wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This is a fresco fragment from Correggio's Coronation of the Virgin, which he painted in the apse of the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista in Parma. It was part of a scene painted into the interior plaster on the church ceiling, and this fragment from the top layer of the plaster was removed and is now preserved in the National Gallery.

The fresco depicted Christ crowning the Virgin Mary in heaven surrounded by the evangelists, doctors of the church and infant angels (known in Italian as putti). Christ and the Virgin were seated beneath a flowering garden pergola against the golden sun of paradise. This head belonged to the angel reclining on a cloud at the feet of Saint John the Evangelist. The angel is looking back over his shoulder at us.

Correggio received final payment for the work in January 1524. The apse of the church was destroyed in the 1580s when the choir was enlarged, but the central figures of Correggio’s fresco showing the coronation of the Virgin were saved and are in the Galleria Nazionale, Parma. A replica of Correggio's fresco was painted in 1587 by Cesare Aretusi in the new apse of S. Giovanni Evangelista.

Style: High Renaissance
This picture by an unknown artist was once thought to portray Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, but a portrait of him in the collection of the Duke of Devonshire shows a different man. He looks out at us with a faint smile, his long, thick hair brushing his forehead and pale cheeks. His costume -- the elaborate high lace collar hugging his chin, lace cuffs and the white shirt showing through the slits in his sleeves -- seems to date the portrait to the second half of the 1630s.

The painting includes a small symbolic depiction of a tiny seated Cupid wearing a crown. He holds an arrow, appearing to use it to pierce the flaming heart on which he sits. Below him is a Latin motto: sic puer ille manet ('he is still young'). It's not clear what exactly this emblematic addition refers to.

Style: Baroque
On the surface, this appears to be simply a rather dark portrait of a sombre Venetian cardinal, although we don't know who he is. The painting is in very poor condition, with several layers of darkened varnish and losses of paint where the canvas was once folded. It has also been flattened, probably when it was lined.

Set against a very dark background, only the man's face can be seen in any detail. He has a melancholy, distant look. His hair is thinning on top and his beard is greying. However, there is more to this painting than meets the eye.

Beneath the bearded cardinal, X-ray images have revealed a portrait of a younger beardless man wearing a braided and buttoned tunic, a small ruff collar and what appears to be a small wig with rolling curls. The wig -- if that is what it's supposed to represent -- looks mid-eighteenth century in style, while the tunic suggests a late sixteenth-century date, creating something of a mystery. It seems more likely that this hidden portrait was painted in the sixteenth century and that what we are seeing is not a wig. Perhaps it was thought to be of poor quality or little interest and so the portrait of a serious and dignified cardinal was later painted on top of it, exactly following the outline of the head beneath.The remains of two lines of an inscription are visible in the X-ray images. The words are illegible but probably would have identified the original sitter and perhaps the office he held.

The folds of the cardinal's crimson robes are painted in boldly swept lines of lead white with red lake in a manner that may have been intended to look like Tintoretto's style. The painting was described as by Tintoretto when it was acquired in 1855 from the Barone Francesco Galvagna, who was the former president of the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Venice (the Venetian Academy of Fine Art). Galvagna had an impressive collection of Venetian old master paintings in his palace, and this was one of ten paintings the National Gallery bought from him. Unequal in quality and value to the other paintings (one of which was The Virgin and Child by the workshop of Giovanni Bellini), it was probably an extra picture that Galvagna added to the sale to make up the numbers.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Anthony van Dyck spent much of his twenties (1621–27) in Italy and in particular Genoa, where wealthy aristocratic merchants were keen to have themselves portrayed in a flattering and engaging manner. Many were full-length portraits of graceful figures who were clearly aware of their status. This is a more modest, half-length portrait, but the sitter still looks at us with a confident, unwavering gaze.

An inscription on the letter held by the sitter in his right hand – now barely visible – reads: 'Gio… Batt…Cattane'. It is the only clue to the identity of the depicted man. Recent genealogical research identifies him as Giovanni Battista Cattaneo Della Volta (1578–1640) of Genoa, son of Filippo Cattaneo di Isnardo (d. 1597), who had a successful career as a merchant in Antwerp while leaving his wife and family in Genoa. Not much is known about Giovanni Battista's life, who was one of Filippo’s three illegitimate sons born in the southern Netherlands. He lived in Genoa by 1594 and might have followed his father in pursuing a business career.

The Cattaneos were a rich and powerful Genoese family who included doges, cardinals, scholars, and statesmen. Giovanni Battista's relatives commissioned a series of family portraits from Van Dyck, probably including Portrait of a Woman and the much admired whole-length portrayals of his stepsister-in-law, Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo, and her two children (National Gallery of Art, Washington). The secret sale of the family portraits in 1907 and their export from Italy led to a scandal.

