wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
These are two panels from a multi-panelled altarpiece (known as a polyptych) painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari between 1508—9 for the church of Sant’ Anna in Vercelli. It was commissioned by the local confraternity dedicated to Saint Anne for the altar of their oratory. The document recording the commission says that Gaudenzio was to follow the example of the altarpiece commissioned by Sebastiano Ferrero for the church of Sant’Agostino della Misericordia in Vercelli.

The panels of the altarpiece were arranged in two horizontal rows of three. The National Gallery’s pictures depicting the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary were originally on the upper row, either side of a panel of God the Father blessing from the heavens. All the panels would have been contained in a large and elaborate gilded frame.

The lower row comprised three paintings: Saint Joachim chased from the Temple; The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Two Members of the Confraternity of Sant’ Anna (the central panel); and The meeting of Saint Anne and Saint Joachim at the Golden Gate. Saint Anne and Saint Joachim were the Virgin Mary’s parents. They were unable to have a child until they miraculously conceived the Virgin Mary in their old age – the panels of the altarpiece depict this story, which culminates in the Annunciation to the Virgin and the birth of Christ, who appears in the central panel with his mother and grandmother.

The lower scenes are set in classical architecture and against a landscape that continues between the panels. The leafy tops of the trees that are growing in the scenes below can be seen peeping above the parapets in the upper scenes depicting the Annunciation. In this work, Gaudenzio successfully integrates a variety of influences. The figure of the Virgin bending to gather up the infant Christ in the central scene of the lower row recalls Leonardo's Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Louvre, Paris), and the influence of Perugino, Filippino Lippi, Bramante and Bramantino is also evident.

No one knows exactly when the panels left the church of Sant’ Anna. By 1864 the two panels representing the Annunciation were owned by Sir Austen Henry Layard. They were given to the National Gallery in 1819 as part of the Layard Bequest. In 1865, the four other panels were bought by the Regia Pinacoteca, today the Galleria Sabauda, in Turin, where they remain.

Style: High Renaissance
These two panels of Saint Louis of Toulouse and Saint Bonaventure are said to have come from a ceiling in the Scuola di S. Francesco ai Frari at Venice. The Venetian Scuole, or confraternities, were charitable and religious organisations for the laity and were important patrons of the arts, commissioning cycles of paintings to decorate the walls and ceilings of their meeting rooms. The Scuola di S. Francesco ai Frari was a confraternity dedicated to the veneration of Saint Francis and attached to the church of the Frari; its fifteenth-century building stood at the west end of the Campo dei Frari.

These two panels are connected with a series of nine pictures by Pordenone described by the seventeenth-century art critic Boschini as made for a ground floor room in that building. The room must have been small, judging by the scale of the surviving pictures. The original arrangement of the ceiling is described as the Four Evangelists on square panels, with Saints Bonaventure, Louis, Bernardino and Anthony of Padua in separate octagonal compartments around a central full-length image on a smaller scale of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata. In his Descrizione of 1733, describing all the public paintings in Venice, Antonio Maria Zanetti reports that the paintings had been moved into an upper room as they were deteriorating in their original site. The central panel of Saint Francis is lost but the Four Evangelists, Saint Bernardino and Saint Anthony are now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

Each of the surviving panels depicts a tightly cropped bust-length imposing male figure. The perspective of the background in the square pictures of the Four Evangelists suggests that they would have been in the corners of the ceiling. The mouldings behind the evangelists’ heads form corners which would have been intended to blend with the corners of the room. The four Franciscan saints on the octagonal panels would have been positioned at the sides. The foreshortened walls behind each figure functioned as imaginary extensions of the room’s real walls.

The National Gallery's panels show Saint Louis of Toulouse in his bishop’s robes holding a Bible, and Saint Bonaventure pointing to heaven. The panels are characteristic works of Pordenone’s late style and closely comparable with his Beato Lorenzo Giustiniani altarpiece (Accademia, Venice) commissioned in 1532, so were probably made at a similar time.

Style: High Renaissance
Two small saints -- Saint Paul, with a sword and book, and a bishop saint, perhaps Saint Ambrose, in richly coloured and gilded robes -- stand against dark backgrounds. The angle at which they are shown makes it clear they were intended to be seen from below: both probably came from top row of a polyptych.

This kind of altarpiece continued to be popular in provincial Italy even after the invention of the pala, where the composition is shown on a single unified surface. It would have had a number of saints standing in different panels around a larger central image, probably of the Virgin and Child. In the early Renaissance the backgrounds behind the saints were usually burnished gold; here they are simply painted black, rather than being set in a landscape or classical frame, as is often seen in late fifteenth-century paintings.

