wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This altarpiece commemorates one of the most important events of the papacy of Pope Gregory XV (born Alessandro Ludovisi). It shows the Jesuits Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier being canonised (officially declared saints in the Roman Catholic Church). This occurred on 12 March 1622, the feast day of Saint Gregory the Great.

Regarded as one of the Doctors, or Fathers, of the Western Church, Gregory the Great was pope from 590 to 604. Here he is seated on an elevated throne between the two Jesuit saints, leafing through a large book on his lap, a sign of his wisdom and learning. Gregory has removed his glasses and gazes up at the white dove, suggesting divine inspiration from the Holy Ghost. At the bottom right a chubby putto plays with the papal tiara, or crown, while two putti at the top right mimic the pious poses of the figures below. At left a youthful angel plays the violin, a reference to Gregory’s renowned musical abilities.

Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491--1556), Spanish founder of the Society of Jesus (or Jesuits), kneels to the left of the Pope. He holds a Jesuit Bible, recognisable by the ‘IHS’ symbol embossed on its cover. To the right is Saint Francis Xavier (1506--1552), the first great Jesuit missionary, holding a white lily and looking up at the Pope. Though the figures are densely packed into a shallow space, the artist has achieved a sense of depth by introducing a range of textures. Both Jesuit saints are dressed in the simple black habit of their monastic order, placing them in contrast with the Pope in his brocaded cope. The carved stone plinth on which the Pope is seated is partly in shadow, as is the ornate jewelled tiara near the base of the picture. The seated putto, with a swathe of fabric twisted around him, turns his face away from us. The arrangement of these various elements also contributes to the sense of depth and space.

Gregory the Great was the namesake of Gregory XV, who was pope from 1621 until his death two years later. Although the two Jesuit saints were canonised in 1622, the style of this picture suggests it was made three or four years later. Several characteristics align this painting with the work Guercino produced after his trip to Rome between 1621 and 1623, particularly the intensity of colour and the fine detail. The elaborate rendering of the sumptuous fabric worn by Saint Gregory the Great is typical of Guercino around this time, and is similar to the vestments worn by the high priest Simeon in The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (1623).

The painting was likely commissioned by the Ludovisi family -- possibly by Pope Gregory XV’s nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi -- in the years following Gregory XV’s death to honour his close connections with the Jesuit order. The Ludovisi were one of Bologna’s most distinguished families and early patrons of Guercino, who had worked for them since 1617. The family also supported the construction of a great church in Rome in honour of Saint Ignatius Loyola. This altarpiece was probably originally destined for that church or for one of the Jesuit buildings adjoining it, but was given away by the family in 1646.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Two shepherdesses, accompanied by a young boy, their sheep and a hound, relax in a lush woodland garden. The younger of the two women attaches a sealed love letter (a billet-doux) to the neck of a white dove or carrier pigeon, using a blue ribbon that matches the colour of her satin dress. Her slightly older companion, in the pink dress, has a basket of flowers beside her, which are traditional attributes of Venus, the goddess of love.

This painting is typical of the pastoral scenes at which Boucher particularly excelled. It is one of numerous studio copies made of The Love Letter (National Gallery of Art, Washington), which was paired with The Interrupted Sleep (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) in which a young shepherdess is woken from her sleep by a young man. Boucher painted the two pictures for Madame de Pompadour, who was Louis XV’s official chief mistress from 1745 to 1751. A portrait of her by Drouais, Madame de Pompadour at her Tambour Frame, is also in the National Gallery’s collection. An important figure in French cultural life, Madame de Pompadour was a patron of Boucher from 1747 until her death in 1764. Her sponsorship of him was part of her cultivation of the Rococo style in the fine and decorative arts, which had an important impact on refined taste..

The compositions of both paintings were adapted by Boucher from a monumental cartoon he had painted in 1748 for a tapestry titled The Fountain of Love. Signed and dated 1750, the two pictures were exhibited at the Salon of 1753, where they were described as overdoors for Madame de Pompadour’s residence, the Château de Bellevue at Meudon, some six miles south-west of Paris. Built in 1750, the small château, which was more like a country house than a traditional royal castle, was specifically intended for private meetings between the King and Mme de Pompadour. Boucher’s pastoral scenes were particularly suited for this venue as the Château de Bellevue (literally, ‘beautiful view’) was not only dedicated to pleasure but also overlooked the river Seine and was surrounded by gardens. In 1757 Bellevue was given to the King’s daughters and Boucher’s paintings are next recorded as being hung in the ground floor vestibule of Mme de Pompadour’s Paris residence, the Hôtel d’Evreux (now the Palais de l’Elysée).

The format of the Washington version of The Love Letter is almost vertical, but this copy is horizontal. As a result, the composition has been reduced both at the top and the bottom and has additions at both sides. These include the base of a column on the right-hand side and the young boy who is leaning on a stile gate on the left of the picture. A similar child appears in earlier paintings by Boucher, as does the hound. We do not know if Boucher himself was directly involved in painting this copy.  Variations in painting quality suggest that several people may have worked on it, which would have been consistent with studio practice.

Style: Rococo, Neoclassical
This lively portrait creates the impression that we have been granted a special audience with its sitter, who looks out at us with a quizzical glance. He wears a long wig, a furred robe and a prominent belt with 12 silver clasps, which tell us that he is a Venetian nobleman in winter dress. The inscription on the pilaster in the left background identifies the sitter as Antonio Correr, son of Vittore Correr, Procurator of San Marco (a guardian to Venice's most famous square and its buildings). Painted below are the date of 1685, the Correr coat of arms and the artist’s name.

Vittore Correr (1658--1714) did indeed become Procurator of San Marco in 1685, but he is not known to have had any sons. It's possible that the inscriptions have been tampered with and that the sitter could actually be Vittore. The date of 1685 was once thought to mark the year the portrait was painted, but this was not necessarily the purpose of the inscription: it is more likely meant to commemorate when Vittore won his appointment. The portrait is of a type commonly made to mark an official appointment in the Venetian state administration.

The background view is probably meant to suggest the colonnade of the Procuratie in the Piazza San Marco, which appears in other views of Venice in the National Gallery’s collection by Canaletto (Venice: Piazza San Marco and the Colonnade of the Procuratie Nuove) and Guardi (Venice: Piazza San Marco).

Style: Baroque, Academic
Christ's lifeless body, supported by the Virgin Mary, lies at its foot of the Cross. The Virgin gazes towards heaven in deep sorrow, her brow furrowed. A fair-haired Saint Mary Magdalene clings to Christ's left arm, unable to contain her grief. In the centre, Saint John the Evangelist buries his face in his red drapery, while other mourning figures stand around him. In the background is the city of Jerusalem.

This episode isn't actually described in the Bible, but there was a long tradition of illustrating it. Rather than concentrating exclusively on the lamentation over Christ's body, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo has included other elements from the story of the Passion. Here we see the two thieves who were crucified alongside Christ, as well as ladders propped against the Cross, elements which usually appear in pictures of the Crucifixion and the Deposition. On the right is the 'good thief', who recognised Christ as the son of God and was saved; the 'bad thief', who was damned, has his back to us. Their bodies are not nailed to their crosses, but tied backwards over the cross bar: this may be closer to reality. The two turbaned men on the right may be Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who anointed and buried Christ's body (John 19: 39). If so, it would point forward to the next event of the Passion: the Entombment.

The crosses are set well above the crowd, against the blue and beige sky. They are potent and moving symbols, but their placing also creates depth and their outlines give subtle movement against the background. In both the crucified bodies and the main foreground figures, Domenico focused on body language rather than facial expressions -- the Virgin being the exception -- as a way of provoking feelings of pity and sadness in the viewer.

Domenico was much influenced by Rembrandt. Joseph Smith, British consul in Venice and an enthusiastic art collector, owned Rembrandt's The Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Domenico could have seen it in the 1730s, when he painted this work, or else he knew an etching after it. His picture owes a great debt to Rembrandt, whose influence can be seen in the bearded men, a facial type that we know Rembrandt studied closely and included in numerous religious paintings.

There is another version of the Lamentation by Domenico in the National Gallery's collection -- it is smaller in size and painted in an upright format, and is even more closely related to Rembrandt's work. Domenico painted these two works in different ways: this one has a more finished appearance, and the clothing, the faces and the town in the background are described in greater detail. These works may have been part of a series by Domenico that explores the themes of the Passion.

Style: Rococo, Neoclassical
The central character of this painting is hidden in the shadows. Here, an austerely dressed man with long hair and a beard seems to draw the attention of the people gathered before him. He can be identified as Saint John the Baptist, standing on what looks like an improvised pulpit and pointing with his right hand, index finger outstretched.

The subject is taken from the Gospels, which begin the New Testament and are an important source for the life and teaching of Saint John. The Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 3: 1--12) locates John’s preaching in the wilderness, but Cornelis van Haarlem has painted a landscape that does not seem very wild. It also describes John as wearing clothes made of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, which does resemble the clothing of the figure here.

Saint Matthew recounts how people flocked from Jerusalem, Judea and ‘all the region round about Jordan’ to hear John’s message and to be baptised by him. Cornelis took great care in painting a great variety of people. Many look like his Haarlem contemporaries, while some -- the group of five men in exotic headdress on the left side of the painting -- resemble Pharisees or Sadducees. In the left foreground, men and women picnic; in the middle foreground one man casually leans on a drum as he chats. A small dog walks by, seemingly picking up on John’s voice, while a group of soldiers on horseback appears on the right side of the picture. The crowd is divided between conversation and close attention to John’s announcement of the coming of Christ -- the boy who has climbed a tree stump to have a better view is an example of the latter. In the far background, the grouped silhouettes of even more people are visible.

Three distinct 'spotlights' illuminate the foreground of the large, horizontal landscape. Gradually, the greens of the lush  vegetation make way for a blue atmospheric hue in the mountainous background. Cornelis seems to have adopted the large-scale landscape with a biblical subject from his Haarlem contemporary, the Flemish painter and biographer Karel van Mander, who situated his Dance around the Golden Calf in a similar setting (Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem). Netherlandish artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often painted the subject of Saint John the Baptist preaching, and its popularity may reflect contemporary debates about open-air sermons by Calvinist preachers, taking the saint as an example.

Style: Baroque
Stanislas Lépine frequently painted scenes of Paris but avoided the sights of the modern city that particularly appealed to the Impressionists. In this small oil painting on wood we see a seated nun and a schoolgirl holding a skipping rope for three girls as another nun and more girls approach to join them. The ruins of the Tuileries Palace can be seen in the background.

Lépine painted over a dozen views of the gardens which surrounded the Tuileries Palace on the right bank of the river Seine in the heart of the city. The Parisian residence of most French monarchs from Henry IV to Napoleon III, the Palace had been burned down during the Commune of 1871, the short-lived revolutionary government that ruled Paris in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and Siege of Paris.

In this picture we can see the ruins of the Tuileries Palace after its destruction. As the ruins were completely demolished between December 1882 and September 1883, Lépine would have painted the picture between 1871 and 1883. He has limited his colours to tones of blue, yellow, green and grey, whose subtle harmonies enhance the sense of everyday life and activities restored after the upheavals of the war and the Commune.

Style: Impressionist
Paulus Theodorus van Brussel’s arrangement of fruit and flowers reveals the eighteenth-century taste for paintings depicting the exotic and expensive set in artful disarray against the faint background of a garden. It's a celebration of the bounty of nature and is, at the same time, an appealing way of showing prize specimens. It also demonstrates his skill in painting texture.

He has included poppies, hollyhocks and celosia, but the flowers -- not as rare and pricey as they had been a century before the picture was painted -- seem to take second place to the abundant fruits. These are mostly hothouse grown, and therefore costly: melons, black and translucent green grapes, peaches and a pineapple with its spiky crown at the top of the arrangement, almost seeming to float in space. Among them, busy insects -- interesting specimens themselves -- investigate the oozing juices, crisp leaves and fragrant petals.

Style: Neoclassical
The sombre colours and dying glow of the evening light in this rustic landscape evoke autumn, the inevitable passage of time and a certain melancholy. Leaves on the cluster of poplar trees are crisp and beginning to turn brown. On the scrubby grass beneath the trees, a few dabs of paint suggest late blooming flowers or perhaps leaves already fallen. A dip in the rough terrain reveals the breadth of a lake, its water rippling and splashing under the distant, grey hills.

We don’t know where the scene is set. It’s most likely to be from Harpignies’ imagination, but based on his knowledge of and affection for the countryside of the Yonne, the area south of Paris that he visited often and where he lived in his retirement. Throughout his life, Harpignies painted countless landscapes and was very successful. A visit to Rome at the start of his career had introduced him to the work of the great seventeenth-century landscape artist Claude, who was a lasting influence. Time spent with Barbizon painters such as Jean François Millet made him aware of their new realism, painting gritty subjects of relentless manual labour or working animals in an often grim landscape. Harpignies wanted realism, but not in their way -- ‘No! No! It’s Rome that marked me above all’, he wrote.

He shared this view of landscape with his great friend Corot -- painting what he saw around him but not in the grim, realist way. He chose the more gentle, classic way of the earlier masters, though without their use of the mythical figures of Greece or Rome. Like Corot, he used subtle contrasting colours to enliven his pictures -- the subtle red in the sky here lifts the heavy greens and browns of the foreground. In Cows in a Marshy Landscape, Corot has used colour contrast in this way, but he also included a figure and animals to give life. Harpignies rarely put figures into his landscapes, and almost never animals; when he did, they usually had a technical purpose. The tiny figure of the woman on the right here is much too small in proportion to the trees. She is there solely to animate the scene through colour, painted in expertly judged dots and dabs of red, pink and brilliant white. The single figure in The Painter’s Garden at St Privé has the same effect.

By the 1890s, when Harpignies was beginning to age, pictures such as this one were considered to be old-fashioned, but his technical skill and confidence was undiminished. The crumbling earth and tufts of grass are painted with heavy impasto, much in the way that younger Impressionist artists like Monet were doing. But still the luminous sky and the elegance of the trees links Harpignies with the classical artists of Rome, making him a bridge between the seventeenth-century masters and his contemporaries.

Style: Impressionist
This is the final scene in the predella of an altarpiece that Ugolino made for the church of Santa Croce, Florence. It came after a scene showing mourners lamenting over Christ's body before his burial (now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin).

Four Roman soldiers -- the guards of Christ's tomb, stationed to prevent anyone stealing the body -- sleep on the ground. Christ, holding the red and white flag of the Resurrection, steps out of the tomb, its lid cast aside on the ground behind. The soldiers, in chain mail and helmets, hold shields, in anticipation of physical attack (these were once covered with silver leaf, which has now darkened). But the Resurrection was miraculous -- it could not have been prevented by the soldiers. Like The Betrayal of Christ, the image emphasises the Jewish and Roman authorities' misunderstanding of Christ's power, which he had always preached was not earthly but spiritual.

Ugolino based the scenes in this predella series on versions that his Sienese predecessor, Duccio, made for the altarpiece called the Maestà. Duccio's image of the Resurrection does not survive, so this panel is important for giving us an impression of what that version may have looked like. The composition is similar to contemporary tomb sculpture found in both Siena and Florence in the early fourteenth century, suggesting that there was a standard composition for the image.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
The Three Marys mourn Christ following his crucifixion. The Virgin Mary kneels at Christ's feet, her outstretched arms framed by her dark mantle. A halo of golden rays of light emanates from her covered head. It is unusual for the Virgin to be shown at Christ's feet; normally his body is laid across her lap. Christ's head is haloed by similar rays, although he also has four sets of red rays among them, which show that he is one of the Trinity.

Mary Magdalene kneels by Christ's head, her arms raised as though gesturing to someone outside the picture, perhaps another mourner. Mary Cleophas stands behind her clutching her head and tearing her hair with grief. All the woman have powerful expressive limbs and intense, anguished expressions. The demonstrative gestures, distorted anatomy and colour contrasts are typical of Dosso's early work, but here they are taken to extraordinary heights.

Christ's feet remain crossed, as they were when nailed to the Cross. A wound from a nail can also be seen in his hand. His chest is arched and his head collapsed, as though his body has stiffened in death; its grey colour contrasts with the pink flesh tones of the other, living, figures. His back seems to be resting on the large pink cushion behind his head, although the size of the cushion is unclear as it is the same colour as Mary Magdalene's skirt.

Calvary, the hill where Christ was crucified, can be seen on the left in the distance. Three crosses stand on its summit against the sky. The one on the left seems to have been occupied by Christ as it looks as though it bears the traditional scroll inscribed 'I.N.R.I.', meaning 'Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews'. It is unusual for Christ's cross not to be in the middle. The bodies of the two thieves still hang on the other crosses. The background of the picture is painted very freely, which is especially noticeable in the rocket-like brushstrokes intended to represent crowds of figures at the base of the hill -- a remarkable example of Dosso's dramatic handling of paint.

The crown of thorns, with which Christ was humiliated during the Passion, lies on the ground beside him; beside it are the dice thrown by the soldiers who gambled for his clothes. It is very uncommon for the dice to be included in a painting of the Lamentation.

Although the distortions of expressions, forms and space in the picture are particularly strange, they and the manner in which it is painted are highly characteristic of Dosso -- especially the jagged white lights on the crisp papery folds of Christ's loin cloth, the flickering yellow and pink brushstrokes of its border ornament and of the tassels of the cushion under Christ's head and the alternating, almost vertical, strokes of strongly contrasting deep plum and light pink showing the pleats of Mary Magdalene's dress.

Style: High Renaissance