The painting's condition is compromised. There is reason to believe that it had been formerly enlarged and subsequently reduced in size. Recent conservation revealed the large extent of repaint and the remains of the original costume, including a fur lined cloak wrapped round the sitter's body, but its rendering is now difficult to appreciate. The work displays stylistic qualities that seem to betray the hand of Van Dyck himself.

Style: Baroque
This graceful Virgin Mary seems to embody both motherly love and maternal sorrow. Her beautiful hands hold the Christ Child almost tentatively, as if to prevent him floating away. She gazes sadly at her son, and he too looks out with wary, hooded eyes, as if aware of his future.

Mother and child are both human and divine. Mary's halo is inscribed in Latin with the angel Gabriel's greeting at the Annunciation (Luke 1: 28): Ave Maria Gratia Plena Dominus Tecum ('Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you'). The child seems weightless, just one foot resting on a gilded cushion. Delicate gold rays emanate from his head but he clasps his mother's hand with tiny fingers and embraces her with human affection.

Sienese art of the late fifteenth century held on to many of the traditions of an earlier era. Images of the Virgin and Christ Child were the most frequently produced type of painting, and artists sought to retain the devotional and decorative qualities of earlier depictions, such as Duccio's The Virgin and Child with Saint Dominic and Saint Aurea, and Patriarchs and Prophets, which had been consciously promoted by Sano di Pietro (1405--1481). Painters made multiple variations on the Byzantine glykophilousa or 'affectionate' type, which they modernised by updating details of costume and background.

Although he has replaced the traditional gold background with a flowery landscape, Benvenuto di Giovanni, who collaborated with Sano in the 1470s, was more interested in an ideal of feminine beauty than in anatomical accuracy. The Virgin's thick blonde hair, long straight nose and rosebud mouth all conform to contemporary tastes while harking back to depictions of the Virgin popular in Siena in the previous two centuries. He has also kept the flowing contours of earlier Sienese painting: the unbroken curve of the Virgin's cloak around her head is derived from Sano and his predecessors.

Newer influences are also evident, however, and Benvenuto has been described as the 'Sienese infidel' for leavening the great traditions of Sienese art with ideas taken from a range of sources. The pose and type of the Christ Child, with his high rounded forehead and chubby feet, are modelled upon Donatello's sculpture, while the muscles of his torso are reminiscent of artists trained by Francesco Squarcione, in particular Andrea Mantegna. Mary appears to stand at a window -- a window onto a visionary world, an idea perhaps derived from Netherlandish Renaissance painting.

A picture of the Virgin and Christ Child was an indispensable furnishing of a bedchamber in this period; this small panel was very likely made for such a setting. It probably hung in a tabernacle frame fairly high on the wall, so that the Virgin looked down on the viewer.

Style: Early Renaissance
A woman sits on a rocky ledge, her head gracefully turned toward a young naked child presented in the guise of a putto or  cupid. He appears to be trying to attract her attention. Her position on the bank, leaning on her basket and with one leg crooked up, looks more like a deliberately staged pose than a natural one. This painting is an early example of the rural subject matter that Millet began to explore in around 1845, and which by 1847 formed a substantial portion of his output.

The mid-1840s was also a period when his style was evolving away from what the critic Alfred Sensier termed his manière fleurie (flowery manner) characterised by light touches of colour. His figures gradually became more monumental in style and increasingly smoothly painted. This work can be described as transitional. Millet was still looking to such eighteenth-century artists as Watteau and Boucher, yet at the same time both the majesty of the woman’s profile and her position on the bank can be linked with Michelangelo, particularly his figures in the Sistine Chapel.

The woman’s uncovered shoulder can be compared to an earlier painting, Young Woman (1844–5, Art Institute of Chicago), painted at the height of his manière fleurie. The handling, on the other hand, with its bold, flowing brushwork, looks forward to his work of the later 1840s.  This is particularly true of the woman’s deeply shadowed blue-green head covering. Additionally, her heavily outlined profile gives her face a monumental, even sculptural quality. Throughout the picture Millet has used a red-brown paint to underpaint the shadowed areas, and has left it visible, for example in the deep fold of the skirt between the woman’s legs. He has overlaid this layer with thick paint, which in some areas becomes impasto. In areas where the upper layers are more thinly applied, the texture of the canvas shows through.

Style: Barbizon
A young girl, her clothes sewn with hundreds of pearls, gazes out at us. She seems to be playing with a golden object made of concentric rings. This is an armillary sphere, a celestial globe showing the movement of the heavenly bodies. Its interlocking circles are echoed in the decoration of her clothes.

