wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The Virgin Mary sits in front of an Italianate landscape, the Christ Child standing on her lap. He twists his body to gaze lovingly at his mother while she cups his left foot in her hand. Behind them, on the left, a man drives a laden donkey along a winding path which crosses a bridge to a walled town. On the right, another man balances rather precariously, one foot in the air, on a tree which has been laid across a stream.

This picture, with its brilliant blues and greens, is among Cima da Conegliano's finest works. As well as being highly decorative the composition has a strong underlying geometric structure. The Virgin and Child together form a wide-based triangle, their heads meeting at the apex. Christ's body makes a narrower triangle, and the shapes of the hills, towns and mountains echo these forms. The marble parapet serves to push the Virgin back into the picture space, while the zigzagging road and path across the stream draw our eye into the painting, linking the foreground and hills. Cima has also used aerial perspective: the distant mountains on the left are coloured blue and on the right a succession of slopes and shrubs alternate dark and light, creating a sense that they are receding. These kinds of techniques were to become especially popular in early sixteenth-century Venetian painting, as in Titian's Noli me Tangere.

This composition was evidently much in demand with Venetian patrons in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, and this is one of several versions painted by Cima and his workshop. This one is thought to be mainly by Cima himself: the clear light and the contrasting colours are very characteristic of his style, and also appear in The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. He used the cartoon of the figures of the Virgin and Child at least three times between 1496 and 1499 -- two other works are in the North Carolina Museum of Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition to these three main versions there are others in which his assistants played a greater role. The landscape background reappears almost identically in a less accomplished version in Treviso and in a painting of Saint Helena (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C). It probably represents a fairly accurate view of fifteenth-century Conegliano, Cima's home town.

Cima's signature normally includes 'of Conegliano' -- as in another Virgin and Child -- but here he has omitted the town's name from inscription on the parapet: IOHANNES BAPTISTA P (for 'PINXIT' -- 'John Baptist painted this'). Its absence suggests the painting was made for Conegliano itself, where he would not have had to distinguish himself from any other Cima.

Paintings showing the Virgin and Child were extremely popular. They made up a large part of the output of Cima's workshop, as they had done for Giovanni Bellini, whom Vasari claimed was Cima's teacher. Both artists often set holy figures in an Italianate landscape; look at Bellini's Madonna of the Meadow. During the Renaissance, people believed that the holy family existed here and now, not just 'then and there'.

Style: Early Renaissance
This portrait was long known as 'Il Cavaliere dal Piede Ferito' ('The knight with the wounded foot'). But the brace supporting the man's left foot suggests he was suffering from foot-drop, a fairly common disorder caused by the failure of ankle muscles weakened by disease or inflammation. It's unusual to find a disorder featured so prominently in a sixteenth-century portrait of this type. Perhaps it was regarded as the consequence of a heroic exercise or the man was thought heroic for fighting despite his disability.

The man rests his arm on his helmet and parts of his armour are scattered across the floor. This plate armour is of a type that was made in north Italy in the mid-sixteenth century. The way in which it has been carelessly strewn about in this portrait is very unusual and unexplained. The ruined setting may be intended to highlight the endurance of virtues which the sitter represents.

The sitter is wearing a doublet of unstained, padded leather -- known as an arming doublet -- to which chain mail is laced to provide protection where there are gaps in the armour. A black satin doublet and white shirt are worn beneath this. The trunks are black and neither puffed nor rounded, which may suggest that the portrait dates to before 1560. The man's cap of black velvet is decorated with black and white ostrich feathers. His plumed helmet would have been used at a tournament rather than in battle. His sword is a rapier, also for use in tournaments, and is luxuriously inlaid with gold and silver.

The repetition of colours in different parts of the painting is typical of Moroni: the duck-egg blue of the sky also appears in the veins of the marble panels and the rusty stains in the stone pick up the colours of the beard and the doublet. The ivy and brown weeds below the fig tree must be of copper green which has discoloured. The various blacks may have been more easy to distinguish originally: the black trunk, codpiece, hose and shoes all differ in texture.

An inventory of 1715 of the Avogadro collection in Brescia describes this painting as showing Conte Faustino Avogadro. He was married to Lucia Albani (possibly depicted by Moroni in 'La Dama in Rosso')  and was caught up in the feud between the Brembati and the Albani families that divided Bergamo in the mid-sixteenth century. Faustino may have been implicated in the assassination of Conte Achille Brembati -- one of his servants was certainly among those condemned to die for the crime. Faustino went into exile in Ferrara. A year later, in 1564, he fell blind drunk into a well and died.

The composition is similar to Moroni's Portrait of a Man, probably Michel de l'Hospital, dated 1554 (Ambrosiana, Milan). Here however, the arrangement and lighting are reversed. It is possible that this portrait was made to hang with Moretto's earlier Portrait of a Man, dated 1526, which may also depict a member of the Avogadro family, possibly Faustino's father, Gerolamo II Avogadro.

Style: High Renaissance
Thomas Jones's twelve or so small oil sketches on paper painted in Naples during 1782 have become the best known of all the work that he produced during his seven-year stay in Italy. A Wall in Naples is one of five studies of buildings from high viewpoints, which are considered to be the most remarkable and original work of his career.

Most of Jones's time in Italy was spent either in the studio, painting commissioned views in oil on canvases of conventional size, or gathering material in sketchbooks, to be worked up, sometimes years later, in watercolour. Few of his works on paper were highly finished and they were not, unlike his larger canvas paintings, the types of idealised 'views of Italy' bought by Grand Tourists to be taken back to England.

By the spring of 1782, Jones knew he was facing his last year in Italy. In 1779, he had set up house with Maria Moncke in Naples, where she bore him two daughters, and although they lived frugally, money was running out. Looking out from various windows or flat roofs, catching oblique views of warehouses, tenements and churches, Jones seems suddenly to have sensed the individuality of the buildings of Naples, and was determined to record it. When Jones and his family moved to the Vicolo del Canale, on the hill going up to Capodimonte, he enjoyed exclusive use of the roof terrace, and it was probably here that he painted A Wall in Naples.

Most of Jones's Naples oils on paper are dated 1782 on the back, some are inscribed with the month as well as the year and a few have titles. A Wall in Naples has neither so it is difficult to place it in the sequence. All the rooftop views are of different sizes and it is possible that Jones cropped some to intensify their impact. A Wall in Naples is the smallest of them, not much larger than a postcard. The shuttered windows, the irregular pattern of scaffolding holes, the patchy cement and the habitual water stain from chamber pots thrown out of the window are not features that can help us to identify the building, but they are the freshly observed details of a particular wall, although Jones may have adjusted some of them to enhance his composition. The sketch is painted from a close viewpoint, probably across the narrow street from Jones's roof terrace. The rectangle of sky is intensely blue suggesting that it was a very hot day in mid-summer, perhaps the same time as Jones painted Houses in Naples (British Museum, London), which is inscribed August 1782.

Most of Jones's time was taken up with painting commissioned pictures, many of them large classicising landscape views. There is a huge difference between Jones's 'studies' and his 'Pictures'. For example, Lake Albano (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven USA) is almost six-foot wide and took 41 days to paint. Working in oil on paper on a small scale and directly recording what he alone viewed as a subject, Jones achieves an originality not hinted at in his larger canvases.

Style: Neoclassical, Georgian
Women combing their hair, or having it combed, often appear in Degas's work -- for example, in his early Beach Scene, also in the National Gallery. This late painting is one of his boldest treatments of the subject.

Here, a maid, wearing her servant’s uniform, combs the hair of her seated mistress, who is not yet fully dressed and who may also be pregnant. Pulled back by the force of the strokes, the mistress raises her right hand to her head as if in pain, or perhaps just to steady herself or hold her hair in place.

Degas may originally have used his own maid, Zoé Closier, who he also photographed, as a model for the maid in his preparatory drawings. However, he replaced her with the woman we see here who, like the mistress, was most likely a professional model. Degas’s choice of this subject in part reflects his interest in Japanese woodblock prints, which he collected, as they often show women engaged in everyday domestic activities. But a more immediate precedent was Ingres's The Turkish Bath (1862--3, Louvre, Paris), in which a seated woman, seen in profile, has her hair plaited by another who stands behind her. A keen admirer of Ingres, Degas was very familiar with this painting, and defended it against its critics.

The principal colours of Degas’s picture are limited to variations of a fiery orange-red painted over a creamy white ground that is still visible on the left of the canvas. In other areas, such as to the right of the curtain, you can also see traces of grey-black underpainting. Degas relieves the intensity of the orange-reds by introducing other tonally related colours such as the yellow comb and brush and the maid’s pink blouse. His use of colour is not naturalistic or descriptive but has an expressive, perhaps even symbolic, dimension, which gives an ordinary domestic scene a feeling of almost claustrophobic intensity. Perhaps the red is metaphor for the pain or discomfort felt by the mistress.

Although the picture shows Degas's great skill in using colour, drawing remains paramount. He sketches in the composition, and also adds final details (for example, in the mistress's face) with swift, bold strokes of black paint containing charcoal. He structures the image by creating a powerful diagonal, which runs down from the maid’s head and arm along the length of her mistress’s body. The standing maid also creates a vertical on the right that is complemented on the picture’s left by the upward line of the curtain.

Some areas are more defined than others -- the objects on the table, for example, look unfinished. Degas probably planned to work further on the painting, as he enlarged it by placing it on a bigger stretcher. However, we can only guess what he intended, as it was never completed and remained in his studio. Two years after his death, the painting was bought by Henri Matisse.

Style: Impressionist, Realist
This is the third in the series The Four Times of Day that Corot painted for his friend, fellow artist Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps. It is evening and colours are at their richest. The upper half of the sky has now turned a deeper blue that is almost turquoise. This is the most highly worked of the four panels and there is greater definition throughout -- for example, of the foliage, especially in the foreground, as the shadows begin to deepen. This is also the only picture in the series to include water (a lake), a feature in many of Corot's paintings.

As in Noon, we can see three people. Nearest to us, a mysterious figure with an indistinct face walks away from the lake. He holds a large staff and wears what appears to be a dark brown monk’s habit with a hood, possibly Capuchin robes. Corot first painted a monk during his first trip to Italy in 1825--8, and monks appear in a number of his paintings. On the lake itself, two women are in a boat on the shoreline. One, wearing a white and pink dress, is sitting while the other, in a white dress and yellow shawl, stands as she holds an instrument that may be a mandolin. Her red bonnet echoes the streak of red on the monk’s hood.

The seventeenth-century artist Claude often conceived of his paintings as pairs and frequently juxtaposed morning and evening -- setting a precedent for Corot’s work. Morning scenes were frequently associated with beginnings -- for example, of voyages or journeys. Evening scenes were, not surprisingly, associated with activities that occurred at the end of the day, such as people making music, as the two women do here. Their clothing, the landscape setting and the suggestion of music give the picture the feeling of a fête galante, a subject that emerged in Italian art in the sixteenth century and which was particularly popular at the French court at Versailles in the eighteenth century. The lakeside location, ringed by tall sinuous trees, whose billowing feathery foliage is set against the sky, also has distinct echoes of French Rococo painting. Artists such as Watteau, Pater, Lancret and Fragonard frequently painted such scenes -- for example, Watteau's The Scale of Love.

Corot loved music and he often attended concerts, as well as the opera and ballet. He frequently sketched performances and his mature works, although based upon the observation of nature, often recall stage scenery. Music is a theme throughout his work, and a number of his paintings include musical instruments, particularly string instruments such as mandolins and cellos. Although not a musician himself, Corot often used musical metaphors when discussing his work -- for example, likening his own abilities to that of a flute which could only play a handful of notes. As his biographer, Ėtienne Moreau-Nélaton, commented, 'He analysed a symphony as he would a picture. He praised an art which was able to produce the most varied effects from the same motifs.'

Style: Barbizon
This small oil sketch of Oetzthal in the Austrian Alps was painted by Vilhelm Petersen when he was travelling to Italy in the summer of 1850. A landscape painter who was part of the last generation of artists of the so-called Danish Golden Age, he studied under Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg and Johan Ludvig Lund at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In 1848 he received a scholarship from the Academy to travel to Italy, but he had to postpone his journey for two years because of political unrest in Europe. When he was eventually able to leave Denmark, he travelled to Italy via the Netherlands, Germany and the Austrian Tyrol. He remained in Italy until 1852, producing some of his most notable paintings there.

The Oetzthal valley, south-east of Innsbruck and north of Trento, is around 40 miles long. Formed by the main chain of the Alps, it separates the Stubai Alps in the east from the Oetzthal Alps in the west and is bordered by some of Austria’s highest mountains. The southern end of the valley meets the Italian border, and in this painting we are most likely looking south towards Italy, perhaps from a vantage point near the town of Oetz.

Petersen was a prolific sketcher, both in Denmark, where he was particularly drawn to coastal towns, and on his travels through Europe. This sketch, painted on paper and subsequently mounted on canvas, was almost certainly made quite quickly on the spot, possibly with a view to producing a more finished painting at a later date. In the foreground, you can see where Petersen has swiftly indicated the outlines of the nearest mountains with pencil and washes of underpaint and has used zigzag lines for the fir trees. He has also noted the location and date. This lack of finish, particularly in the foreground, and the visible use of pencil were typical of the traditional technique for oil sketching, as artists sought to capture the principal forms and tones of a scene but without completing the painting. In this sketch, Petersen's attention is mainly focused on the mountains in the background, and on the play of light and atmospheric effects of the clouds. An almost clear blue sky, which slightly lightens near the horizon, forms a backdrop to the mountain peaks, with just a line of low cloud on the right. Using subtle tones of lavender and a pale blue-grey for the far mountains, he created an effect of distance and summer haze. As it is summer, there is only a little snow, which he painted with thin streaks of brilliant white.

