupid's distress, Venus pays him no attention. Instead, her gaze is directed towards us. Her tilted head is inclined towards us and her gaze could be interpreted as curious or coquettish. She clasps the transparent veil that is draped around her body, accentuating the curves of her form and emphasising her identity as the goddess of love. She wears a bracelet and a choker of gold and pearls, as well as a hairnet decorated with pearls underneath a wide-brimmed red hat. The inscription on her headband reads ‘all is vanity’. These accessories would have made the timeless goddess appear modern to Cranach’s original audience as they reflect the fashions of the Saxon court where the artist worked for the electors of Saxony. Cranach often depicted female figures from classical mythology and biblical history wearing accessories that were stylish in Germany in the sixteenth century.

The Latin inscription on the tree trunk explains Venus' lack of concern for her son, as well as the moral of the picture. It describes how, just like the stings felt by Cupid for stealing the honey, the 'brief and fleeting pleasure we seek is mingled with sadness and brings us pain'. This alludes to the sting of Cupid's arrows of love, which cause a pain that lasts far longer than the mere sting of a bee.

Cranach painted numerous versions of this subject, and there is another in the National Gallery’s collection: Cupid complaining to Venus. Although they differ in size, these two pictures are visually similar: in both, the pair are stood outdoors, with Venus positioned centrally and Cupid to her right. Both pictures include the same Latin inscription, emphasising that Cranach intended them to serve a didactic function. The artist's depictions of this subject were especially popular with his patrons for combining a moralising message with blatant eroticism: here, Venus' open pose shows off her body. The date of the painting and Cranach’s signature of a winged serpent appear upon the stony ground at the lower right of the composition.

Style: High Renaissance
This is a copy of the central figure of Christ from Christ Among the Doctors by Luini. The artist's composition may be based on an original design by Leonardo.

At the age of 12, Jesus was taken to the Temple in Jerusalem by Mary and Joseph, who became accidentally separated from him. They found him three days later debating learnedly with the theologians there (Luke 2: 41). Jesus looks at us serenely as he counts the points of his argument off on his fingers. The picture is sometimes thought to be the adult Christ disputing with the Pharisees, as his beard suggests he is older than 12.

This copy does not seem to be contemporary with Luini's original painting. The artist's work was venerated and copied for a century or more after his death and this popular composition was copied in multiple versions by many different artists.

Style: High Renaissance
The glorious colours in this portrait are equalled by the delicacy and sensitivity with which Van Dyck has captured an intimate moment between us and an unknown woman and her little boy. She looks out at us with a shy half-smile that seems to invite us to share in her pride in the child.

The woman wears the formal clothing of an affluent bourgeois wife: a black silk dress with an elaborate gold stomacher, and fine lace and jewellery at her wrist. The enormous, exaggerated ruff round her neck was worn in the Netherlands long after it had become outdated in the rest of Europe. The child has a miniature version round his neck, keeping to the older tradition as well. It's the hat that marks him as a boy; voluminous skirts were standard for all children. Boys were formally 'breeched' (dressed in a form of trousers called breeches) around the age of five. At this point, a father would become more involved in his child's upbringing. It’s thought that the boy’s gaze and vivacious gesture towards the left may suggest that there was once a portrait of the father that would have hung next to this one, but which is now lost.

Van Dyck’s use of colour and texture in this painting is superb. The sheen of the woman’s black satin is rich and intense. The white of her ruff seems to make her pale skin glow and the interlaced pattern of hands foreshadows Van Dyck’s later preoccupation with the portrayal of long, slender fingers. The child’s sleeves are decorated with gold filigree feathers that echo the gold of his mother’s stomacher, and his lace cuffs rival hers for fineness. The soft lilac colour of his skirts is unusual and striking, and the mother catches up one corner of his white pinafore to show it off to advantage -- perhaps to demonstrate that no expense has been spared in her little one’s attire. Behind the couple, a curtain is lifted to show a grey sky with a glimmer of light that throws the minimal landscape into silhouette. But the curtain is a deep, opulent crimson, just enough to enrich the picture and give it sparkle. It lifts the image and balances the whites, which would otherwise be too glaring.

During his early career, Van Dyck lived in Antwerp. He painted some of his least formal portraits in the city, mostly -- like this one -- of the bourgeois citizens and their families (Portrait of Cornelis van Geest, a subtle and sympathetic study of an old man, is also in the National Gallery's collection). The paintings Van Dyck made in Antwerp have more in common with the works of Rubens, his teacher, than they do with his later portraits of aristocrats, made when he was in England.