The girl seems to be about nine or ten years old. The richness of her dress shows that she was royalty, and the blue parts of the sleeves were originally purple -- a royal colour. The shape of the sleeves and the curve of the neckline suggest a date of around 1530. The only young girls in the Low Countries who might have appeared in such splendid clothes at this date were Dorothea and Christina, daughters of Christian II, exiled King of Denmark. The family came to the Netherlands in 1523 when their father was deposed, and were cared for by Margaret of Austria. Gossart painted Dorothea with her siblings in 1526. In that picture (now in the Royal Collection, London) she has a high forehead, widely spaced eyes and frizzy hair -- like the sitter here.

Dorothea indicates a point approximately 55° north of the equator on the outer ring of her sphere. The latitude of Copenhagen is 56° north; she may well be directing our attention to her father's lost kingdom. Her sphere -- and the world -- might be upside down because of political turmoil which drove Christian and his family out of Scandinavia. These kind of visual puns and riddles were very popular in Renaissance painting.

Around the broad band in the middle of the sphere is a row of letters, with vowels and consonants grouped separately. This may be an anagram of the artist's name, although some of its letters are missing and others are included which do not appear in it. Gossart plays spatial games, too: Dorothea's bulky sleeves and cap overlap the fictive frame. The contrast between the flat green background and the three-dimensional modelling of her figure makes her seem to project outwards towards us, as though she has escaped the confines of the painting.

In 1535 Dorothea married the Count Palatine, Frederick II. Its possible that this painting was commissioned by Margaret of Austria, or one of the Habsburgs, for whom the artist often worked. Dorothea might have taken it with her to the Palatinate; a portrait of her attributed to Gossart was mentioned in an 1685 inventory of the castle of Heidelberg, hanging next to one of her husband. Heidelberg was sacked by the French in 1689, and the painting might have gone to France; French inscriptions on the back show it was in the country in about 1800.

Style: High Renaissance
At first sight this looks like a busy scene sixteenth-century street scene. A young man sells poultry and other produce in the corner of a market square. In the foreground, baskets and barrels are piled with pigeons, ducks, chickens and other birds, both alive and dead, as well as round cheeses, eggs and what seem to be pats of butter wrapped in white cloth. The stallholder holds two hens by their legs, feathers from their flapping wings drifting down and settling on the coop below. His pink jacket is surprisingly rich for a street vendor.

On the left, a smartly dressed young woman -- her detachable sleeves were once mauve, and her bodice and apron different shades of purple or purple-blue -- grasps a handsome cockerel by its feet. She turns and look confidently out at us, as if we are standing next to her at the stall, and puts her hand possessively on a large brass jug. She seems to have been painted from the same model that appears in several other paintings by Joachim Beuckelaer -- she is probably the woman on the left in The Four Elements: Earth. Next to her, an older woman in a red jacket also has a basket ready for shopping; several other ladies, their higher status shown by their black mantles, stand behind. In the background other stall holders and their customers mill about in front of the brick buildings of a typical Netherlandish town. One woman is transporting cheeses on a sled, while other people unload goods from boats drawn up at the quay.

There is more going on here than the daily shop. This is one of four large paintings in which the four elements -- earth, air, fire and water -- are represented by food, with biblical scenes in the background. Here we can see the prodigal son, in red trousers, disporting himself with the market women -- he's wasting 'his substance with riotous living... with harlots' (Luke 15: 13 and 15: 30).

Beuckelaer specialised in scenes like this, full of abundant and varied produce. This painting develops two themes: that of his Market Squares, made between 1561 and 1566; and that of his many pictures of Poultry Sellers, made between 1563 and 1569. His Two Women and a Man Selling Poultry dated 1564 (Palazzo Bianco, Genoa) is particularly close to our painting. Beuckelaer often signed his paintings in half-hidden places: here his signature and the date, 1570, are on the barrel below the brass jug.

None of the produce shown here is especially exotic -- this is the kind of food that was readily available in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, at least in normal times. Still, the food is very much the star of the show and was largely a way for Beuckelaer to show off his astonishing ability to convey texture, in the contrast between the gleaming brass and earthenware pots, the shimmering fabrics and the feathers and fur of the birds and animals.

Style: High Renaissance
Painted towards the end of Mignard's career, this is a portrait of Catherine-Thérèse, the Marquise de Seignelay (1662--1699), and two of her five sons. She was the widow of Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Colbert (1651--1690), the Marquis de Seignelay and eldest son of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619--1685), the most powerful minister in seventeenth-century France.

The Marquise and her children are painted as characters from Greek and Roman mythology. She is probably meant to be the sea goddess, Thetis. She could also be interpreted as Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, with her attributes of a scallop shell and strings of pearls. One of her children is dressed as the winged Cupid, the god of love, who kneels beside her carrying arrows. The other is shown as Achilles, a Greek hero of the Trojan War, his ornate armour, scabbard, helmet and shield reflecting his military skill. Achilles was usually portrayed as a mature warrior but this has been ignored given the age of the child -- probably Catherine-Thérèse's eldest, Marie-Jean Baptiste.

