wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This life-size portrait of a man on a rearing horse is an extremely unusual painting. It is one of the largest ever made by Rembrandt (only two of his surviving canvases are bigger) and one of only two life-size equestrian portraits of ordinary citizens in the history of Dutch art. Apart from a much smaller picture known as The Polish Rider (Frick Collection, New York), it is also one of only two equestrian paintings made by the artist.

Rembrandt’s lack of experience in depicting horses may explain the rather stiff, sketchy figure of the animal here. He has drawn our attention instead to the horseman, emphasised by his bright yellow jerkin, fancy gloves, shimmering sleeves and plumed hat. Much of the rest of the painting is, like the horse, only sketched in, often quite broadly using bold, black outlines. This makes the rather gloomy background difficult to interpret. The rider seems either to be leading or taking part in a procession which winds around a stretch of water behind him. It is possible to make out the prow or stern of a boat in the left foreground. Also on the left is the roughly sketched facade of a building; it may be the Heiligewegspoort, one of the gates to the city of Amsterdam (now demolished). In front of this is a coach with a bright red and yellow interior carrying three passengers. There's a groom on the running board, and the heads of the driver and two coachmen at the rear are also just visible. The coach is part of the procession, as are the two (or possibly three) riders on horseback in the right background.

Although he is not named on the painting, most experts agree that this is a portrait of Frederik Rihel, a prosperous businessman who was born in Strasbourg in 1621 and moved to Amsterdam in 1642. He was a member of the city’s civic guard and was eventually promoted to the prestigious post of ensign, or standard bearer. This identification is based on the inventory of Rihel's property drawn up after his death in 1681, which included a 'portrait of the deceased on horseback by Rembrandt'. Since this is Rembrandt’s only recorded equestrian portrait (The Polish Rider probably isn’t a portrait) and Rihel was known to be a keen horseman, the evidence is convincing. The horse’s elaborate harness and most of the rider’s clothing also seem to be listed in the inventory (for example: 'a variety of sashes some with silver and gold fringes and with matching gloves and a leather jerkin embroidered with gold thread'). Most likely, Rihel commissioned the portrait, which is dated 1663, to commemorate his membership of the Amsterdam Guard of Honour which accompanied the entry of Prince William of Orange into Amsterdam in 1660.

In 2008, an X-ray scan of the painting revealed another, apparently unrelated, composition beneath the portrait now visible: a full-length figure of a man, turned at 90 degrees to the canvas. This suggests an unwanted or unfinished canvas was reused, which wasn’t uncommon in Rembrandt's studio, although this is by far the largest example known, and appears to be the only instance in which Rembrandt adopted this practice for a commissioned portrait.

Style: Baroque
A young  man, naked but for a red cloak and an animal skin, is seated on a rock in the foreground, playing a pipe. This is Apollo, Greek god of the sun and of music and art, dressed as a shepherd. As a punishment for killing the Cyclops, Jupiter sent Apollo to be herdsman to Admetus, king of Pherae in Thessaly (Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2).  Apollo, distracted from his duties by his music, failed to notice Mercury stealing the king's cattle, shown in the background.

This large fresco is one of ten which were painted by Domenichino and assistants to decorate a magnificent garden pavilion at the Villa Aldobrandini, in Frascati near Rome. Eight of them were transferred to canvas and are now in our collection. The frescoes were in the Stanza di Apollo, a large room in the right-hand wing, which also contained an elaborate fountain with figures of Apollo and the Muses.

The iconographical scheme was designed by Domenichino's friend, Giovanni Battista Agucchi, both to glorify the Aldobrandini family and to express their philosophical and religious ideas. Many of the scenes, including this one, were taken from the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses. In a very intellectual programme, Agucchi used classical stories to symbolise contemporary ideas. Apollo was not just the god of the sun but also of the music and the arts, and the Stanza was a temple to the arts.

This fresco was originally on the right-hand side of the room. Domenichino designed the overall programme and individual compositions, but much of the actual painting was left to assistants, especially on this side of the room, since by the time work got this far he was busy with other projects. The fresco's poor condition makes it impossible to tell Domenichino's hand apart from that of his assistants. The composition of the scene is unlike any of the others: it is not arranged in recessed planes with trees and hills framing the sides, and figures in the centre distance. Unusually, there are no surviving preparatory drawings for this painting, though this may be purely an accident of survival and does not necessarily indicate that Domenichino was less involved in its design.

Style: Baroque, Academic
This panel depicts Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, a thirteenth-century mystic, and an unidentified bishop saint. It formed part of an altarpiece of which at least two other fragments are also in the National Gallery's collection. It was positioned to the left of a central panel that depicts the Virgin and Child, opposite an image of Saints Bartholomew and Monica to the right.