Style: Baroque
The theme of Puvis de Chavannes’s painting is an old one. Images of summer and harvesting can be found in medieval illuminated manuscripts, and it remained a popular subject with artists from Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Nicolas Poussin onwards. In Summer, also known as 'The Harvest', Puvis has adapted the theme to paint not an image of rural life and work but a timeless idyll -- a dream image of warmth, peace and well-being. His figures have both biblical and classical overtones, and the air of calm and bounty with which he has imbued the scene is that of a golden age.

Puvis was celebrated in his lifetime for his large, multi-figure decorative pictures. Although some were genuine frescoes, many were huge paintings on canvas that took the place of murals and were known as 'decorations'. This picture is a study for one such work, which was bought by the French government in 1873 and which now hangs in the entrance hall of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

In the oil sketch Puvis worked out the main figure groupings and in almost chalky shades set out the colour scheme. There are, however, numerous differences between the sketch and the finished work. Puvis was clearly unhappy with the foreground composition and moved the pond and its swimmers to the middle ground, gave the landscape greater prominence but lost the pollarded tree on the right of the picture, and changed the positions of the groups of women and children. He also intensified the colours across the whole scheme, most noticeably making the sky a much richer blue, which gives the finished work the feel of one of the sixteenth-century Venetian pastoral scenes of Titian or Giorgione.

During his lifetime, Puvis was seen by some critics as France’s national painter. In 1891 the critic and historian Alphonse Germain wrote that: 'What Rembrandt is to Holland, Puvis de Chavannes will be to France, he is ours; thanks to his "thusness", our art will become national again.' In the years immediately before Puvis started work on Summer, France had undergone a series of upheavals: the Franco-Prussian War, which cost innumerable French lives; the capture and exile of Emperor Napoleon III; the siege of Paris and the short-lived and bloodily suppressed government of the Paris Commune. With his gentle scene he showed a timeless France outside politics and bloodshed -- a welcome alternative to war and chaos.

Puvis’s painting is therefore more than just a 'decoration'. It is a nostalgic dream of an ideal France -- a form of pictorial balm -- and perhaps an aspiration that the nation could return to peace and bounty once more. Although Puvis was a traditional painter, the influence of Summer can be felt in two of the most important works by leading French avant-garde painters of a younger generation: Paul Cezanne’s The Large Bathers of 1898 and Henri Matisse’s Luxe, Calme et Volupté of 1904 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris). If Puvis stood outside the artistic movements of his day, they nevertheless looked at him.

Style: Symbolist
This panel by Ugolino di Nerio, was once part of a multi-panelled altarpiece made for the Florentine church of Santa Croce. It would have appeared in the third tier of the structure, above an image of Saint Francis and beneath a pinnacle panel (now both lost).

This tier consisted of six identically shaped panels each depicting two different apostles. Saints Peter and Paul were excluded, as they appeared in the position of honour on either side of the Virgin Mary, and were replaced by two female saints: Saints Elizabeth of Hungary and Saint Clare. Both belonged to the Franciscan Order. We hold one more panel from this layer, showing Saints Bartholomew and Andrew.

An inscription, now quite faded and damaged, identifies the saint wearing violet drapery: S.THA. (Saint Thaddeus). You can just see it to the left of his halo. Nothing remains of the inscription that named the other saint, but it is likely to be Simon -- the only apostle not identifiable elsewhere. The saints' draperies are quite damaged.

Heads appear in the decorative shapes (quatrefoils) that run beneath the apostles; they are so individual they might be portraits. We see two bearded older men wearing black and one younger man, beardless and quite plump. We don't know their identities, but they might be friars from the Franciscan Order who lived at Santa Croce.

The portraits are interspersed with more abstract images of animals -- a bird to the left and some kind of imaginary two-legged monster on the right -- contained in circles bound in a square. The artist has painted these decorative border elements with great care. The decoration within the trefoil (three-lobed shape) between the two arches at the top was once painted with silver leaf that has now degraded. There is also evidence that the sgraffito technique was used.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
The unknown little girl in this portrait looks out at us, shy and uncertain. Her auburn curls hang loose, framing her pink cheeks. She is in her finest clothes, the bodice stiff and restrictive, the silk apron sparkling white. Her overskirt is looped up to show that as much attention has been paid to the decoration of her petticoat as to the wide lace collar and cuffs. This is the daughter of a wealthy, possibly aristocratic, family and the cross at her neck may imply that they are Catholic. Although we don't know who painted the picture, the child's clothing suggests a date of about 1640.

A parrot was sometimes seen as a sign of eagerness to learn, as they can be taught to speak words and phrases. In an illustration in a contemporary book of advice on marriage, a woman representing 'eagerness to learn' is shown with an embroidery frame in one hand and a parrot on the other. This is probably the case in A Woman in a Red Jacket feeding a Parrot by Frans van Mieris the Elder, which is also in the National Gallery's collection.