The figures' clothing is rich in detail. Catherine-Thérèse wears a gold-embroidered gown, with a jewelled belt and sandals. Her robe was painted using an expensive, high-quality ultramarine blue, as a show of her wealth and power; the amount of pigment used was unusual during this period. She holds a small cameo adorned with a portrait. Its importance shown by the way the children gaze towards it -- perhaps it is of her husband, who had died a year earlier. The red coral in Cupid's shell and in Catherine-Thérèse's hair symbolises the power to heal and protect. Many of the symbols reflect the importance of family relationships.

Shells are scattered at the water's edge, celebrating Seignelay's career in the French royal navy and his famed collection of rare objects. The figures are surrounded by sea and a smoking volcano -- perhaps Vesuvius, which Seignelay had witnessed on his travels to Italy.

This was painted in 1691, the year after Mignard became the official painter to King Louis XIV and senior official at the Académie Royale, positions formerly held by his great rival, Charles Le Brun (1619--1690). In 1914, on seeing the painting in Paris, the then Director of the National Gallery, Charles Holroyd, observed that it was 'a large cold picture dull in composition & colour but well painted... I recommend that it be declined. If accepted, it could only be hung downstairs' -- presumably where fewer visitors would see it.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
This view forms part of a group painted by Corot during his stay in north-east France during the spring and summer of 1871, when he left Paris during the upheaval of the Commune. The Marsh at Arleux was painted around the same time.

According to Corot's friend Alfred Robaut, this picture was painted during the month of May, when the artist was staying at his house in Douai. It is a bright day, the strokes of bright green in the foreground giving a spring-like tonality. The plain is bordered on the left by distant blue hills, and on the right the buildings of a village are suggested by a streak of brown paint overlaid with a line of grey. Just to the right of the centre stands a windmill, its sails visible against the sky. Windmills were a very common sight in the Pas de Calais region at this period. In the foreground is a horse, its head bowed, and the wagon from which this painting takes its name.

The canvas has two grounds or preparatory layers. Grounds were added to make canvas less absorbent and the application of paint smoother. The first, which is off-white, was almost certainly applied by the manufacturers of the canvas; the second, which is grey, was probably added by Corot himself. He has left areas of it exposed, and in the sky it forms the darkest tones of the clouds. To paint the sky Corot used a thick blue paint mixed with white. Using long strokes which closely follow the line of the horizon, he covered several trees, the ghostly forms of which can still be seen through the paint.

Style: Barbizon
A sandy path meanders through a landscape of dunes towards distant hills and mountains. An old man in blue with his back towards us occupies the foreground, a sack and water bottle lying beside him on the ground. He seems to be watching a young man on the other side of the path who bends to scoop water from a pool with a pottery shard.

Trees frame the path which draws us into the scene and leads our eyes towards the distance. The small town and several people in the background are roughly sketched, conveyed using simple dots of paint. The buildings and people in the background, and the dappled areas of light and shade, evoke the Roman Campagna, in which Poussin often travelled to make studies. Blue mountains merge with the cloudy sky at dusk, another technique to create a feeling of distance: far-off mountain ranges seem blue because distance alters the way colours appear to us. The brown-green tones of the pond are carried through into the landscape beyond. Poussin attempts to create the reflection of the trees on the water's surface, although this lacks skill and reflects the early stage of his career. The edges of the leaves and branches catch the sunlight, and overlapping brushstrokes convey their different types.

Poussin's work was also inspired by art from classical antiquity. The symmetry of the leaning trees, the blue sky and sandy landscape taking up equal areas and the central path give the composition order and balance. The men's muscular and idealised physiques recall antique statuary.

This painting is not based on any known story, although it loosely echoes the life of the Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes (about 400--325 BC) who advocated a life without possessions and luxury: he threw away his cup on seeing a young boy use his hands to drink water. It might also hint at the philosophy of the Stoics, who thought that in order to become a good person you had to live according to certain virtues, including wisdom, courage, justice and moderation. These themes were revived in the seventeenth century and became popular with Poussin and his patrons.

Poussin painted this work for one of his most important patrons, Cassiano dal Pozzo, and around the same time as Landscape with travellers resting. They are among Poussin's earliest landscape paintings, made in the late 1630s. On the back of the canvas of both paintings are labels indicating that in 1739 Cosimo Antonio dal Pozzo gave the pictures to his daughter Maria Laura. These works were probably not intended to be displayed as a pair, but both include a person sitting, leg outstretched, in the foreground, and the paths in each painting recede in opposite directions.

Style: Baroque, Academic