wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The huge dome of the church of S. Maria della Salute, begun in 1631 to commemorate the end of the plague, dominates the entrance of Venice's Grand Canal. In front of the church, where the Grand and Guidecca canals meet, is the Dogana da Mar (Customs House), built in the 1670s and shaped like a ship's bow -- see Guardi's close-up view of this building. Above its entrance is a weathervane in the form of Fortune, a personification of the Venetian Republic's supremacy over the Adriatic Sea.

Like its companion piece, Venice: The Doge's Palace and the Molo from the Basin of San Marco, this picture shows large barges in the left foreground. One, its sail hanging limp, may have just arrived from the mainland or further afield; the other's sail is neatly furled. The workers aboard these boats are animated, busy with a range of activities, but little attention has been given to their naturalistic form or individuality. By the time Guardi painted this work during the 1770s, he had established a formula for depicting people. Here, as in his other pictures, they appear to merge with their surroundings rather than serve as the main focus.

The water is a hive of activity. Large boats carrying cargo sail beside smaller vessels that head in all directions, while some gondoliers wait for passengers. On the shore, merchants remove goods from their boats, pay import taxes and secure passage into the Grand Canal. A little way along the quay, locals walk towards the church. Despite Venice's industrious history, the city had experienced economic and commercial decline since the seventeenth century. Within a few decades of this picture being painted Venice surrendered to Napoleon Bonaparte's troops, causing the collapse of the Republic.

But Guardi's picture is a celebration of the glory of Venice. He seems to have enjoyed painting scenes with lots of movement and light: the sky here is luminous and sunlight flickers on the water. Guardi has used a variety of tones and colours to create the rippling, reflective surface of the lagoon.

For the buildings he used areas of flat tones, picking out windows, doors and steps with delicate black lines. This is particularly noticeable in the quay and low buildings to the right, which are made up of a continuous sweep of light brown paint with subtle detailing. From a distance the church looks like it has been painted with great precision, but on closer inspection its glorious architectural features have been expertly described using loosely drawn lines, with variations of light and shade to give an impression of solidity and three-dimensionality.

Style: Neoclassical
The traditional Italian title of this portrait, 'Il Gentile Cavaliere', means the 'well-born gentleman'. The two quarto-sized leather-bound books on which he leans his hand, and his prominent sword -- a symbol of gentility -- suggest that this nobleman is a man of learning as well as action.

As in many of Moroni's portraits, the man holds a letter that records his identity. It is addressed 'al...Sig' (To Lord), but the name is now illegible. Below that is written 'Berg', for Bergamo. The black costume decorated with gold braid is typical of the French court and would have been a contrast to the Spanish fashion dominant in Bergamo at the time. The angle at which the cap is placed on the man's head, as well as its jewelled band decorated with pearls, is similar to those in portraits by the French painter Clouet. A surprisingly large number of old versions of this portrait survive, which suggests that the sitter was someone important.

Since the sword is worn on the man's right side, he must be left-handed. It is very rare to find an explicit reference to left-handedness in a portrait of this date. Although there are references to left-handed swordsmen in literature of the period, left-handedness generally had negative associations. The sword has a hilt of chiselled steel with a pommel decorated with a pattern of linked circles. The dagger, worn on the man's left, has a pommel decorated with domed projections.

Moroni's earlier portraits of the 1550s, such as A Knight with his Jousting Helmet are meticulously painted, with crisp outlines, and often feature ruined architectural settings. In Portrait of a Left-Handed Gentleman, Moroni adopts a softer, more atmospheric approach which enhances the startling naturalism of the face, and he pays new attention to the expressive potential of the sitter's hands.

The muted grey background is very freely painted -- large unblended brushstrokes of dark paint are swept over and into lighter still-wet paint. The background must have been painted late as it passes over the edge of the sitter's right arm. The plain background, looser technique and rapid brushwork are typical of Moroni's portraiture of the mid-1560s. This dating is also confirmed by the style of the ruff and that of the braided doublet with its low waist.

Moroni is different from Titian and his other contemporaries in that he needed his portrait sitters in front of him; other portraitists were better able to imagine or reinvent their sitters from drawings or memory. The striking naturalism and psychological depth of Moroni's portraits is a direct result of painting from life. We don't just look at his sitters, we feel we are engaging with them on a personal level. Moroni's skill at expressing his sitters' inner lives continued to develop during his final years in works such as The Tailor and Portrait of a Man holding a Letter.

Style: High Renaissance
This altarpiece is the greatest work that Parmigianino painted in Rome. It was commissioned by Maria Bufalini for a burial chapel in San Salvatore in Lauro. However, the political turmoil following the Sack of Rome in 1527 meant that it was never installed there and it was later moved to the parish church of Città di Castello.

According to Vasari, Parmigianino was working on this picture when imperial troops burst into his workshop, but 'seeing him [and] stupefied at this work… they let him pursue it'. Another interpretation may be that the soldiers were so perplexed by this jarring, unusual composition that they simply left him alone.

Saint John the Baptist dominates the foreground, staring at us intently. With his exaggeratedly long finger he points upwards to the Virgin and Child seated in a burst of light against dark grey storm clouds. The Virgin is represented as the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, before the moon. Her body is distorted, her legs massive compared to her delicate head and neck. The Christ Child -- his head strangely disconnected from his body -- mischievously kicks his foot out of the painting towards us.

Saint Jerome sleeps on the ground, exhausted from his vigils in the wilderness, clutching a cross with the crucified Christ. His steeply foreshortened pose is derived from the sleeping Venus in Correggio’s Venus, Cupid and a Satyr (Louvre, Paris). Jerome’s size and scale are difficult to reconcile with that of the other figures. During the nineteenth century this picture was known as The Vision of Saint Jerome. In its odd juxtaposition of scales, compressed space, the intensity of John the Baptist’s engagement with us and the dramatic lighting, the picture does have a strangely visionary appearance. The unsettling spatial organisation is typical of Parmigianino's self-consciously artificial style and is characteristic of the work of other contemporary artists since commonly described as Mannerists.

Practical considerations also played a significant part in the composition. Parmigianino had to arrange his figures within a compact vertical design that fitted into the awkward tall narrow space allocated for the altarpiece in its intended location. The lighting was designed to reflect the source of natural light from a high window to the right of the altar. In the darkened church the Baptist’s right arm would seem not only to curve upwards towards the Christ Child but also outwards from the painting, catching the light.

Vasari claimed that the 'spirit of Raphael had entered into the body of Francesco…’. Parmigianino’s decision to divide the composition in two and set the Virgin in front of the burst of light, and the Baptist’s pointing gesture, are based on Raphael’s Madonna of Foligno (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City), which was then on the high altar of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome. The types and poses of the Virgin and Child originate with the work of Michelangelo, particularly the Bruges Madonna, but the tempestuous drama of the image is Parmigianino’s own invention.

Style: High Renaissance, Mannerist
Medieval and Renaissance artists worked on a wide variety of objects, not just pictures intended to be hung on walls. These two paintings -- Male Members of a Confraternity and Female Members of a Confraternity -- are a rare survival of an important type of artwork from this time: a painted banner.

Made in Milan in around 1500, they were painted on silk or linen which was later mounted on wooden panels. Banners like this were designed to be seen from a distance. They were usually around 2.5 metres high and hung from a tall wooden cross, which would be carried at the head of public processions, such as those organised by confraternities.

Confraternities were an important feature of society. They had their own rules and meeting places, and organised public events such as processions, funerals and services of remembrance for their members. The medieval equivalent of charities, they ran hospitals, looked after orphans and prisoners, and distributed food, clothing and money to the poor.

Each confraternity had its own guildhall and church or chapel where saints' feasts and other devotions were celebrated, and for which they commissioned frescoes, crosses and altarpieces as well as banners. The Virgin and Child Enthroned among Angels and Saints by Benozzo Gozzoli and The Adoration of the Kings by Paolo Veronese were painted for confraternity chapels in Florence and Venice.

Behind the group of kneeling men we can see part of a figure of a saint, apparently dressed in brown robes -- perhaps Saint Francis. In 1475 the confraternity of the Immaculate Conception was set up in Milan under Franciscan sponsorship. It was hugely successful, and was soon able to build -- and sumptuously decorate -- a new chapel attached to the church of San Francesco (now destroyed). In 1483 they commissioned Leonardo da Vinci and Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis to paint an altarpiece for the chapel.

Could these paintings have come from a banner made for this confraternity? Another piece of the same banner, showing God the Father -- an appropriate part of an image of the Immaculate Conception, like in this version by Carlo Crivelli -- was in a private collection in Milan in the mid-nineteenth century. We will probably never be able to confirm this tempting hypothesis.

Style: High Renaissance
These fair-haired teenagers were brother and sister, the heirs of royalty and future rulers themselves. Philip the Handsome and Margaret of Austria were the children of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, and Mary of Burgundy. They are identified by inscriptions in gold around their heads and by the coats of arms on the shields at the tops of the panels.  Around them are a further 17 smaller shields representing the states and towns their parents governed.

Philip (1478--1506) wears the livery collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece (a prestigious chivalric order, founded in the 1430s by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy) which he received in 1481; it also surrounds the top shield, which shows his father's coat of arms on the left and his mother's on the right. The coats of arms around him are those of Maximilian's possessions in Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Alsace. Not all are accurate: the labels for Upper Austria and Schelklingen have been mixed up and the arms of Alsace are back to front.

Margaret (1480--1530), who was to become one of the effective rulers of her day as regent of the Netherlands, was clearly unmarried when this painting was done: half of the lozenge-shaped shield at the top of her panel is left blank, waiting for her husband's arms. The shields around her display the arms of her mother's Burgundian territories.

Collecting portraits of relatives and prospective spouses was an important feature of late medieval court culture: in an pre-photographic era this was often the only way people got to see who they were to marry before they met them. This small diptych was easily portable, and was probably done in the early 1490s, when portraits of Philip and Margaret would have been much in demand as various projects for their marriages were matters of intense concern. A very similar diptych, now at Schloss Ambras in Austria, gives their ages as 16 and 14, so can be dated to between 22 July 1494 and 10 January 1495. The National Gallery's diptych was clearly painted at about the same time.

These paintings were once very colourful but are now obscured by layers of discoloured varnish. The brownish backgrounds seem originally to have been red, and Philip's hat was also red; it has been overpainted in black. The blue areas in the coats of arms have darkened and the gilded details have lost their shine. They also had broad green frames, now missing.

Style: Early Renaissance, Gothic
These two paintings -- The Agony in the Garden and Christ carrying the Cross -- were once part of a triptych, along with The Virgin and Child with Two Angels. They were not, however, made to go together and were painted by different artists (albeit brothers).

The two panels of the life of Christ may well originally have been part of a polyptych  painted by Ambrogio Bergognone in around 1501 (the date on one of the panels). The Virgin and Child does not seem to be by the same hand, however; it was probably painted in the late 1480s by Ambrogio's brother, Bernardino Bergognone.

Ambrogio ran one of the leading painting workshops in Milan in the late fifteenth century, and his brother worked closely with him.

Contemporary with the Master of the Pala Sforzesca and Andrea Solario, the Bergognone brothers remained unaffected by the radical compositional and atmospheric innovations of Leonardo da Vinci, who was also working in Milan from about 1482. Their calm, still scenes with their clear light and bright colours are closer to the work of Vincenzo Foppa.

All three panels were in a private collection in Milan -- the Melzi Collection -- in the early nineteenth century. We don't know where they were before that, or when they were combined into a single altarpiece.

Style: High Renaissance
This altarpiece was commissioned by the family of Hermann Rinck, who was burgomaster (or mayor) of Cologne three times in the 1480s. Rinck had died by 1496 -- the painting was commissioned in his memory and in the belief that it would speed up the journey of his soul to heaven. The artist remains anonymous; he is named after this painting. The altarpiece is in the form of a triptych (a painting made up of three panels).  Its two side panels -- or shutters -- are in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The altarpiece was dismantled and the panels separated some time between 1810 and 1820.

The central panel, which is in the National Gallery's collection, shows the Crucifixion, while the shutters depict the episodes leading up to the Crucifixion and those that followed it. The left-hand panel shows two events: Christ's trial under Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor in Jerusalem, and his torture before his crucifixion. Known as the Flagellation, Christ was tied to a pillar and brutally whipped from all sides. The right-hand panel shows a scene known as the Lamentation, when the Virgin, her companions and Saint John the Evangelist mourned over Christ's dead body. In the background -- in the hills above the main scene -- is the culmination of the story for Christians: Christ's bodily resurrection from the tomb and triumph over death.

When the altarpiece was cleaned in 1963, paintings were discovered on the reverse of the shutters. They had been painted over, probably when the panels were exported from Germany in the nineteenth century. They show Rinck and his wife Gertrud Von Dallem (identified by their coats of arms) with three of their sons in prayer before the miraculous Mass of Saint Gregory the Great. The legend tells how Gregory had prayed to convince a monk that Christ's body and blood were truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. As he celebrated Mass at the altar, Christ miraculously stepped out of the image on the altar and into the chalice with the wine.

Style: Early Renaissance, Gothic
When Herod, King of Judea, found out about the birth of Jesus, who was being called 'the king of the Jews', he ordered the killing of all children under the age of two, an event known as the 'massacre of the innocents' (Matthew 2:16).

These two pictures once formed a continuous image, but it was cut up before entering our collection. The painting showing Herod overseeing the slaughter was originally to the right of The Massacre of the Innocents. The architecture -- for example, the balustrade -- continues from one scene to the next but the alignment is not seamless, suggesting that both paintings were cut down at the inside edge.

Paintings by Mocetto are quite rare; he is better known as an engraver. When the pictures were purchased by the National Gallery in 1888, they were considered particularly worthwhile because they are signed on the pedestal that supports the column of Herod's palace: HEROL/EMO / MOCETO / P.[INXIT] ('Gerolamo Mocetto painted this'). The Gallery's director, who made the purchases, valued them because Mocetto was working in the Veneto at around the same time as Giovanni Bellini, the most famous Venetian painter of the Early Renaissance. The panels however show a very close affinity to the work of Bellini's friend and rival, Mantegna; Mocetto even copied certain figures from Mantegna's engravings.

In the eighteenth century, the pictures belonged to the British consul at Venice, John Strange. They were also included in a well-known eighteenth-century book on art history by Seroux d'Agincourt, a French art historian.

Style: High Renaissance
These two panels once formed the shutters of an altarpiece in three parts, called a triptych. The two female saints -- Ursula and Catherine of Alexandria -- flanked a central image signed by Solario (now in Bristol Museums and Art Gallery) which shows the Virgin adoring the infant Christ, who lays on a marble table resembling an altar.

Kneeling before Christ is the man who commissioned the altarpiece, a London merchant called Paul Withypool. His coats of arms decorate the reverses of the two shutters, and would have been visible when the triptych was closed. Withypool was a powerful and influential person in the 1530s and 1540s, serving as a Member of Parliament from 1529 to 1536, and sitting on various commissions. He was trusted as a supporter of the king's policies. As a merchant, he had connections with his Italian counterparts who in turn might have had something to do with Solario's introduction to English society.

England's mercantile connections with the Continent during the rule of the Tudor monarchs stimulated an appreciation of the work of Italian artists. Several Italian painters and sculptors, for example Guido Mazzoni and Pietro Torrigiano, were commissioned to create sculptural portraits for the royal family. By choosing Solario, Withypool was showing his discernment and taste for Italian luxury goods. We can't be sure, but it is possible that Solario may have worked in England for a time. This is the only known picture by him in the country but the poems of the humanist and antiquarian John Leland mentions works by him in English collections.

Style: High Renaissance
These two panels, each depicting two saints standing on a tilted floor, are fragments of an altarpiece -- a lost or unidentified central panel is likely to have shown the Virgin Mary and Christ Child. If that is the case, it's likely that the tilted floor would have continued seamlessly across all the panels. But it's also possible that a sculpture formed the centre of this ensemble. Either way, the orientation of the figures suggests that the panel showing Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist was originally on the left-hand side of the central image, with the panel showing Saints Mark and Augustine on the right.

Saint John the Baptist, identified by his camel-hair shirt and cross staff, makes direct eye contact with the viewer. He is joined by Saint John the Evangelist, one of the Twelve Apostles, who is using a quill to write in an open book, referring to his role as as one of the four authors of the Gospels. The eagle at his feet is his traditional symbol. A winged lion, the traditional symbol of Saint Mark, rests at the feet of the saint in the opposite panel. Mark, like John, was one of the Twelve Apostles. He holds a quill and his Gospel, which is closed, perhaps a comment on chronology: while the Gospel of Mark dates to the seventh decade AD, the Gospel of John was probably written around 100 AD. Mark is joined by Saint Augustine, the famous fourth-century theologian and Bishop of Hippo, himself a celebrated writer.

Nothing is known about the original layout and context of these panels, but the depiction of Saint Augustine suggests they were made for an Augustinian foundation. Scholars have speculated that the panels, which were acquired with the Lombardi-Baldi Collection in 1857, came from the Florentine church of S. Spirito, but there is little evidence for this claim. Another possibility is that they came from the Tuscan hilltop town of Montepulciano (where they were recorded in a private collection in the early nineteenth century). It has also been said that these two panels formed part of the same altarpiece as three other panels by Zanobi Machiavelli, but their shapes and sizes do not correspond.

On the back of Saint Mark and Saint Augustine there is a sketch of a portrait of a woman in profile, suggesting that the panel was originally meant for a different purpose or that it was used for study. No such portrait by the artist is known; he specialised in the production of altarpieces and devotional paintings.

Style: Early Renaissance