wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This theatrical scene, with its stage-like setting of dramatic buildings that loom over the figures, was imagined by  Guardi. The building on the left may be based on an unused design for Venice's Rialto bridge by Andrea Palladio, a sixteenth-century architect. Guardi probably studied the design and has added a dome here.

The painting presents a collection of Ancient Greek and Roman architecture, from the domed building with a temple front to the classical arcade in the background, which curves round to end in the loggia (open-sided gallery or room) on the right. Although you get a sense of the distances between the buildings, the staircase going down from the temple portico merges into shadow and it isn't easy to tell where the drum-like podium actually meets the ground.

Guardi's painting is characteristically lively, with energetic figures and sharp yellow and white highlights that suggest brilliant sunshine.

Style: Neoclassical
This capriccio, or architectural fantasy, is a patchwork of features taken from different buildings in Venice: the archway in the foreground is from the Torre dell'Orologio (clock tower) while the buildings and staircase (known as the Scala dei Giganti, the 'Giant's Stairway') are from the inner courtyard of the Doge's Palace. Guardi has exaggerated the width of the archway and the distance to the arches beyond to draw our eye further into the painting, while the staircase gives the scene a sense of grandeur.

The archway we are looking through is partially in shadow, but patches of intense sunlight cut across the floor and wall to the left. Guardi has clearly taken delight in depicting particular details, like the statue above the door on the left and the white cloth draped over the windowsill, and the hanging lantern opposite. Several decades earlier, Canaletto had introduced the device of using an archway to lead a viewer deeper into the picture -- see Venice: Piazza San Marco and Venice: Piazza San Marco and the Colonnade of the Procuratie Nuove. But Guardi's painting technique is different, as is the look of his work, with its thin layers of oil paint in pale tones.

The scene feels like a snapshot of a real moment in city life. The two men highlighted in the foreground give a coin to a beggar boy, while the woman in a splash of yellow walks away from us. The slice of pink wall framed by the arch encourage us to explore the buildings in the square. People climb the steps to the right and a pair suspend a blue cloth over a balcony to the left, softening the intersecting vertical and horizontal architectural lines. With its mixture of Gothic and classical buildings, the rich and the poor, dark shadows and brilliant sunlight, the picture captures the essence of Venice.

This is one of a number of Venetian paintings gifted to the National Gallery as part of the Salting Bequest. It arrived with several other pictures by Guardi, like Venice: Piazza San Marco and An Architectural Caprice with a Palladian Style Building, as well as work by Canaletto.

Style: Neoclassical
This portrait was made in about 1620, when Anthony van Dyck was only 21 years old -- the rising star of his generation, and soon to become one of the best-known portrait painters in Europe. The sitter, on the other hand, is Cornelis van der Geest, who was 65 and a grand old man of the arts.

A prosperous and influential Antwerp spice merchant, van der Geest was one of the most prominent collectors of paintings of his day. He was so revered that Van Dyck’s famous teacher Rubens described him as 'the best of men and my oldest friend, who, since my youth, has been my never-failing patron, whose whole life showed a love and admiration of painting'. And if we doubted Rubens's word, a painting of the interior of van der Geest’s house in 1615 by Willem van Haecht (now in the Rubenshuis, Antwerp) shows his extensive collection of pictures by some of the most important Flemish artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

So for the young Van Dyck, in the early stages of a career in portrait painting, a commission from such an influential patron must have been extremely important. He certainly rises to the occasion, though not by showing off a radically new approach to the composition, as some young artists might have done. Instead he has taken -- or perhaps van der Geest asked him to take -- a relatively conservative approach using a traditional format: a close up of the sitter's face framed by a white ruff. What sets the painting apart is Van Dyck’s virtuoso brushwork.

For the hair and beard he employed long, wispy strokes, while elsewhere he used much thicker paint -- to add texture to the edges of the ruff, for example, or for the edges of the lower eye lids, which are modelled in three dimensions with thick ridges of paint. The moisture in van der Geest's eyes is evoked with delicate flecks of white paint. The positioning of van der Geest’s head and gaze is also subtly effective. He looks very slightly back and down at us, enhancing the illusion that he has reacted to the viewer and that we are encountering a real person.

The picture we see today is somewhat different to what left Van Dyck’s workshop. X-ray photographs show that, instead of the plain dark background, the portrait was originally set in a simulated oval frame painted to look as though it were made of porphyry (a type of red stone). This was a device which Van Dyck used in at least one other picture around this time (Portrait of a Man, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels). Part of the white ruff has also been painted over by a later hand; it was originally higher at the back, up around the level of his right eye on one side and above his ear on the other.

Probably less than 15 years after it was made, new pieces of oak were added to the sides and bottom, and the painting was extended into a bust-length portrait which also showed his left arm. This extension was almost certainly not done by Van Dyck. The large frame now covers the additions so that they are not apparent.

Style: Baroque
We are looking through an arched window of a brick house at a well-dressed young man. He holds a heart-shaped book; a pen case and inkwell, tied together with red tapes, sit on the window ledge. This tiny painting was possibly once part of a diptych (a painting made of two parts). The young man may be at his devotions, and might originally have been gazing at a religious image in the missing left wing.

There are no obvious indications who the sitter was. He may have been a scribe, though clearly -- considering his clothes and jewellery -- an affluent one. The book was probably a Book of Hours. A few heart-shaped books do survive from the Middle Ages, some containing love songs but others with devotional texts. The page layout and numerous red and blue initials here suggest the latter.

Behind the sitter we see the church of Our Lady of the Zavel and a view across the Zavel cemetery towards the walls of Brussels. This is one of the earliest known views of the city and an early example of the relatively exact rendering of a recognisable place. Beside the sitter's head is a gateway into the street, blocked by a large stone (often used in Netherlandish graveyards to prevent animals entering). In the street behind is a stone cistern for watering animals and fighting fires, probably the one which once stood between the two Coudenberg Gates. In the background the city's outer walls are shown from within: we can see the arches which carry the walkway along the inside of the battlements.

The church on the left, built by the Great Confraternity of Crossbowmen, was under construction throughout the fifteenth century. We are looking at the church from the south. We see the east end, which would have been built first, the south transept and the first bay of the nave, apparently without aisles. The nave was finished in 1435 but the aisles were not begun until after 1494 and the south portal, shown in this picture, was not completed until the nineteenth century. In the underdrawing the building programme seems even less advanced as the left wall of the transept looks unfinished, whereas in the painting the building is more nearly complete.

The landscape must have been of some importance to the sitter. It is possible that the house on the right belonged to Robert Cottereau, an important official in the service of the house of Burgundy, whose descendants perhaps owned a property in that location in the sixteenth century. The sitter is possibly a member of Robert's family or household, perhaps one of his sons. The most likely candidate is his son Phillippe, whose professional skills gained him the position of Keeper of the Charters in 1484.

This artist seems to have specialised in topographically exact landscapes. This portrait is closely related to three other paintings: a very similar, slightly earlier portrait of a different young man in almost identical dress (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and two Marriages of the Virgin (Museum Catharijneconvent, Utrecht; Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) which have similar backgrounds.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
The fresco comes from the chapter house of the convent church of San Francesco, Siena. It had been covered with whitewash but it was rediscovered in 1855 when it was cut out of the wall and kept in the room of the church’s caretaker, who decided to sell it in the 1870s.

A group of women are clustered together. The edges of their veils wave gently. The faces of the two women at the back are partly obscured by the cloaks of the figures in front of them, giving a sense of the depth of the crowd. Some of the women have brown eyes, others blue. The central figure has a gentle gaze and a delicate profile and holds her right hand across her breast.

There was intense international competition to buy this fresco fragment when it was sold in Siena in 1878. This was partly because its attribution to Ambrogio Lorenzetti was well-documented. Ambrogio decorated Siena’s most prestigious public buildings including the Palazzo Pubblico, the town hall, with frescoes; an example that could be hung in a gallery was regarded as very precious. At the end of the nineteenth century, art historians and museum professionals were developing an appreciation for early Sienese painting.

The round fragment is set in a square block of plaster. Despite its history it is in fairly good condition: Charles Fairfax Murray, the agent who acquired the picture for the Gallery, remarked that the central head was in ‘perfect preservation’.

The women’s tunics were originally brown but only a trace of the colour remains. The brown habit and black cloak was the dress of the religious order known as the Poor Clares. This religious order was founded by Saint Clare of Assisi, a follower of Saint Francis, in the thirteenth century. The nuns lived lives of poverty and penance and so were called ‘Poor Clares’. We do not know where this fragment came from but the women might be part of a crowd gathered in a scene that showed Saint Francis giving the Rule (the name for the document governing the behaviour of those belonging to his order) to the Franciscans and the Clares, a scene found in other chapter houses, for example at San Lorenzo in Naples, which shows the Franciscan friars gathered on one side and the Clarisse nuns (another name for Poor Clares) on the other side of St Francis himself.

Other frescoes in the chapter house were The Crucifixion and  The resurrected Christ, both painted by Ambrogio’s brother, Pietro. Ambrogio painted a further two scenes in the chapter house: Pope Boniface receiving Saint Louis of Toulouse as a Novice, and The Martyrdom of the Franciscans. The cycle of images may also have included The Stigmatisation of Saint Francis -- the moment the saint received the wounds of Christ, caused by the nails of the Crucifixion.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
This painting is typical of Giovanni Battista Viola who specialised in landscapes with hunting and fishing scenes. In a woodland clearing, a hunter dressed in yellow lets his dogs drink from a stream, while another sounds a horn to gather the hunting party. Smartly dressed figures on horseback ride toward him.

Although the figures and action are concentrated in the foreground, subtle areas of light and shadow, along with details like the herds of animals and the building with a smoking chimney, guide our eye towards the distant mountains.

With its companion piece, Landscape with a River and Boats, the painting entered the National Gallery's collection as by Annibale Carracci, whose studio Viola may have joined in Rome in the early 1600s. Viola is known to have worked with Domenichino and Francesco Albani on the decorative paintings in the Palazzo Giustiniani during this period, and these pictures perhaps hung above the doors in one of its rooms.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Two bearded old men sit at a small table playing cards. What little light there is focuses on the white cap of one and the grey hair of the other, as well as their white collars, and reveals them to be better dressed than some other patrons of the inn. The inn itself is drab and sparsely furnished. A man relieves himself in the shadows on the left, but the two old men, undisturbed, concentrate on their game. One deals, the other fans out his hand of well worn cards, heads together with a smiling companion who clutches the handle of the tall stone tankard on the table.

Behind the card players, a smoker looks on. Next to him, a young man with long hair and a clean white collar and cuffs stuffs tobacco into a pipe with great care. A woman wearing the white coif and black cap of a widow leans through an interior window overhead to follow the state of play. Light through an exterior window does little to illuminate the dingy back room, where a young woman sits by an open fire making pancakes for a group of jostling peasants. She looks back at a man in the group behind her and the expression on her face suggests a certain tension in the air. Perhaps it has something to do with the man waving a pancake over her head, who glances in the same direction.

Teniers has paid great attention to the objects in the foreground, and it's possible he has placed them prominently because each one was often used as a symbol of bad behaviour. The glinting jug and the beer barrel suggest drunkenness. The dropped clogs, the open mussel shells and the white cloth abandoned on the barrel were seen as signs of the loss of a woman's virginity -- in this case, the pancake maker's. She's surrounded by men in various stages of drunkenness; perhaps she has little chance of retaining her virtue.

The rowdy backroom is contrasted with the sedate middle-class pair playing cards, though the card game and the young man smoking might be seen as the first steps on a downward path. Teniers has painted their faces in a far less cartoon-like manner than is usual for him. The texture of their skin and their facial expressions are far more realistic than those of the group round the pancake maker, where Teniers has used his customary grotesque and exaggerated style. Pictures of 'merry-making peasants' -- as they were known in Teniers's time -- were popular with well-to-do buyers, who would find them amusing but also use them as a moral lesson.

Style: Baroque
This playful scene celebrates Silenus, companion to Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and drunkenness. Silenus, a naked old man with a bald head, sits slumped on a throne to the left, supported by two men. He rests his hand on a jug of wine. Too drunk to stand, he balances one leg precariously on a tiger, although he is often shown in paintings riding an ass. The garland at Silenus' feet and the wreath being lowered onto his head are mentioned in Virgil's Eclogues, a series of poems on pastoral themes (book VI, 1:16). They were worn during Roman festivals and banquets devoted to Bacchus.

The revellers remove their clothes and enjoy the festivities as they drink and dance. The flute player in the centre stares towards us, inviting us to join the party. On the right, a shepherd seduces a female satyr, who symbolises lust. In the background, two centaurs with human bodies and horses' legs attack an ass. The idealised and muscular physique of the men reveals Poussin's study of statues from classical antiquity. The composition is complex and sophisticated, with trees and rocky cliffs framing the scene. The faded colouring of the draperies hanging in the trees was once vibrant.

The people and setting are similar to Titian's Andrians (Prado, Madrid) which Poussin may have seen in Rome. The frieze-like composition, with the people and trees evenly placed across the painting, is inspired by images on ancient Roman stone coffins, known as sarcophagi.

Around 1636 Poussin painted three bacchanalian scenes for the home of the powerful French minister, Cardinal de Richelieu (1585--1642): a scene depicting Silenus, The Triumph of Pan (in the National Gallery, London) and The Triumph of Bacchus (Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City).  At some point before 1741 all three of Poussin's Triumphs were replaced with copies (now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours). Despite the copy after Richelieu's Silenus painting being identical in design to this work, most scholars since the mid-twentieth century have cast doubts over the latter's attribution to Poussin. This was, in part, due to the painting's discoloured varnish and uneven finish: some figures appear rather coarsely painted whilst the objects in the foreground are rendered meticulously. Recent conservation treatment and technical analysis, revealing changes made to the composition during the painting process, undermine the argument that this work is a copy and point instead to it being Poussin's original.

Style: Baroque, Academic
This work was painted for the high altar of the Oratory of the Conception, Ferrara (attached to the church of S. Francesco) and was probably commissioned by Carlo and Camillo Strozzi. A lunette of the Pietà (Ferrara, private collection) has been associated with it.

Narratives generally shown on the the lower edge of a large altarpiece, or 'predella', are here represented on the plinth of the throne. Unusually, they read from right to left, beginning with the Nativity and concluding with Christ among the Doctors. The Virgin was identified as the second Eve, through whom mankind would be saved, which is symbolised by the presence of Adam and Eve below her feet. The paintings beside the arch show the Sacrifice of Isaac and probably Esther before Ahaseurus. These Old Testament episodes were believed to foreshadow Christ's sacrifice and the exceptional purity of the Virgin.

Style: Early Renaissance
This panel is like a miniature altarpiece. The Virgin Mary and Christ Child occupy the central arch, with Saint Mark on the left and Saint John the Baptist on the right.

Mary is seated on a green mound, probably intended to represent the ground. Next to her, a gold inscription in Latin gives her title, 'Holy Mary of Humility'. This was often given to images in which Mary is shown seated on the ground; another example is The Virgin and Child. It's possible that as well as being a humble pose, the title is related to the Latin word humus, meaning 'earth'.

Saint John, who makes a blessing gesture, holds a scroll. It is inscribed with words the saint spoke about Christ when he was preaching in the wilderness: 'Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world' (John 1: 29). Under his green robe he wears a camel-hair tunic. According to the Gospels, this is what he wore in the wilderness (Matthew 3: 4; Mark 1:6).

Mary's almond-shaped eyes, with their slightly puffy lower lids, are characteristic of Lorenzo's style but other elements also point to its Venetian origins. The image of the Virgin seated on the ground probably came from Siena, but it was popular in Venice too. In Venice, it was often combined with the celestial elements we see here: the sun-shaped brooch at the Virgin's throat, the crescent moon beneath her feet and the 12 stars -- made with tiny indentations called punch marks -- around her figure. These are the symbols of the so-called ‘Woman of the Apocalypse’, a cosmic mother figure mentioned in the Book of Revelation and interpreted as the Virgin Mary. The depiction of Mary as the 'Woman of the Apocalypse' seated on the ground emphasises her humble background and her divine role as the mother of Christ. The infant Christ's feet are crossed and poke out of his swaddling cloth; the soles of his feet are very prominent. This may be intended to bring to mind the wounds of the Crucifixion, when Christ's hands and feet were nailed to the Cross.

The picture remains in its original frame, and the spiral colonettes are typical of frames made in Venice. Technical examination reveals that the roundel decorations between the arches were once in fact rosettes, later changed to the appearance they have now.

This painting was probably made for private worship and created as an independent work, never joined to another panel (unlike many of the other small-scale early Italian pictures in our collection). Saint Mark was the patron saint of Venice; the picture might have been made for a Venetian patron, perhaps someone named after Saint John the Baptist.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance