wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Propped up on a pink cushion, a young, fair-haired woman -- the ideal of beauty in Renaissance Florence -- gazes directly at us. Her hair rests in springy waves on her shoulders, and her loose white robe is gathered beneath her breasts and falls in rippling folds over her legs, revealing their form. It is probably intended to recall the chiton or tunic worn by the sculpted goddesses of classical antiquity.

She seems oblivious to the three chubby little boys playing around her, all clutching at handfuls of pink roses which come from a basket at her feet. One, beneath her arm, holds a bunch of black grapes while scattering his flowers on the cushion. A pomegranate tucked beneath her arm is partly cracked to reveal its seeds. The fruit, the flowers and her idealised beauty suggest the woman may represent fertility, which the pomegranate with its many seeds was often associated. The long horizontal format of the painting, as well as the classically clothed reclining blonde and the playful children, recalls Botticelli's Venus and Mars.

The picture was in fact purchased as a Botticelli from the same London sale as Venus and Mars in 1874, when Botticelli was hugely popular with English collectors. The German art historian Waagen thought it was ‘one of the most remarkable of Sandro Botticelli’s mythological pictures. The forms are grand in conception, though the head, hands, and feet of the goddess show that they were taken from a living model.’ It was the more expensive and famous of the two pictures, which seems strange today, when Venus and Mars is recognised as one of Botticelli's masterpieces. At the turn of the twentieth century the picture was connected with another Florentine painter called Jacopo del Sellaio, but this idea did not last for long.

We do not actually know who the artist was, but the picture may be based on Venus and Mars. Like that painting, it may have been placed in the room of a newly wed Florentine couple in order to encourage fertility and, therefore, the birth of many children to carry on the family name.

Style: High Renaissance
Children play within a loggia, pulling along a girl on a toy cart, while a nurse who holds an infant looks on. This is the first of a series of four canvases by Lancret (all in the collection) which represent the Four Ages of Man - 'Childhood', ‘Adolescence’, 'Youth', and 'Old Age'. The series, was engraved by Nicolas de Larmessin III; these engravings were announced as issued in July 1735, and it may be assumed that the pictures were painted not long before.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
The scene shows the violent biblical episode in which King Herod orders a massacre of all children under the age of two in an attempt to kill the newborn Christ, believing him to be a threat to his rule.

A soldier kneels, about to plunge his dagger into the infant lying on its back. Mocetto took this pose from one of his own engravings, The killing of the Sow (British Museum, London), which shows the figure naked and about to ritually sacrifice a pig; he holds it steady by the ear. Nearby a woman raises her arms in horror at the sight of her dead children, their bodies piled up before her. Her pose is copied from the figure of a woman mourning Christ in The Entombment, an engraving by Mantegna (Albertina, Vienna). Another woman tries to protect her child from the soldier in green who has already grabbed its arm; her head and turban are copied from another female mourner in The Entombment. The position of the two children at the woman's feet is an exact copy of the two sleeping children in Mantegna's engraving of Bacchanal with a Wine Vat (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The references show Mocetto's knowledge and admiration of Mantegna's work, as well as the idea that the 'massacre of the innocents', as the slaughter is known, prefigured Christ's own violent execution.

This panel was once joined with another painting in our collection, and formed the left-hand part of the composition. Both pictures feature a variety of architectural features inspired by classical buildings, a setting popularised by Mantegna. This one shows a lofty marble archway, indented with niches which dwarf the figures. The arcade that runs along the right edge of the picture is topped by a balustrade of slender round columns -- this appears to continue in the other half of the composition, where it runs along to top of the image.

Style: High Renaissance
This large panel is the main part of an altarpiece painted by Carlo Crivelli in 1491 for the Ottoni family chapel in the Franciscan church at Matelica, in the Italian Marches. Its predella is also in our collection.

The Virgin, to whom the chapel was dedicated, sits on a marble throne and is crowned as the Queen of Heaven. The Christ Child on her knee holds an apple, symbolising the fruit with which Eve tempted Adam  in the Garden of Eden.  A swallow, the rondine of the painting's title, is perched above the Virgin's head. Because they reappeared every spring, swallows symbolised the Resurrection.

The saints on either side of her reflect the concerns of the patrons, one a churchman, the other a soldier. Saint Jerome, in his cardinal's robes, carries the books of the Bible which he translated into Latin; on them, a model church balances precariously. Rays of light come from its open door, suggesting the light which Jerome's writings cast on holy scripture. Opposite him is Saint Sebastian, dressed as a medieval knight, an arrow pinched delicately between his fingers. Sebastian was a Roman solider and a secret Christian. When his faith was discovered he was shot with arrows, but did not die.

Jerome looks intently at Christ and points at his model church, asking for Christ's mercy on the Church. In response, Jesus points to his mother -- a symbol of the Christian Church. Sebastian, in contrast, looks out at us: he personifies the Ottoni family's ideal of the perfect Christian knight. In the Middle Ages Sebastian's arrow wounds were related to the black swellings of bubonic plague, which ravaged Western Europe from the mid-fourteenth century. Here, his down-turned arrow symbolises his role as protector from the disease, which had hit Matelica in the 1480s.

With clothing, then as now, indicating social position, the Virgin is dressed in the height of late fifteenth-century Italian fashion. Her sleeves are made of brocaded cloth of gold, laced at wrist and elbow, slashed to reveal her linen shift. People who lived in Matelica would have been especially interested in luxury fabrics, as the town was a centre of textile manufacture and the Ottonis themselves owned wool, silk and dye workshops.

Crivelli himself was fascinated by decorative textiles -- they appear in many of his paintings, like The Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Sebastian -- and the Virgin, her throne and even the back wall are draped in rich silk. He was an economical artist, though: look closely and you can see that he has used the same design for both the silks draped over the back wall, and that the cloth of honour is repeated in Saint Sebastian's sleeve. Like earlier Italian artists such as Fra Angelico, Crivelli clearly had a stock of designs, probably drawings, which he recycled and reworked, creating an impression of variety by giving them different textures and colouring and changing their scale. Here, the two silks hanging on either side of the throne show different portions of the same design and are in different colours, making the repetition less obvious.

Style: Early Renaissance
The Virgin Mary, bareheaded and richly dressed, holds the naked Christ Child, who rests on a white cushion on a ledge of purple-grey veined stone. The gold that edges her blue overdress is studded with cabochon, or uncut, jewels, and her underdress is of cloth-of-gold. Her bare head and the richness of her dress remind us that she is queen of heaven -- queens wore their hair loose and uncovered -- while the tiny gold rays around her head stress her divinity. She has an almost invisible transparent scarf around her neck, tucked in to her underdress.

Behind her is a blue and gold brocade cloth of honour edged with strips of green silk, such as would have hung behind medieval kings and queens. Its pattern appears in other paintings by Memling -- notably his Triptychs of the Two Saint Johns (Memling Museum, Bruges) -- and the motifs are the same or almost the same size. Memling ran a large and well-organised workshop, and tended to recycle designs based on workshop patterns with little variation.

The figures of the Virgin and infant Christ also resemble those in other Memling works. The rather restricted composition can be paralleled in his Man of Sorrows in the Arms of the Virgin (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) of 1475. The Virgin's shoulders are very narrow, but in this and in other respects she resembles the Virgin in the centre panel of the Triptych of Jan Floreins (Memling Museum, Bruges) of 1479. Our painting has sometimes been thought to be by a follower rather than Memling himself, but the very detailed and delicate painting technique is close to that of The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors (The Donne Triptych). Close inspection reveals that the white catchlights in Christ's left eye are made up of seven separate brushstrokes.

We are not sure whether the painting was once part of a triptych or stood alone; the Christ Child could be blessing a donor on his right. The panel is almost exactly the same size as Memling's portraits of Willem Moreel, a prominent Bruges politician, merchant and banker, and his wife Barbara (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels), which were certainly the wings of a triptych. But it is unlikely they flanked this painting, as the Virgin is rather smaller than the two Moreels, and the compositions do not balance. Perhaps Memling was simply using panels of a standard size. Our painting could equally have stood alone, with the infant Christ gesturing and speaking to the viewer rather than a painted donor.

The bare strip of wood around the sides would originally have been covered by the frame, now missing. The reverse is covered with black paint. As this does not quite extend to the edges, it may have been applied when the painting was still in its original frame.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
This painting was made for private worship, and the donor who commissioned it is shown kneeling in prayer towards the majestic figure of Saint Catherine. Catherine, shown wearing a crown, was a princess from Alexandria. According to the Golden Legend, she was persecuted by Roman Emperor Maxentius for her Christian faith, though she eventually converted him. Behind her is the spiked wheel that she was tied to in an attempt to kill her, a torture she miraculously survived. The sword is a reminder of her eventual beheading.

The donor's tonsure (partly shaved hair) shows that he was a cleric. It's possible that he worked for Pope Alexander VI: his robes here were painted with a mixture of red and blue pigments (specifically red lake and azurite) to create a lilac or purple hue, a colour worn by those who held an official post in the papal court. Pope Alexander was particularly devoted to Saint Catherine, and she features prominently in the Vatican apartments decorated for him at around the time this panel was made. The patron, then, might have been showing his loyalty to the pope through this image. He may be Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos in Cyprus: his features resemble the profile view of Pesaro in a painting Titian made in 1502 (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp), which shows him being presented to Pope Alexander VI. It was Alexander who made Pesaro bishop in 1495 and our picture may commemorate that event.

Catherine is shown against a gold banner painted in minute detail, which highlights her divinity by separating her from the landscape background. If you look closely you can see individual buildings in the town beyond the river -- and even some on top of the enormous mountains which loom above it. They appear blue and hazy to give the impression that they are a long way away, a technique called aerial perspective made famous by Leonardo.

The picture was once thought to be painted by an associate of Pintoricchio -- a member of his workshop -- but after it was cleaned in 2008 its true quality was revealed. Pintoricchio used a variety of methods of applying gold leaf to enrich the decoration. The upper part of the picture is painted over gold leaf, and paint has been scratched away in places so that the leaves of the trees appear to reflect a golden sunlight -- a technique called sgraffito. The decoration of Catherine's robe has been applied using mordant (an oil-based adhesive) to fix the gold leaf over painted areas. Her sword once gleamed with silver leaf which has now degraded.

Style: Early Renaissance, High Renaissance
Scenes set in brothels (called bordeeltjes in Dutch) were a popular genre in seventeenth-century painting; in English, they have come to be known, rather euphemistically, as 'Merry Companies'. But euphemisms can’t disguise the sort of merrymaking we are seeing here. If the two young women seated on the laps of their clients don’t make things clear enough, Hendrick Pot has included a much older woman right in the centre of the picture: she is the one who runs the brothel.

He has laid plenty of other clues. Clearly there's a lot of drinking going on: as well as the wine glasses around the table, we can’t miss the wine flagon and cooler left on the floor to the left. The group has been tucking into oysters too, as we can see from the empty shells scattered on the plates and one which has dropped on the floor. Both oysters and alcohol were believed to have aphrodisiac qualities, as was tobacco -- a point underlined here by the way the old woman is using her forefinger to push it into in the bowl of her pipe. This would have been interpreted as an obscene gesture. The dog licking the man's fingers in the bottom right corner is also probably suggestive of licentiousness.

Although the men are the paying customers, it is the women who are clearly in charge in this picture. The two younger ones both look directly at us with a knowing glance, and the brothel-keeper watches on wryly. The men are either too inebriated or too distracted to notice who is running the show, or that we are watching them. The two on the right appear to be extremely drunk. One has knocked over a glass on the table in front of him and his eyes seem to be rolling as he tries to tempt the woman to take some wine. The other, in the foreground, is so far gone that he is holding his glass in a precarious position against his chest. The third man, meanwhile, is getting excited to the point where the woman on his lap is having to hold his hand back. He has already half removed his jacket.

We are clearly intended to be amused by what is going on, but that doesn’t mean that Hendrick Pot expected his customers to approve of such behaviour. As well as entertainments, pictures of this sort were understood to be cautioning against high living, manipulative women -- as Pot would have seen it -- and the consequences of immorality. In this painting, he also seems to be reminding the viewer of the transience of youth and beauty. The brothel-keeper's sunken cheeks and wrinkled face are in clear contrast to the fresh complexions of the young women. The subtext is that it's all very well having fun when you are young, but eventually you will have to face up to old age and death. And, according to the beliefs of what was a highly religious society, death was inevitably followed by judgement at the gates of heaven.

Style: Baroque
Aert van der Neer was an expert at creating a sense of depth in his landscapes. Often, as here, he used the sinuous path of a river or inlet receding into the distance to emphasise the effect. In this picture he has gone a step further, using figures to reinforce that recession and to inject a sense of movement and progression to the scene.

Lit up by bright evening sunshine, a horse and cart is about to pass us, after apparently fording or following the river. The horse obviously isn’t enjoying the experience and hunches its head under the peasant’s switch, while its foal trots ahead. They are followed by a woman carrying a basket and jug while, in the middle distance, two more horses and carts seem to pick their way along the same route. In some landscapes, the viewer is given an elevated prospect; here, the artist has positioned us as bystanders, watching the traffic as it emerges from the distance and passes on its way.

Style: Baroque
The Virgin Mary in this painting is majestic -- she looks directly at us while holding the infant Christ in her left arm. The Christ Child, equally regal, makes a blessing gesture towards the figures below.

The Virgin's standing pose is unusual for an image of this size. It shows off her elegant velvet gown, which is woven with a pattern and lined and trimmed with ermine fur. If you look closely, you'll see it is edged with gold tassels. Her large jewelled crown sits on top of a semi-transparent veil. Christ's elaborate outfit, complete with fur-lined cape, is a miniature version of his mother's but includes even more gold embroidery.

The details of their clothes reflect fashionable outfits of the period -- this is clothing that wealthy Florentines would have aspired to wear in the mid-fifteenth century. The Virgin's belt is high on her waist, a trend that was fashionable in the late 1440s or early 1450s. The angels surrounding the Virgin and Child wear patterned hose (stockings) and fur-trimmed tunics with sleeves decorated with gold thread -- clothes that resemble men's fashion in Florence in the 1440s and up until the early 1450s. If it weren't for the tiny wings which poke out at their shoulders, we might think they were page boys attending to a queen.

The other references to the divine are equally subtle. Cherubim are inscribed into the gold background rather than painted. The flowers held by two of the angels are carnations, which symbolised the nails of the Crucifixion (they smell like cloves, which look like nails). Their Greek name, dianthos, means 'flower of God'.

The secular qualities of the image may indicate that this work was painted for a domestic setting rather than a church. It is possible that the painting was made for someone who would have placed it in their home to worship privately. These sorts of private images of the Virgin and Child were often made for women -- in this case, perhaps a wealthy woman who would have been able to identify more closely with the Virgin if she resembled one of her contemporaries. There is some evidence that images like this were given as wedding gifts.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
Willem Claesz. Heda uses muted colours to show the ingredients of a meal, with a focus on quality, not quantity. Everything on the table is expensive: this is the meal of a rich man. The white table cloth is made of damask, a luxurious silk fabric. Lemons were brought in from the Mediterranean, the porcelain blue and white plate came from China, and the pepper, spilt on a pewter plate, arrived in the Dutch Republic on a merchant ship from the East Indies.

The silver, pewter and glass vessels were probably made in the Dutch Republic but were still very desirable objects. Rock salt was a luxury and appears like a treasure on a polished pewter pedestal. Even a crab was costly. In keeping with Heda's restrained colour palette, the crab is grey-brown rather than the bright pink they turn when cooked. The silver tazza (a shallow ornamental dish on a stem) is on its side, partly to break up the many upright lines at the back of the composition but also to show the detailed decoration on its underside.

Heda's command of perspective is evident in how he shows the knife on the pewter plate that's almost dropping off the table close to us. He's creating the illusion of a real table with real objects. The ivory handle of the knife also protrudes into our space as if it were real. The blade is inserted into the mouth of a paper cone from which the peppercorns have spilled -- this was the normal way of packaging spices. This particular cone has been made from a page torn from an almanac, a calendar of significant dates.

In another of his still life paintings, Still Life with a Lobster, Heda shows this same cone screwed up and put aside. This may mean that the painting is intended as a kind of vanitas (a still life that shows how fragile and transient life and its treasures are) though this isn't certain in either picture. Heda also shows a large pewter pot with a spout shaped like a mythical beast -- a pot that also appears in Still Life with a Nautilus Cup by Heda's son Gerrit, together with the salt pedestal. Father and son worked together, Gerrit probably as assistant, which suggests that some of the items used were studio props.

Style: Baroque
The head of Saint John the Baptist rests in a white ceramic footed dish on a narrow stone ledge. Salome’s mother Herodias persuaded her to ask King Herod for the head of John the Baptist as a reward for her dancing (Matthew 14: 1--12). Herodias held a grudge against the Baptist for saying that her marriage to Herod was unlawful. The saint was beheaded, and his head was then presented to Salome on a charger.

The grisly head stands out starkly against the plain black background. The Baptist’s expression is peaceful despite his violent end, his lips slightly parted, revealing his teeth, and his lashes resting softly against his cheek. His curls spread over the rim of the dish, which is marked with smudges and spots of his blood. The highlights on his curls and facial hair have been picked out in fine gold lines that echo the delicate gold designs on his halo.

There is some evidence that Leonardo painted a 'Head of Saint John the Baptist on a Charger' during his years in Milan, and there are many early sixteenth-century Milanese pictures of this subject which, like this one, may have been closely derived from Leonardo. Andrea Solario painted a version of the design in 1507, probably for the Cardinal d'Amboise (1460--1510), which is now in the Louvre in Paris. The cardinal was the prime minister of the French king Louis XII, and responsible for increasing French power in Italy, including the conquest of the Milanese territories. In a demonstration of his virtuosity, Solario depicts the reflection of John the Baptist's ear in the polished surface of the dish, something barely attempted by the artist of the National Gallery's painting.

The increase in the demand for such images in Milan at the beginning of the sixteenth century seems to relate to the transfer of the headquarters of the Order of the Knights of Saint John in Lombardy to Milan in 1496. It also relates to the presence in Milan of Cardinal d'Amboise and his nephew Charles II d'Amboise, governor of the city from 1500 and 1511, who had a particular devotion to Saint John the Baptist. Charles II d'Amboise became a friend of Leonardo da Vinci, who lived the last years of his life close to the royal castle of Amboise in France

The painting is inscribed in gold letters: MDXI / II.K[A]L.FEB. This translates as '1511, two days before the Kalends of February' -- meaning 31 January 1511. The date on the painting is the day of the death of Charles II d'Amboise, and the painting may have been commissioned to commemorate that event.

Style: High Renaissance