Style: Baroque
This panel is one of three that come from the lower tier of an altarpiece made for the Duke of Milan, and shows the Archangel Raphael, hero of the apocryphal Book of Tobit in the Old Testament.

The book is named after a blind old man, Tobit -- a merchant and devout Jew -- who sent his son Tobias on a long journey. Raphael was sent to accompany the boy, disguising himself as one of his relatives. An expansive landscape was an appropriate background to the subject, and here it is a continuation of that in The Virgin and Child with an Angel and The Archangel Michael.

Tobias holds a freshly caught and gutted fish: Raphael had instructed him to keep its heart, liver and gall. According to the text, Raphael explained that these could be used as an ointment to cure blindness and burnt to drive away evil spirits. He holds the precious organs in a little box. The pair were joined in their travels by Tobias's dog. We can only see its head at the bottom of the panel, as the lower edge -- like that of the other panels-- was cut down in the eighteenth century.

Perugino was well known for his 'sweet' style, which is particularly apparent here in the look Tobias and Raphael share and in the way they tenderly grip each others' fingers. He planned their poses in a drawing from life (using workshop assistants) now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. The fish is painted with great skill -- Perugino has taken particular care to show the faceted structure of the gill, and the sheen of its finely freckled silvery scales. As in the other panels, this naturalistic effect is achieved through his expert blending of oil paint.

Unlike  Verrocchio's version of the same subject, Perugino's picture does not show the figures wearing the latest fashions -- the emphasis is on Raphael's protection of the boy. This is because the panel was made to celebrate Raphael, who takes his place in the altarpiece along with his fellow archangels: Michael on the left panel in the same tier and -- Gabriel in the upper tier (now in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva).

Style: Early Renaissance, High Renaissance
The Virgin Mary holds her infant son tenderly on her knee as he learns to read, supporting him as he follows the words with his tiny finger in a gesture familiar to all parents. The Child traces the line of text with one hand, while the other rests tenderly on his mother's thumb. Saint Joseph gently supports the open book.

This intimate and charming depiction of the holy family is one of the finest and most beautiful of numerous small pictures of this subject which Schedoni painted in the last years of his life. The close-knit composition, bathed in a soft golden light, creates a powerful sense of domesticity and warmth, while the nearness of the figures to the picture plane connects us closely with them.

According to an inscription on the back of the panel, this picture belonged to Schedoni's wife Barbara, whom he married in 1611. It was probably painted in the last two years of the artist's life, and was presumably done for pleasure, since it remained in the possession of Schedoni's widow after his death in 1615. She gave it to her mother, Violante Cacciardina, who sold it in 1618.

From 1607 Schedoni was working in Parma for Duke Ranuccio I Farnese, whose favourite painter he was: receipts and lists of his works in the Farnese collection show that all the important works of his maturity were painted for the Duke, and nearly all have survived and are mainly in the Galleria Nazionale, Parma, or in the Museo e Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. According to the terms of his contract Schedoni could work for other patrons only with the Duke's permission, but it seems clear that Ranuccio had no objection to him producing modest devotional paintings like this one. Schedoni painted many such small-scale pictures of the holy family for a more popular market, and  numerous workshop copies and versions also survive. An autograph variant of this particular composition is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: probably dating from slightly earlier, it includes the young Saint John the Baptist who is being helped to read by the Christ Child.

The sweetness of the image is at odds with what we know of the artist: the son of a mask-maker, Schedoni was a violent and disorderly man who served several prison sentences and, according to a seventeenth-century chronicler, died in a fit of passion -- possibly suicide -- after a night of heavy gambling losses.

Before entering the Gallery's collection in 2013 the painting belonged to Sir Denis Mahon, one of the great collectors of Italian Baroque art in the modern era.

Style: Baroque, Academic
The 12 small pictures in this group show the 'labours of the months' -- the rural activities that take place each month throughout the year. They were painted on canvas and then each glued to a wooden panel. It is possible that they were made to decorate the recessed panels of a pair of doors. The paintings seem to have been planned in pairs with the figures facing each other, and they are currently displayed in two frames in groups of six.

The young man gestures to something in front of him and turns to look over his shoulder as if talking to someone outside the picture. He is sitting on a rock but appears to be about to start ploughing. The simple wood and metal plough he holds would push the soil to either side to make an open shallow furrow. We can see the kind of furrows such a plough would make in the painting representing February, in which streaks of pale paint form parallel lines along the field in the background, ready to be planted with vines or olives supported by wooden stakes.

Style: High Renaissance