We do not know who the artist was, but the style of the panels links them to the work of both Ambrogio Bergognone and Vincenzo Foppa. They must have been painted by a less talented follower of either artist, and are quite similar, although less finely painted, to Foppa's Saint Augustine and Saint Theodore (Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, Milan). The pictures are painted on poplar, the usual wood for Italian paintings, covered with fabric, as was quite common.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
These paintings once formed the shutters of an altarpiece made for the Benedictine abbey at Werden, near Cologne in Germany. The shutters were decorated on both sides, and could be closed to protect the central part of the altarpiece, which has not been traced.

The inner and outer faces have been separated, creating four panels out of two. The inner faces, which would have been visible when the shutters were open, show events from the life of Saint Hubert. The outer faces each show four standing saints, including Saint Hubert and Saint Benedict, as well as other members of the Benedictine Order.

Style: Early Renaissance, Gothic
Two of the most popular late medieval saints -- Francis, who died in 1226, and Bernardino of Siena, who died in 1444 -- present a young man to the Virgin and Child and a choir of angels: he is the altarpiece's patron. In the outer panels stand Saints John the Baptist and Bartholomew.

This kind of altarpiece -- a triptych with a larger panel in the centre, flanked by standing saints traditionally set against a burnished gold ground -- was the most popular form in Italy through much of the Middle Ages. Large churches would have had multiple altars, each with its altarpiece; even quite small parish churches may have had several.

We don't know exactly where this altarpiece came from, though Bartolomeo Caporali seems to have worked mainly in Umbria. We don't know the patron's identity, though he was clearly a man with a special devotion to the Franciscans, friars who took religious vows but were not confined to a monastery. Founded in the thirteenth century to provide educated preachers and teachers for a growing urban population, they flourished in fifteenth-century Italy. Men who joined the Franciscan Order took vows of poverty and travelled from place to place, preaching and living on what was given by their listeners.

This is one of the few paintings of saints that actually resembles the person it depicts. Bernardino was a famous mendicant preacher and drew large crowds to his outdoor sermons. He spoke out against 'vices' such as fine clothing and homosexuality, and encouraged a devotion to the holy name of Jesus; he is often shown with an IHS monogram, as in Giorgio Schiavone's painting of him. He wears the ash-grey habit of the especially strict Observant (reformed) Franciscans, known in England as the Grey Friars. Many paintings were made of Bernardino immediately after his death -- possibly from his death mask (which still survives) -- and show him as here: an old man with a toothless mouth and sunken cheeks.

Caporali was born, died and worked in Perugia and his very traditional style -- the smooth, flowing lines, decorative colours and burnished gold backgrounds hark back to International Gothic -- was primarily influenced by the work of his teacher Benedetto Bonfigli. Some aspects recall Florentine painting: the radiating lines incised into the haloes are derived from Florentine painters of the 1430s and 1440s, such as Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi. The smoothness of his paint handing -- look at the skin of the Virgin and the angels -- and his way of painting draperies show similarities with  Benozzo Gozzoli.

All the panels in this altarpiece have been cut down. The marble parapet would have run horizontally across all three panels, and they had pointed arched tops. The original frame, which was possibly very elaborate, is also missing. There might well have been more panels and possibly a predella.

Style: Early Renaissance
These three panels entered our collection attached to the top of Niccolò di Pietro Gerini's altarpiece featuring the baptism of Christ. While they would have appeared at the top of an altarpiece, as the crowning pinnacle panels, they did not originally belong to that work.

These three panels share an apocalyptic theme -- that is, they relate to the Last Judgement of humanity at the end of the world. Christ is shown as the 'Apocalyptic Christ', reflecting how he appears in the Book of Revelation, the Bible text that describes the events that will occur at this moment (Revelation 1: 13--18).

This central image would have been flanked by panels showing the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist, turning inwards to look towards Christ. Both figures were traditionally seen as intercessors for humanity at the Last Judgement, so their presence here, surrounding Christ as judge, is appropriate. At some point before the picture came into our collection, John's scroll was repainted with a text from the book of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. But it is definitely John the Baptist: the figure wears a camel-hair tunic, one of the saint's identifying features.

Our panels have been associated with four others from the same altarpiece which survive in collections in Italy and America. There's a central image of Christ seated on a throne, surrounded by angels, and a large panel that would have been placed on its left, showing 11 saints looking towards him. Two small rectangular panels from the predella have also been identified. One, most likely the central panel, shows Christ resurrected and standing upon his tomb; there's a scene of him appearing to Saint Peter on the left while his appearance to Mary Magdalene is on the right. The right-hand panel shows him appearing to a group of disciples, among them Thomas, who doubted Christ's resurrection from the dead.

Several clues within the picture suggest that it was made for the church of San Salvatore al Vescovo, the Bishop of Florence's church, in the Palazzo Arcivescovile. Christ in the central panel is shown seated on a stool decorated with lions' heads, the symbol of papal -- and episcopal -- authority. Saint Peter, the first Bishop of Rome, features prominently in the front row wearing a bishop's stole; he also is shown in the predella. This makes sense given Peter's position, but also because Florence's bishop from 1362 to 1369 -- around the time this altarpiece was made -- was Pietro Corsini.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
These two paintings, known as capricci, combine reality and fantasy: set in the Venetian lagoon, they show people, buildings and boats surrounded by invented ruins. The paintings were given to the National Gallery as genuine works by Guardi, but are now thought to be by a nineteenth-century imitator.

The varnish on both has become discoloured and the colours have darkened, but Guardi's stylistic influence is apparent in the thick paint that expresses cloud movement and the heavy outlines that define the landscape. Guardi painted numerous imaginary scenes inspired by his home city of Venice, where he lived and worked.

Style: Neoclassical
We do not know whether somone commissioned Lancret to paint this series of pictures on copper of The Four Times of Day: Morning, Midday, Afternoon and Evening. He began them sometime before September 1739, when Morning was exhibited at the Salon. Painting series of pictures was something of a speciality for Lancret – he had already produced The Four Seasons in about 1719, The Four Elements by August 1732, and The Four Ages of Man by July 1735. The set of The Four Times of Day was complete by February 1741, when the engraver Nicolas de Larmessin III presented proofs of his engravings of them to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris (The Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture). The absence of any owner or patron’s name on Larmessin’s engravings suggests that Lancret may have painted the pictures speculatively with the aim of making money from the engravings, as there was a long-established taste for buying prints in series. Many of Lancret’s sets of paintings were the subject of financially successful sets of engravings.

Lancret may have known Boucher's series of The Four Times of Day, as the activities in Boucher's Morning, Midday and Evening show some similarity with those in Lancret’s paintings. However, Lancret’s pictures are more narrative-based and story-like than those of Boucher.

Lancret painted on small copper panels on other occasions, for example The Birdcatchers, probably of 1738 and its pendant Pastoral Revels, which is dated 1738 (both now in the Wallace Collection, London). A silvery metal coating was applied to the panels before painting, perhaps in an effort to stop the copper from corroding. Painting on copper would have allowed for fine and detailed brushwork, but why Lancret should have used copper for only a brief period of his career -- around 1738 -- is unknown. In these paintings he paid great attention to detail in the hands and faces of the principal figures, and made numerous small adjustments to produce particular expressions and gestures.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
Lot and his Daughters Leaving Sodom and Susannah and the Elders are two works by Guido Reni, both of which depict biblical scenes containing three figures. They are of similar size, and are painted in a horizontal format with dark backgrounds. The two were first recorded in the Palazzo Lancellotti, Rome, in 1640, where they hung together as pendants until they were respectively acquired by the National Gallery in 1844. Their earlier histories are unknown.

Upon their acquisition the works were considered to be a pair, given their similarly moralising subject matter, size, and location in the Palazzo Lancellotti. However, cleaning revealed brushwork that suggests the paintings were created in different periods of Reni's career, and were not made to hang together. Lot and His Daughters leaving Sodom has been dated to about 1615--16; the sculptural quality of the figures and the careful brushwork with which they are rendered is illustrative of Reni's style in the immediate aftermath of over a decade working in Rome. Susannah and the Elders is believed to have been painted almost a decade later, between 1620 and 1625, evidenced by its considerably looser handling of paint and visible brushstrokes.

Because the two Old Testament subjects illustrate feminine vice and virtue, the pairing would seem to be deliberate. It's possible that Reni painted Susannah and the Elders to accompany his earlier work, but it's similarly plausible that the pairing was made by a collector much later.

Style: Academic, Caravaggist
This series of four small paintings is an allegory of the seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter have been given human forms that embody the essence of each. Spring is a gardener carrying a tree to plant in a formal garden; Summer is a peasant tying up a sheaf of corn; Autumn is a drinker who raises a glass of wine; and Winter is an old man wearing a fur cap and mantle, warming himself near a brazier.

David Teniers has placed each character, of an appropriate age and dressed accordingly, in the foreground, with a symbolic object also given prominence. In the background, other figures, less posed, appear doing work or other activities associated with the season, depicted in a more realistic way.

The pictures are on a copper base, which allowed the paint to flow more freely than it would on canvas. Teniers could show minute detail: the facial characteristics and expressions, Summer's hand as he holds the sheaf of corn, Winter's splendid hat and the objects on his table, and Spring's smart new jacket. Elsewhere, his brushstrokes are much quicker and less defined, leaving traces in the paint, as in Summer's coarse textured shirt and in background trees and skies.

Allegorical paintings of the seasons were popular at the time, and Teniers painted several versions of the subject. The four National Gallery pictures are displayed in one frame as a set, but elsewhere they are shown as four separate entities. In some cases, only one or two of the set has survived (one of these, often called 'The Toper' but possibly a personification of Autumn, and said to be an imitation, is in the National Gallery's collection). They are often almost exact copies. The rather idle young man in Summer seems to have been repeated several times, and the hat of the figure in Winter is almost always a copy of the one shown here. It seems that Teniers was cashing in on the popularity of the series and turning them out quickly to fulfil demand.

Strongly influenced early in his career by the Dutch artist Adriaen Brouwer, Teniers became the most famous painter of peasant life of his day, rivalling Brouwer's rowdy, raunchy tavern scenes full of larger-than-life characters. Teniers enjoyed international popularity in his own lifetime and during the eighteenth century, especially in France. He was so successful that he was able to buy a country house, and was granted a patent of nobility in 1680. His work was imitated by many followers, including his son, David Teniers III.

Style: Baroque
Lancret treats the traditional subject of The Four Ages of Man as a series of contemporary genre scenes. The paintings represent Childhood, Adolescence, Youth and Old Age. Lancret certainly knew the series of The Four Ages of Man painted by Jean Raoux for Philippe de Vendôme around 1714--15, and although it has been suggested that Lancret’s series was inspired by it, overall the differences are greater than the similarities.

In Childhood (L'Enfance), a group of wealthy children play boisterous games in an open-air loggia watched by their nurse and governess. Lancret’s Childhood is closely related to that of Raoux – there are similarities in the architectural background, the balustrade on the right, the frieze-like arrangement of the children and the motif of the governess teaching from an open book.

In Adolescence (L’Adolescence), a young woman admires herself in a mirror while her hair is decorated with ribbons and flowers. Such is the young woman’s absorption in her own reflection that she has not noticed that the wealthy nobleman beside her has turned to talk to a young woman coquettishly adjusting her stocking.

The third painting in the series is less conventional. Instead of showing his third age as a time of maturity and depicting a middle-aged married couple, Lancret paints several pairs of lovers in a woody glade and entitles the picture Youth (La Jeunesse). In the foreground, two archers are engaged in a game of pape-guay, in which they shoot at an imitation bird placed on top of a long pole. The two apparently unattached women in the background might be read as the targets for the arrows aimed by the archers, as arrows are associated with Cupid, the god of love.

In Old Age (La Vieillesse), Lancret dispenses with the usual depiction of old people warming themselves indoors before an open fire to take the scene outdoors. A young woman rejects an old man's advances while an old woman spins and another sleeps.

Since all of the paintings are influenced by earlier prints it is not possible to determine the order in which Lancret painted them. However, the close connection of Childhood (L’Enfance) with the version by Raoux suggests it was tackled first. It is likely that Lancret worked on the series between 1733 and 1734. Two figures in Lancret’s Dance between a Pavilion and a Fountain of 1733 (Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin), also appear at the far left of his Childhood (L’Enfance).

Lancret had his paintings copied by leading engravers. The Seasons, The Ages of Man, The Times of Day and The Elements were all engraved so he could make as much money as possible from them in printed as well as painted form.

The set was engraved in reverse by Nicolas de Larmessin III and announced in the July 1735 issue of the Mercure de France. Most of the numerous painted copies are also in reverse, showing that they were copied from the prints. A set of large wall tapestries based on Larmessin’s prints was made at the Aubusson tapestry works around 1745--50.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
These two paintings, which were made as companion works to hang together, show the moments during and after a gallant hunt for wild animals. The Boar Hunt, a scene of suspense, drama and movement is paired with The Return from the Hunt which is altogether more peaceful and romantic.

Parrocel mainly painted battle scenes, particularly the military conquests of King Louis XIV of France, as well as hunting subjects, many of which were royal commissions. He decorated the walls of the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris, as well as the palaces at Marly and Versailles. The leading artist of the day, Charles Le Brun, also explored these subjects. Parrocel would have had ample opportunity to study Le Brun's work throughout his career.

The Boar Hunt can be seen as a nod to the aristocratic hunting scenes of Dutch painters during the second half of the seventeenth century, such as Jan de Lagoor's A Woody Landscape with a Stag Hunt, and Jan Hackaert's and Nicolaes Berchem's A Stag Hunt in the Forest.

The Return from the Hunt is nearer in spirit to a fête galante, a type of painting that was made very popular in early eighteenth-century France by Parrocel’s near-contemporary, Jean-Antoine Watteau. With its elegantly attired figures, loose brushwork and beautiful rich colours, The Return from the Hunt also owes a debt to Peter Paul Rubens.



Parrocel's pictures were painted in about 1700, probably for Louis XIV, who gave them to his son, Louis Alexandre de Bourbon, the Count of Toulouse. They have magnificent frames decorated with carved animal heads, which were probably made especially for them as they date from around the same time as Parrocel painted these works.

Style: Rococo