Petersen's paintings have the clarity and technical skill of his teacher, Eckersberg, but also show the influence of French painting, particularly the naturalism and direct observation of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and the Barbizon artists, who often painted outdoors. The emphasis in this sketch on the mid and far distance over the foreground was also a feature of many of Corot’s sketches and studio paintings.

Style: Realist
A wine glass, a flask-shaped carafe, a knife and a plate of fruit are shown on a table, set against a flat dark background. The table is covered by a cloth decorated with flowers and blue stripes that helps create a sense of recession into depth. The tablecloth is also present in the artist's Still Life: Oysters, Fish and A Vase of Wild Flowers, making it possible that they were painted as pendants.

Monticelli painted fewer still lifes than he did any other subject, probably because he preferred to paint outdoors than work in the studio. Nevertheless, his landscapes are generally far less realistic than his still lifes. Most of Monticelli's still life paintings were made between 1875 and 1885 -- the majority, including this picture, were completed between 1878 and 1882. Here, the position of the table, which is placed parallel to the picture plane, recalls similar compositions by Cezanne painted in the late 1880s. It is worth remembering that Cezanne was an admirer of Monticelli's use of impasto (thickly applied paint) and the directional brushstrokes of his later work, and the two painters were good friends during the 1880s.

Technical investigation by the National Gallery has revealed how Monticelli used differently shaped brushes to describe the specific surfaces. For the overall composition he used medium-sized brushes, while smaller brushes were used for thicker impasto and finer details. This variation in the brushwork can be seen, for example, by comparing the texture of the tablecloth with that of the flask. It is also possible that the artist used a matchstick, dragged through the paint, to create some of the finer textural effects of the skin of the fruit. Together with the strong outlines, this technique enabled Monticelli to give the objects in his painting a solid, almost three-dimensional appearance. The artist used a mahogany wooden panel as support.

The picture was presented as part of the 'Harry Wearne Collection of Twelve Paintings by Monticelli' to the Tate Gallery in 1939. It was  transferred to the National Gallery in 1956.

Style: Impressionist
The Archangel Gabriel, evidently arriving at speed, raises his hand to gesture to the Virgin Mary, the end of whose cloak can be seen trailing across the floor at the bottom of this picture.

This was on the outside of the left wing of the Crucifixion Triptych, an altarpiece possibly made for a member of the Bollis family of Sint-Truiden. It is painted in grisaille and would have been visible when the altarpiece was closed. Together, the wings showed the Annunciation, the moment Gabriel told Mary she would bear a child.

Both wings have been split -- this painting remains on its original oak panel -- separating the images that appeared on the inside from those on the outside. One of the patrons once appeared on the inside. The whole triptych was probably produced in the workshop of Pieter Coecke van Aalst. It bears some resemblance to an Annunciation painted in Coecke's workshop for Willem van Brussel, Abbot of St Trudo, between 1516 and 1532.

Style: High Renaissance
These three saints stand on the left side of a large multi-panelled altarpiece painted for the high altar of the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Pratovecchio, Tuscany, by the Florentine artist Giovanni dal Ponte. Several panels from it are in our collection -- it's one of the most complete early Renaissance altarpieces that we have.

There is no very obvious explanation for the selection of saints in the pilaster and we don't know who the small saint in the roundel at the top is meant to be. A label identifies the saint in red as Cosmas, the twin of Saint Damian on the opposite pilaster. Both wear the red clothing of a late medieval doctor and carry a martyr's palm. According to their legend, Cosmas and Damian were Arab physicians and early Christian martyrs, who practised their profession without asking for fees. They were enormously popular throughout Europe, though especially in Florence where their cult was encouraged by the Medici, the city's ruling family.

In Italian medieval altarpieces smaller figures of saints were sometimes included as local references. Here Saint Francis at the bottom might be included as a compliment to the Camaldolite prior of Poppiena, a Florentine called Francesco, as well as an example of poverty and austerity. Francesco might well have been involved in organising the commissioning of the altarpiece itself: in other Italian altarpieces the officials who were in charge of the commission had their patron saint shown in the pilasters.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance