wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Sienese painting of the second half of the fifteenth century blended the artistic ideals of its time with a continued reverence for the language of earlier Sienese art. Nowhere is this more true than in this triptych, painted in 1479 by Benvenuto di Giovanni.

Benvenuto has integrated a very contemporary interest in naturalism and perspective with a typically Sienese love of lavish materials, brilliant colours and decorative detail. In the central panel, the Virgin Mary is seated on an inlaid throne with the infant Christ on her knee; in the side panels Saint Peter and Saint Nicholas stand like statues on a marble parapet which runs across the triptych. The figures are set against burnished and tooled gold backgrounds, and all are spectacularly dressed in accordance with the Sienese passion for jewels and textiles -- but they look convincingly solid underneath their clothes. The precise dresses to be worn and materials to be used were sometimes stipulated in artists' contracts.

The altarpiece is very characteristic of the paintings made by Benvenuto in the 1470s. He was a pupil of Vecchietta and his early style was heavily dependant on that of his master, but it was changed by the arrival of Liberale da Verona and Girolamo da Cremona in Siena in 1466 and 1470 respectively. These two Northern Italian illuminators (artists who painted illuminated manuscripts) came to contribute to one of the greatest artistic projects of the late fifteenth century: the decoration of the great series of choir books for Siena's cathedral. The project attracted artists from near and far, and Benvenuto also worked on it.

There was no hard and fast division between painters and illuminators in Siena, and Liberale and Girolamo were of enormous importance in introducing a more progressive style that combined brilliant colours with minutely detailed technique. Close examination reveals that the pearls on the Virgin's dress cast shadows, an idea derived from Girolamo's trompe l'oeil border decorations.

The masterpieces from this sharply defined, highly detailed and decorative phase of Benvenuto's career are the triptych from Montepertuso (dated 1475, now in the parish church of Vescovado di Murlo, near Siena), the Borghesi altarpiece in the church of San Domenico in Siena (1475--1477/78) and the National Gallery altarpiece. In this painting Benvenuto has reverted from the single unified space of the Borghesi altarpiece -- the pala format -- to a triptych with gilded ground (presumably at the request of the commissioner). We are not sure where this altarpiece was originally intended to be displayed. In the early nineteenth century it was apparently in the church of the Gesù at Orvieto, which was founded in 1618; it had perhaps been made for a church there.

Style: Early Renaissance
Housed in different collections for many years, these two panels once formed the left and right wing of a diptych -- a fact only discovered in 1999. They were joined by a central hinge so the painting could be folded up and carried when travelling, for use as a personal private altarpiece wherever the owner might be.

Holes on the left edge of the panel depicting Christ after his death match up with those at the right edge of the panel with the Virgin and Child; this is where the hinges once were. The panels have the same dimensions and the gold leaf backgrounds are decorated with the same scrolling patterns and markings. Their reverses are painted to imitate red porphyry, a type of stone -- further evidence that they belong together.

The image of Christ after his death was known as the 'Imago Pietatis' ('image of pity') or the Man of Sorrows; it is based upon an image from Byzantium, the Eastern Christian empire. The image of the Virgin Mary derives from a Byzantine icon called the Virgin Hodegetria, where she points to the Christ Child who makes a blessing gesture with his right hand. The pairing of the Man of Sorrows with the Virgin and Child can also be found in Byzantine painting; there is, for example, a double-sided icon in the Byzantine Museum, Kastoria, Greece, where the front is painted with the Virgin and Child and the reverse with the Man of Sorrows. Our painting is the earliest known diptych pairing both images. The Man of Sorrows became very popular in western Europe in the thirteenth century.

The diptych may have been made for a Franciscan patron. The Man of Sorrows was popular with the Franciscan Order, who placed particular emphasis in their prayer upon the suffering of Christ. The patron might have specified that the artist copy a specific Byzantine image that he knew: our painting appears to be a careful copy of another work. Infrared reflectography has shown that detailed outlines of the figures were incised into the ground as a guide before painting began, but we don't know if the artist was following a single painting or images from two separate objects. The Order's presence in the eastern Mediterranean after the Fourth Crusade of 1204 -- one of a series of religious wars which resulted in the Latin conquest of the Byzantine capital Constantinople -- meant that they would have been very familiar with Byzantine imagery.

The panels have been linked to the Master of the Borgo Crucifix by comparison to figures -- particularly Saint John the Evangelist and the Virgin Mary (now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) -- from a painted Crucifix once in the church of Santa Maria in Borgo, Bologna, after which the painter is named. All share softly rippling draperies, delicate hands and fingers and similar facial features, including the strong 'v' shape between the eyes.

Style: Gothic
Two donors -- husband and wife -- kneel in the wings of this triptych, gazing at the Crucifixion in the central panel. The Annunciation was originally painted in grisaille on the outside of the left and right wings, but the fronts and backs are now physically separate.

The style of the painting links it with the work of Bernaert van Orley, and especially with that of his pupil Pieter Coecke van Aalst. Like the figures in the central Crucifixion, Coecke's compositions are self-consciously staged, as if his people are being directed by choreographers. This was evidently a popular composition: a triptych with different donors was in a St Petersburg collection in the nineteenth century, and three versions of the centre panel survive in European collections. All parts of the triptych were probably made shortly after Coecke became a master of the Antwerp Guild in 1527--8.

We don't know who the donors are, although coats of arms hang on the sides of their prayer desks (the woman's is completely erased). The man might a member of the Bollis family, possibly Willem Bollis, who in 1519 was a member of the court of the Prince-Bishop of Liège at Sint-Truiden. Coecke's workshop certainly produced paintings for patrons in Sint-Truiden. They worked for two abbots of St Trudo, the great Benedictine monastery there, painting an Annunciation (Hasselt, Bisdom) for Willem van Brussel, abbot from 1516 to 1532, and producing a series of painted panels to complete a carved altarpiece of the Life and Passion of Christ for his successor, Joris Sarens, in 1534.

The centre panel and the fronts of the wings were transferred to canvas in the nineteenth century. The Annunciation is still on the original oak boards, thinned where they were sawn from the fronts.

Style: High Renaissance
These two panels were once a diptych (a painting in two parts) showing Christ crowned with thorns and his mother, the Virgin, grieving. Both the Virgin and Christ are shown close up, almost like portraits. Both are red-eyed and weeping, drawing them together emotionally. The frames (now lost) and figures both seem to cast shadows on the gold backgrounds.

Numerous versions of these paintings survive, most of rather poor quality. A more or less identical diptych in the Louvre, Paris, was apparently painted in the same workshop, from tracings of the same pattern drawings. Both were probably made in Dirk Bouts's workshop.

The popularity of these kind of images was part of the great flowering of personal religious activity outside formal church worship which took place in the Netherlands in the fifteenth century. Small devotional paintings such as this were used as an aid to private prayer. Christ and the Virgin's sorrow was intended to inspire empathy in the viewer, who was encouraged to meditate upon Christ's suffering and his mother's grief as a route to personal salvation. Images such as these, and Christ Crowned with Thorns were perhaps connected with the interest that the Devotio Moderna ('Modern Devotion') movement took in the pain inflicted by the crown of thorns.

The paintings are in good condition, although  somewhat affected by discoloured varnishes. Both panels were made from the same tree, and although they have been slightly cut down none of the painted surfaces has been lost.

Style: Early Renaissance, Gothic
Cabinets of curiosities, or Kunstkammern -- encyclopaedic collections of natural objects and artworks --  flourished in Renaissance Europe. They were regarded as a microcosm of the world, and Jan van Kessel’s compositions reflect the sense of discovery and the urge to collect that led to their creation. His tiny still-life paintings were often produced as pairs, and some originally formed part of a series of plates that could adorn the front of the small drawers of the cabinet in which a collector kept his items.

Highly sought after during the artist’s lifetime, Jan van Kessel’s detailed and very lifelike representations of insects, flowers and plants invite the viewer to look closely. He started painting his celebrated studies of insects in the first half of the 1650s, with the earliest dated paintings originating from 1653. These two works -- Butterflies, Moths and Insects with Sprays of Common Hawthorn and Forget-Me-Not and Butterflies, Moths and Insects with Sprays of Creeping Thistle and Borage -- were probably conceived as pendants and are signed and dated 1654. Although some fine examples like this pair are on panel, most were painted on copper, its smooth surface ideally suited to his meticulous and detailed finish.

Born in Antwerp, van Kessel belonged to a dynasty of famous painters. David Teniers the Younger was his uncle, and his grandfather was Jan Brueghel the Elder. A pupil of the history painter Simon de Vos, van Kessel was apparently also instructed by his uncle, Jan Brueghel the Younger. He continued the family tradition of painting small-scale, brightly coloured and minutely detailed paintings, specialising in flower still lifes, studies of insects and allegorical series representing the elements, the senses or the parts of the world.

In Cognoscenti in a Room hung with Pictures, another Flemish painting in the National Gallery's collection, we can see a collector’s gallery: sculptures, prints, scientific instruments and natural objects are displayed alongside paintings. One of the connoisseurs turns away from the table in the left foreground and addresses the viewer. He holds up a small-scale study of insects and snails very similar to van Kessel’s paintings, suggesting collectors would take works like these in their hands rather than hang them on a wall.

Style: Baroque
Two paintings by Claude, Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba and Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, are known as the 'Bouillon Claudes' because they were made for Frédéric-Maurice, Duc de Bouillon (1605--1652), a French general in the papal army in Rome. They were completed in 1648 and remained together in the Bouillon family throughout the eighteenth century. Despite their large size -- they are two metres wide -- and fame during this time, they escaped seizure during the French Revolution when Bouillon's successor was imprisoned in 1794 and his property confiscated.

These two works are the same size and explore complementary themes, although the scenes belong to completely different biblical stories. Each picture explores the relationship between men and women, whether during a wedding celebration or because of a journey that brings friendship. There is a contrast between the bustling urban seaport and peaceful countryside. The central activity of each painting is framed by either buildings or trees, with the sea or a substantial river in the background.

Drawings of both of these paintings were included in Claude's Liber Veritatis (Latin for 'Book of Truth') a collection of his drawings which represents all the paintings he made. This book makes it possible to know which paintings are genuine works by Claude and which ones were painted by his followers or forgers.

Style: Academic, Baroque
This is a series of five small pictures, each of which represents one of the senses: taste, touch, hearing, smell and sight. Many paintings on this theme were made in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, and artists approached them in different ways. Sometimes all five senses were referenced in a single painting; often, as here, they were depicted individually. Some artists followed an earlier, rather staid tradition, showing a series of idealised women, each one holding an attribute or attributes to indicate which sense she embodied.

But many painters preferred more naturalistic allegorical scenes of everyday life. The earliest surviving paintings by Rembrandt form a series illustrating the five senses through groups of three characters focused on a different activity (only four now survive). Some were comic, such as Jan Molenaer’s low-life scenes -- one shows Touch as a woman beating a man (Mauritshuis, The Hague). Others verged on the quaint, such as a series of children by Dirck Hals (Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede).

Coques painted the series more than once. As well as this version, complete sets survive in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, and Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu. Like the National Gallery version, these take an apparently simple approach, with the figure of a man engaged in a relevant activity representing each sense -- Hearing, for example, is shown as a musician in all three series. But there's an added dimension in the National Gallery and Antwerp paintings: rather than a generic figure, each appears to be a portrait. The identities of some have been lost, but it may be that each shows an artist; all the figures which have been positively identified depict contemporary painters or sculptors.

In the National Gallery series, the figure of Sight is a portrait of Robert van den Hoeke (1622--1668), a painter and engraver who worked in Antwerp and in Brussels (an engraving of the picture published in a book of 1661 gives the identification). The pipe-smoking figure of Smell is probably the Flemish sculptor and architect Lucas Fayd’herbe (1617--1697), and the lute player who symbolises Hearing may be Jan Philip van Thielen (1618--1677), an Antwerp flower painter. Van Thielen also plays the lute as Hearing in the Antwerp series, where Lucas Fayd’herbe features again as Smell (this time sniffing a tobacco leaf). At least two other artists are depicted in the Antwerp paintings: the sculptor Artus Quellin (1609--1668) as Sight and the portraitist Pieter Meert (about 1620--1669) as Touch (we don’t know who represents Touch in the National Gallery series). The final figure, drinking wine and representing Taste, appears to be the same man in both series. He can’t be reliably identified, but there has been speculation that he might be a self portrait.

The National Gallery paintings appear to have been designed to hang in a particular way. All the men are seated; two face to the right and two to the left. Touch sits facing the viewer, and was presumably intended to be hung as the central image flanked by the others.

Style: Baroque
Greuze portrays this middle-aged man half-length, facing three-quarters towards the right but looking out towards us with a serious and thoughtful gaze. He took great care painting the man’s face, using a series of glazes to capture his slightly droopy eyes, barely parted lips, pink cheeks and light grey stubble shadow. The man's blue velvet jacket is decorated with a gold trim and gold-coloured buttons. Greuze paints the trim beautifully, using linear, parallel strokes of the brush. The blue colour of the coat may originally have been more of a purplish or inky blue. Beneath the jacket is a matching waistcoat with white lining. A delicate and convincingly painted white lace jabot (ornamental frill) spills out of the waistcoat.The tightly wrapped white cravat above the man's jabot emphasises his double chin. His grey powdered wig is fastened at the back by a large black ribbon known as a solitaire, which extends to the front.

Greuze signed and dated the portrait above the man’s left sleeve. About the time the picture was painted, Greuze became famous as a portraitist and was considered by his contemporaries to be on a par with Rubens and Van Dyck. However, it is hard to see their influence here. Greuze used a similar pose for his portrait of Comte d’Angiviller (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), painted in the same year.

Although we do not know the identity of the sitter, several suggestions have been made as to who he might be. It has been proposed that he is Comte Pierre de Lupé, whose portrait Greuze exhibited at the Salon in 1763, the same year that this picture was painted. The portrait of the count is the only one of a male sitter exhibited by Greuze at the 1763 Salon that has not yet been located. Pierre-Marie de Lupé, comte de Lupé et de Falaise in Normandy (1724--1770) was an army officer. In 1764 he was appointed Gentilhomme de la Manche (Governor) to the Comte d’Artois, who later became Charles X of France. Eight years earlier he had been made a chevalier of the Order of Saint Louis. However, the absence of the cross of the Order, and the sitter’s age suggest that this is unlikely to be a portrait of Pierre-Marie, who would have been in his late thirties at the time. It is possible that he may be Louis, also a comte de Lupé and a marquis de Besmaux (1699--1774), who is not recorded as a member of the Order of Saint Louis.

Alternatively, the sitter may be a Russian businessman from St Petersburg called Bacherach. On 11 November 1763 the engraver and dealer Johann Georg Wille recorded in his journal that Greuze received 25 gold louis from Bacherach for completing his portrait. From Wille’s diary it appears that Bacherach was in Paris after the closure of the 1763 Salon, explaining why his portrait is not listed in the booklet that accompanied the 1763 Salon.

Style: Rococo, Neoclassical
Nessus the centaur was killed by Hercules for attempting to rape his bride Dejanira. Before dying, Nessus gave Dejanira his bloody tunic, telling her to give it to Hercules if he was unfaithful, and his affections would return. When she did this the shirt stuck to Hercules' skin and he burned to death in agony. Ovid, 'Metamorphoses' (Book IX).

The picture may have been part of a decorative scheme, illustrating the life of Hercules or stories of thwarted love. It dates from around 1700.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
A young woman floats above a landscape, a translucent moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head. A yellow glow surrounds her. This imagery is based on the New Testament Book of Revelation, in which Saint John the Evangelist records his vision of the Woman of the Apocalypse 'clothed with the sun'. She bears a male child and is threatened by a dragon -- the devil.

In Catholicism, this woman represents the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. Here, her hands are clasped in prayer and she looks down in humility to show her protection over humanity. The garden, fountain, temple and ship at the bottom are all symbols normally associated with her purity, and were included in a litany (or prayer) dedicated to the Virgin.

This is an early example of the representation of the Immaculate Conception in Spanish art. The belief that the Virgin was herself conceived without sin dates back to at least the Early Middle Ages. In 1617, just before this picture was painted, Pope Paul V issued a decree that enforced this doctrine.

An important Spanish treatise on painting, the Arte de la Pintura (1649) by Velázquez's teacher Francisco Pacheco, gives detailed recommendations on how to depict religious scenes such as this one. It was published 30 years after this picture was painted, but its concepts would have been familiar to Velázquez from his time in Pacheco's studio. Pacheco wrote that the Virgin should be shown 'in the flower of her youth, 12 or 13 years old, as a beautiful young girl, with fine and serious eyes, a most perfect nose and mouth and pink cheeks, wearing her mat golden hair loose'.

The youthful, naturalistic Virgin here seems to be based on an actual girl. But she also has a solid sculptural appearance, especially in the deeply carved folds of her drapery. Velázquez was probably trained in the art of painting wooden sculpture, and this may have improved his ability to convey form in such a lifelike, three-dimensional way. The Virgin's blue mantle originally swept across the lower part of her legs, in front of her tunic; this is clearly visible in X-ray images. Velázquez painted this out, perhaps to make the form of her legs beneath the drapery clearer and to enhance her sculptural appearance. The pink tunic would originally have been more intensely red, but its colour has faded.

With its companion painting, Saint John on the Island of Patmos, this is one of Velázquez's earliest known works. In that picture, he shows Saint John looking up towards his vision of the Woman of the Apocalypse, and we are encouraged to look towards this painting for an intimate and close-up view of the Virgin.

There are several paintings on this subject in our collection, including others by artists working in Seville during the seventeenth century, such as Juan de Valdés Leal's The Immaculate conception with Two Donors, and The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and his studio.

Style: Baroque