Saint Nicholas and the bishop stand side by side on an angular step that encloses a patch of grass. Nicholas, carrying his traditional attributes of a book and lily, wears the habit of the Augustinian Order, which indicates that the altarpiece was made for an Augustinian church. He makes direct eye contact with the viewer, suggesting that the original altar was dedicated to him. Canonised in 1446 by Pope Eugenius IV, Nicholas became one of the most popular saints in Italy, as evidenced by the number of legends surrounding his virtuous life. His remains are enshrined in Tolentino, a small town near Macerata in the central Italian region of the Marche, but devotion to the saint went far beyond his hometown. It is possible that a small panel showing him rescuing a man condemned to death (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) once appeared beneath this one.

Scholars have speculated that this panel came from the Florentine church of S. Spirito, in which case the bishop, whose left hand is raised in blessing, may represent Saint Zenobius. There is, however, little evidence for this claim. Another possibility is that it came from the Tuscan hilltop town of Montepulciano, where it was recorded in a private collection in the early nineteenth century. It has also been said that it formed part of the same altarpiece as two other panels by Zanobi Machiavelli, but while their composition and gold grounds correspond, their shapes and sizes do not.

The pointed arch shape of the panels is typical of Italian panel painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as is the decorated gold background. But by around 1470, when Zanobi Machiavelli painted this panel, both the shape and the gold background would have appeared slightly old-fashioned -- they had been superseded by naturalistic landscape settings and rectangular picture fields. Pala altarpieces, where the Virgin and Child with saints are depicted on a single unified surface rather than on separate panels, had also become the norm. The fact that Machiavelli did otherwise paint pala altarpieces suggests that the unknown patron of this work demanded the pointed-arch, multi-panelled format. The wooden framing elements that would have surrounded this panel to create a separate compartment are now lost, but they can be imagined on the basis of surviving examples.

Style: Early Renaissance
Like Holt Bridge on the River Dee, the other painting from this pair, this is a view of the valley where England and Wales meet. For a long time the viewpoint of this picture was unknown, but it is probably the 'View near Chester' that Wilson exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1761. It was most likely painted downstream from the village of Holt in Denbighshire in North Wales, from a viewpoint five miles to the east of Gresford. The towers of Chester Cathedral and St John's Church are just visible in the background. The hills in the distance may be in Lancashire, beyond the River Mersey. Wales is on the left of the river and England is on the right.

The style of the landscape is inspired by the work of the seventeenth-century French neoclassical painter, Claude, who depicted views of the countryside outside Rome. His paintings were very fashionable in Britain when this landscape was painted. In Wilson's picture it is sunset, and a golden light illuminates the clouds and meadows, infusing the composition with an atmosphere of warmth and stillness. This quality of evening light was also favoured by Claude in paintings such as A Seaport.

Wilson's trees cast long shadows over the grass and the sun is in the west, suggesting that it is the end of the day. He has made the native English oak trees in the foreground tall and slender with thin, spreading canopies like the trees of the Roman countryside that Claude paints in pictures such as Landscape with David at the Cave of Adullam.

A group of figures and a dog occupy the brow of the hill in the foreground of Wilson's painting. A woman stands holding a baby, with a dog beside her, while two men sit on the ground. One appears to hold a stick and may be the herdsman of the cattle grazing nearby. It is as though the shepherds and nymphs commonly included in Claude's neoclassical landscapes, such as Landscape with Goatherd and Goats, have been translated here into contemporary but timeless English country folk. The inclusion of the figures helps us to locate our own viewpoint on the scene.

Style: Academic, Neoclassical, Georgian
This panel, along with its pair, framed the predella of an altarpiece made for the church of San Domenico, Fiesole, near Florence. Visually they were a continuation of the predella but they were actually painted on the bases of the pilaster panels. The grain of the wood they are painted on tells us this: it is vertical, like that of the pilasters.

This panel follows the pattern of the predella panels by arranging the figures in three rows, with the women kneeling on the bottom row. The figures were important members of the Dominican community, known as the 'Beati' ('Blessed'). These were the Dominican friars and nuns who were venerated for having lived particularly holy lives, and some would eventually become saints. For now, though, they do not have haloes like saints; golden rays shine around their heads instead.

This panel appears at the right of the predella, which has Christ at its centre -- so, to Christ's left, a less honourable position than his right. This is because the panel included not only nuns and monks who had taken vows and lived within the Dominican community, away from the non-religious world, but also tertiaries (on the front row). Tertiaries made a promise to the Dominican Order but had fewer responsibilities and could live outside the convent. Their habits (or uniform) are slightly different.

The men in this panel are mostly elderly with white hair. They all have tonsures -- partially shaved heads, a sign of devotion -- and wear the black and white habit of the Dominicans. Neat inscriptions on their tunics -- a 'b' for Beatus followed by their name -- identify them, but they also carry objects that tell us who they are. One, in the centre of the middle row, carries a miniature church on the palm of his hand. He has been identified as John of Salerno (d.1242) who founded the Dominican Order in Florence and was an important figure for the church in Fiesole, a town not far from Florence.

In the opposite panel, one man is shown inscribing Jesus's name on his chest; mirroring him here is a man labelled as Jacob who holds his heart in his hand -- he points to the opening in his tunic where the wound is still fresh. The heart is inscribed with Jesus's name in gold lettering. The Blessed Peter on the second right in the top row has the same letters inscribed in gold in his mouth.

Unlike the panel opposite there is a sense of movement in this picture, partly due the gestures the tertiaries on the bottom row make. Catherine of Siena, who was canonised (made a saint) in 1461, is at the front, her name inscribed along her raised arm. The two tertiaries behind, like her, raise their hands towards the central scene of Christ resurrected. Behind them are the only two figures in the panel without rays around their heads, dressed in the habit of male Dominican tertiaries. They might be Jacopo and Domenico degli Agli, the sons of Barnaba degli Agli, who paid for the altarpiece.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
This picture is closely related to a larger work of the same subject in the monastery of San Lorenzo in the Escorial, which El Greco probably painted for Philip II, King of Spain -- one of the artist's first commissions upon his arrival in Spain. It's not clear whether our picture was painted in preparation for the Escorial one or if it was produced as an independent work, perhaps intended as a gift to Diego de Castila, El Greco's friend, patron and dean of the cathedral in Toledo, where the artist had moved by 1577.

The picture celebrated the victory of the so-called Holy League -- the Venetians, the Spanish Empire and papal states under Pius V -- against the Turks at the naval battle of Lepanto, in south-western Greece, in 1571.  The Holy League was established, as Philip II wrote to his minister on 12 April 1571, 'to defend the holy name' of Jesus. Indeed, the letters 'IHS' -- an abbreviation of IHSOUS, the Greek spelling of 'Jesus' -- in the sky are the painting's main focus, and seem to glow with a celestial light. The name of Jesus was believed to have power over non-Christians and its veneration was promoted by Saint Paul.

In the foreground, kneeling on a carpet that seems to be floating in space, are the key figures in the battle against the Turkish forces. The man in a gold robe with his back to us is Doge Alvise I Mocenigo, the elected head of the Venetian state. To his right, dressed in black with a white ruff, is Philip II; opposite him is Pope Pius V. The figure with outstretched arms next to the Pope may be Don Juan of Austria, the fleet commander -- in the Escorial painting his pose makes more sense as he leans on a sword.

To the right is a monstrous open mouth that looks like the opening to a dark cave. Pointed teeth hang down like stalactites. This is Leviathan, the mythical sea monster of the Old Testament, swallowing up the souls cursed to hell. The tiny figures inside are dark and shadowy, and there are skeletons among them.

In the space between the two groups is a bridge leading towards an archway. Souls pass through here to purgatory, where they will be cleansed of their sins and await their ascent to heaven. By including visions of hell, purgatory and heaven, El Greco turns the scene into an epic vision of humanity's judgement and the promise of salvation.

The picture was designed to be portable, rather than hung on a wall -- the reverse is painted to imitate wood grain -- and it was probably used to aid private prayer.

Style: High Renaissance
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 and doctors of the church, and little angels known in Italian as putti. Christ and the Virgin were seated beneath a flowering garden pergola, which revealed that the scene was set in paradise.

The head belonged to the angel to the left of the Virgin, who held Saint Benedict's crosier. You can just make out the angel's fingers in the bottom right-hand corner of the fresco fragment. The line running up the side of his face is the staff of the crosier. Correggio's black chalk drawing for this angel's head is in Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford.

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
In the past, this painting was titled Mother and Child, as the figures in this very natural image of a mother breastfeeding show no obvious signs of holiness. However, most women of the time who were wealthy enough to own a painting of this quality would not have nursed their own infants but would have paid women known as 'wet nurses' to breastfeed their babies. Paintings of an anonymous mother and child were rare in sixteenth-century Italy, so the subject here is almost certainly the Virgin and Child. The choice of this subject for a painting was significant, and emphasised the Virgin's humility, her devotion, and the sanctity of her milk.

The Virgin gazes at the infant Christ who sits on a white cloth her on lap and feeds from her breast. The naked child is encircled in his mother's arms and twists away from us. We see very little of his face, just his brown hair and rosy red cheek, which echoes the red fringe of the Virgin's brown headscarf over her shoulder. Our eye is drawn from the Virgin's delicate fingers, up the line of her child's back and to the expression of tenderness on her face, which is the painting's focus.

Titian appears to be citing a very similar design by Michelangelo, preserved in a large drawing at Casa Buonarotti in Florence, although it is unclear how he would have seen it. His twisting Christ Child and powerfully built Virgin certainly evoke the grandeur and physical strength of his colleague's figures, but he simultaneously brings a painterly softness and tenderness to his picture. The silvery harmonies of the pastel colours are combined with tremulous brushwork which make the solid forms of the Virgin and Child seem to dissolve into shimmering light. The surface of the painting has been flattened and worn from ironing during the process of relining [glossary:lining] and cleaning before 1962, and the pink lake glazes in the shadows of the Virgin's lavender-grey dress have faded.

The elderly Titian may have kept this painting in his studio and worked on it during the last years of his life. The unblended brushstrokes and restrained colour scheme are typical of Titian's very late works such as The Death of Actaeon, Christ Crowned with Thorns (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), and  Nymph and Shepherd (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

Style: High Renaissance
Beyond Venice's Grand Canal, on the peaceful island of Guidecca in the easternmost part of the city, is the domed church of Santa Maria della Presentazione. Better known as the Zitelle, the church was built in the sixteenth century and attached to a foundling hospital for young girls (zitella is Italian for 'spinster').

We see energetic figures unload cargo and row gondolas across the lagoon, all described with vibrant colour against a backdrop dominated by blue and brown tones. Guardi often positioned an elegant, white sail in the left foreground of his pictures to draw us into the scene -- see his The Punta della Dogana and Venice: The Doge's Palace and the Molo -- and here the device is repeated in the two boats a little further back. In Venice: The Punta della Dogana, the companion picture to this one, he used a boat's spindly bare mast to the same effect.

Style: Neoclassical
This painting is a companion piece to Fishermen hauling a Net, which is exactly the same size and depicts a scene with three similarly positioned boats, a low horizon and high billowing clouds. However, the muddy island in the middle of this scene is more substantial and, as the title suggests, someone has built a hut on it -- probably as a fisherman’s shelter or somewhere to store nets.

While similar, there are many subtle differences between the paintings. In this one it appears to be high water; in the other it is clearly low tide. Both feature a windmill and a church in similar positions on the horizon, but the windmills are facing slightly different ways and the church depicted here has a tower rather than a spire. The boats in this painting are being used for a different purpose to the ones in its companion piece -- not for fishing, but for transport. The open boat in the foreground is being rowed by an oarsman sitting in the bows while his mate steers, and three passengers are gathered between them. The larger sailing boat, known as a smalschip, was used for transporting goods and people on inland waterways. It is towing a tender -- a small boat that enables its passengers to disembark and go ashore in very shallow waters. But it is struggling to make way: its pennants hang limply, the sails are slack and there is barely a ripple of water around the bow.

For all the activity in the foreground, it is the sky which dominates both pictures. But again, there are differences between the two. Here the contrasts between the dark rainclouds nearest to us, the fluffy white cumulus clouds and the blue of the sky which shows through the gaps is more marked than in the other painting. The light on the horizon and shimmering on the water on the other side of the island is brighter too. It is as though a rain shower -- like the one which seems to be afflicting the fishermen in the other picture -- has passed, leaving a clearer day behind it.

Style: Baroque
This painting shows the dead Christ, wrapped in his shroud, being held upright in a marble tomb by two grieving angels. It formed part of a large polyptych (multi-panelled altarpiece) painted between about 1456 and 1461 by Giorgio Schiavone for the funerary chapel of the wealthy Roberti family in the church of San Nicolò in Padua. This panel would have been at the top of the altarpiece, above The Virgin and Child Enthroned.

This way of showing Christ was based on a vision Pope Gregory (about 540--604) had as he celebrated Mass in the church of Santa Croce in Rome. Gregory was said to have ordered a picture of this vision to be made, which became known as the 'Imago Pietatis ('image of pity') or Man of Sorrows. In the medieval period people believed that anyone who prayed before the original image or copies of it would be given an Indulgence -- these allowed people to reduce the number of years they spent in purgatory -- of 20,000 years.

Schiavone’s composition of the Pietà is based on a painting attributed to Fra Filippo Lippi, who was in the city in the 1430s. The artist must also have been familiar with another famous example of the subject by the sculptor Donatello. The latter’s great bronze altarpiece was installed in 1449 on the high altar Sant'Antonio, the main Paduan church. It was topped with an Imago Pietatis which showed Christ upright in his tomb flanked by putti. This new composition was hugely influential and widely imitated, as in The Dead Christ supported by Two Angels, painted by Schiavone's contemporary, Carlo Crivelli.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance