wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
An old man with a long white beard kneels in a rocky landscape. This is Saint Jerome, one of the four Doctors of the Church. After a dissolute youth, the saint converted to Christianity and spent time as a hermit in the Syrian desert. He later used his classical learning to produce the Latin Vulgate, the standard version of the Bible. He was inspiration both for Christian penitents and for humanist scholars; to scholars, he was a model for the study of classical texts and for the solitary life, away from the distractions of the city.

A large number of small-scale paintings of Saint Jerome were produced in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, combining his roles as hermit and scholar: Saint Jerome in a Landscape by Bono da Ferrara, Saint Jerome reading in a Landscape by Giovanni Bellini and Saint Jerome by Albrecht Dürer. In these, as in this painting, he is accompanied by the faithful lion from whose paw he had pulled a thorn. Here, however, the saint is not reading. He has flung himself to the ground in a penitential frenzy, gazing in awe at a fragile cross made from two slender branches roped together. His fingers are clenched around the stone which he used to beat his breast when tempted by sinful thoughts (here symbolised by the snake wriggling on the ground).

This is one of a series of versions of the subject painted by Cima da Conegliano, allowing us to see how his idea of the subject developed (others are in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; and the Uffizi, Florence). All seem to derive from a large and beautiful painting at Harewood House, Leeds, which was in turn Cima's response to Giovanni Bellini's large panel of about 1480, now in the Uffizi, Florence. In our painting, Cima has selected and rearranged elements of both the Harewood painting and Bellini's versions: the hawk on the bare branch, the overhanging rock, the enclosing walls of the craggy hollow rendered claustrophobic by the small scale of the picture.

The saint's dramatic pose is a reversed and exaggerated version of the Harewood figure, his body tipped forward to increase the painting's emotional intensity. The composition is carefully arranged to focus our attention on the white of the stone Jerome holds, almost in the centre. The shapes of the landscape are closely related to Jerome's own shape and movements, and the picture is structured around a series of diagonal parallel lines running from top left to bottom right. The slope of the rocky hill on the left is extended by the curving road and bridge, and by the foliage of the bush between the saint and the cross. The line of the saint's right arm continues up through the slopes of the distant mountains and down along his leg. It is echoed by the leaning tree and stark bare branch, the line of which continues that of the saint's left arm.

The fertile plain and sunlit city on the hill of Bellini's paintings and Cima's Harewood version have receded into the distance, leaving the saint alone in the wilderness, cut off by the wall of rock behind him. Figures pass unaware on the road behind him, emphasising his isolation from civilisation.

Style: High Renaissance
Mounted on a large horse, King Charles I surveys the landscape of England, one of his kingdoms. He is dressed in fine armour, and his hair flows loosely over his shoulders, although this, and the expensive pearl earring he wears, will be hidden when he puts on the helmet that his servant is passing to him. He is glamorous, but also ready for battle.

Though Charles does not wear a crown -- a clear symbol of royalty -- other objects point to his status: the baton of command he holds signals his senior military rank, and the gold chain around his neck, commonly called the ‘Little George’, shows that he's a member of an elite society called the Order of the Garter. The horse is equally finely dressed, with gold decoration and elegantly styled hair which, like the King's, blows lightly in the breeze. Impressively muscular, it is suitable for carrying such an important passenger, who is raised to the very centre of the picture. In one hand, Charles I calmly holds the reins to the powerful animal, demonstrating his greater strength: the power to command his state. He was to lose this control to civil war a few years after this painting was made, and was eventually put on trial for tyranny and treason, and publicly executed by beheading.

As the King's official painter, Anthony van Dyck painted several portraits of Charles I, and while this is the largest, it was not the first to show him with a horse. In one portrait, the King sits proudly on a horse under a stately arch, attended to by his riding master; in another, he and a servant stand by his animal in a landscape, having paused during a hunt. Equestrian portraits like these have in fact been a popular way of displaying an individual’s power and grandeur for centuries, and one of the most famous early examples is a bronze statue of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius on horseback (Capitoline Museums, Rome).

A portrait of Charles V on a horse by Titian -- a favourite artist of both Van Dyck and Charles I -- probably inspired the format of this picture. Other equestrian portraits then in the Royal Collection may also have been influential, as well as ancient texts which describe similar scenes. Van Dyck has, however, also painted the horse's legs in an elegant position, which would have been recognised at the time as a movement from the fashionable sport of horse dancing (called dressage).

A Latin inscription on the tablet hanging from the tree reads: CAROLVS./ REX MAGNAE/ BRITANIAE ('Charles I, King of Great Britain'). Charles I’s father, James I, had been the first ruler to declare himself ‘King of Great Britain’, even though England and Scotland were not legally joined into the Kingdom of Great Britain under the same monarch until the Acts of Union of 1706--7.

Style: Baroque, Stuart
Calais Pier is based upon an actual event. On 15 July 1802, Turner, aged 27, began his first trip abroad, travelling from Dover to Calais in a cross-channel ferry (a packet) of the type shown here. The weather was stormy, and Turner noted in his sketchbook: ‘Our landing at Calais. Nearly swampt.’

In the painting, a ferry (centre left), fully laden with passengers and flying a British flag, is approaching the port of Calais on the northern French coast. Around it, small French fishing boats head out to the open sea. In his title, Turner refers to these fishing boats as ‘French poissards,’ which appears to be his own idiosyncratic adaptation of the French word poissarde ('fishwife'). The sea is rough and dark storm clouds gather, although a shaft of sunlight breaks through to illuminate the white sail in the centre of the picture. The entire scene looks chaotic and there is a risk of a collision. In the lower right foreground, a small fishing boat is trying to get away to avoid being battered against the pier.

Full of incident and detail, this is one of Turner’s largest and most complex maritime paintings. Its dramatic storm scene was also a significant milestone in the development of British maritime painting. The critic John Ruskin, an early supporter of Turner, described it as ‘the richest, wildest and most difficult composition'. The painting also includes one of Turner's most ambitious figure groups, as he shows the French fishermen attempting to cast off while agitated women look on from the windswept pier. The number and variety of animated figures combines the activity of Dutch genre painting with an almost comic element that recalls Hogarth -- for instance, a departing sailor holds up a flagon to be filled by a woman holding a bottle. Dutch maritime painting was an important precedent for Turner, and he may have been stimulated to paint Calais Pier when, towards the end of his trip, he saw (and sketched) Jacob van Ruisdael's A Storm at Sea off the Dykes of Holland (1670) in the Louvre.

When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1803, Calais Pier met with a mixed reception that marked the beginning of the critical disapproval of Turner's work that would continue until his death. Criticism of the picture focused especially on his method of painting the foreground and the sea. Viewers more accustomed to the smooth translucent glazes of traditional marine paintings were particularly resistant to Turner’s visible brushwork and his impasto (thickly applied paint), often laid on with a palette knife. You can see this clearly in the white foam of the waves. Although acknowledging Turner's precocious talent, critics compared his use of paint to blots, batter, pea soup, smoke, a mix of soap and chalk, and the veins on a marble slab. The painting was unsold and remained in Turner's possession.

Style: Romantic, Georgian
We stand inside a church, although it is not clear which one. The picture can be attributed to Gerard Houckgeest, a pupil of Bartholomeus van Bassen. He specialised in painting fictional architecture early in his career, but then switched to painting existing church interiors. He is best known for these later works, in which he often introduced an oblique viewing angle and paid special attention to the daylight coming in through the church windows. This is an early example of his work, the fictional church interior still reminiscent of those by his master, Bartholomeus van Bassen.

This painting was previously attributed to Pieter Neeffs the Elder, whose name appears at the bottom of a lengthy inscription above the lavish tomb on the right, together with the date 1644. This signature has since been identified as a forgery, although the date might be accurate; its placement might have been prompted by the sumptuously dressed man pointing his cane towards the inscription, one of a number of figures animating the scene, together with multiple dogs.

Style: Baroque
Inspired by Virgil's Aeneid, this painting shows Aeneas and Dido, Queen of Carthage, caught in a storm created by Juno (book IV: 119). To the right, Dido and Aeneas shelter in a cave and embrace -- we see the moment before they kiss.

A winged putto holds Aeneas's horse beside which stand his loyal hunting dogs. Two other putti hover above the cave, one holds a burning torch and the other a bow and arrow, both symbols of love and romance. In the sky to the left is Juno, dressed in blue, wearing a crown and holding a sceptre. Venus sits beside her, accompanied by the white doves that are one of her attributes, symbolising lust. To the right, holding a torch, is Hymen, god of marriage, who does not appear in Virgil's story.

The fierceness of the storm is conveyed by the bent and twisted tree branches, blown by wind coming from the top left. Thick branches have been ripped from trees in the bottom left corner and beside the cave's entrance. Although the painting has darkened with age, this scene is meant to be gloomy and imposing. According to Virgil's story, Juno promises to 'pour down from above a black rain mingled with hail'. Through heavy clouds, a ray of sunlight illuminates the detail of the foliage and its vibrant yellow-green tones. In the distance and to the left, figures flee the storm, some on horseback, struggling to move against the wind. The areas of the landscape in sunlight and shade and the rocky hills receding into the distance lead our eyes back and forth across the composition.

The landscape was painted by Gaspard Dughet, while Carlo Maratta added the figures and dogs. The figures were painted once the landscape was complete, suggesting that the artists planned the overall composition beforehand, though some alterations were made. A putto above Hymen was removed and the position of Venus was changed. Artists often collaborated on paintings to improve their training or reputation, but here it seems that Dughet and Maratta simply enjoyed working together. They were already established artists when the picture was painted in the late 1660s. Maratta ran one of the largest and most successful workshops in Rome during the second half of the seventeenth century.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Charity, one of the theological virtues together with Faith and Hope, is here represented as a woman with three children. In his Letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul places the greatest emphasis on Charity (Love): ‘So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love' (1 Corinthians 13). The King James version of the Bible translates the Greek word agape as both ‘love’ and ‘charity’ and uses them interchangeably for the same concept. The word ‘love’ used in the New Testament almost always carries the meaning of charity. From the sixteenth century onwards, Charity was commonly depicted as a mother suckling her infants.

One of the children looks at us and draws our attention to his mother, who seems distracted. Her breast is still exposed from feeding her babies, although they have turned away from it and two embrace each other on her lap. A fire burns in a brass dish to the left. This may represent the hearth of Vesta, the Roman goddess of the home and family. The combination of Roman and Christian elements is typical of Italian Renaissance art, which celebrated the rebirth of interest in classical antiquity.

A red velvet cloth edged with gold and silver braid hangs behind the woman. It resembles the cloth of honour often hung behind the Virgin and Child in sixteenth-century Italian altarpieces to suggest the appearance of a throne. The visual association of Charity with the Virgin and Child is frequent in Italian art of this period and would have been intentional.

The woman wears an elaborate headdress in an all’antica style and drapery of cangiante ('changing') colours -- the fabric is yellow shot with purple and pink over her arm, and is blue lined with purple shot with green over her knee. The prominent use of rose pink, the cangiante colours and the artificial way that white is used as a highlight are seen frequently in the work of Florentine Mannerist artists.

The composition derives from Francesco Salviati's larger picture of the subject (Uffizi, Florence) painted around 1540, and was previously thought to be by a follower of Salviati. The head of the woman and the child looking at us resemble Salviati’s image most closely. The pose of Salviati’s Virgin is itself based on that of the Virgin in Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo (Uffizi, Florence).

Michele Tosini began painting in the early sixteenth-century Florentine style of Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto. He was also known as 'Michele da Ridolfo' due to having spent part of his training in the workshop of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. The influence of the Florentine Mannerist painters Salviati, Pontormo and Bronzino became visible in his works by the 1540s. He worked with Vasari on the decorations of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and through his example adopted motifs derived from the work of Michelangelo. According to Vasari, Tosini headed a large workshop that produced many altarpieces and paintings.

There are versions of this painting at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the Narodowe Museum in Warsaw and the Palazzo Giustiniani Pallavicini, Genoa.

Style: High Renaissance
It was in Haarlem that many of the genres for which Dutch painting is best known were first developed. Floris van Dijck was among the city’s most important pioneers in the field of still-life painting. Celebrated for their precise realism, his paintings invariably depict banquet tables laden with bread, cheese, fruits, and luxurious glassware. On the one hand these reveal pride in how the fledgling Dutch Republic prospered, but on the other they serve as a reminder that material goods are ultimately less important than spiritual concerns, a message that would remain central to much of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting.Van Dijck’s marriage in 1627 to the wealthy Cornelia Jansdr Vlasmans enhanced his already considerable social standing. It provided further stability and may well explain why works by the artist are exceedingly rare, as there was little financial incentive for him to be productive. Only just over a dozen of his paintings have survived. Even so, his banquet still lifes defined the genre and his works were the fountain from which a great tradition of opulent still-life painting sprang: the works of artists such as Pieter Claesz in Haarlem, Willem Kalf in Rotterdam and Jan Davidsz de Heem in Utrecht and Antwerp – to name but a few – are unthinkable without the pioneering example set by Van Dijck.The breakfast still life shows a richly laid table with fruit, olives, sweets and butter shavings in various blue and white Wan Li Chinese export porcelain bowls, a stack of cheese and apples on pewter plates, a knife, a leather gourd, a stoneware Schnabelkanne, a silver-gilt nautilus cup, a roemer, stemmed glass flutes, a pewter plate with spices and a slice of melon, and various scattered fruits, breads and nuts, all arranged upon a white lace and damask cloth laid over a red damask cloth covering a table. It is largest work by Van Dijck to have survived and, within his small oeuvre, ranks as among his most impressive. Moreover, it is a superb example of the beginnings of the great Dutch tradition of painting so-called banquet still lifes. Such early examples are characterised by a predilection for delicacies laid out on a table, piled high and seen as if from a bird’s-eye view, allowing all the goods on display to be clearly visible, in much the same way as early flower still lifes of the same period tend to show every flower individually.

Style: Baroque
This elegantly dressed young lady is Margaret of Austria, one of the most important female rulers of the Renaissance. The only daughter of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor and Mary of Burgundy, she was regent of the Netherlands from 1507 to her death in 1530. The half-blank coat of arms at the top of the arch indicates that she is unmarried -- the space would be filled by her husband's arms -- so the painting was evidently done before her first marriage to Juan, Prince of Asturias, in November 1495.

Margaret's early life was largely spent on the European marriage market. She was born on 10 January 1480. Her mother was killed in a riding accident when she was two and she was brought up by her step-grandmother, Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV of England. She was betrothed at the age of three to the infant heir to the French throne, Charles, and was sent to be brought up at the French court.

In 1491 she was rejected by Charles, and she returned to the Netherlands in 1493. This painting must have been done after that date, though perhaps not long after: her clothes are very similar to those she wears in a portrait done when she was still in France (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Although not much more than a child, she is in adult dress, as was traditional for royal children. Her cloth of gold dress has a fashionably square neck, trimmed with white fur, and she wears a black gorget, probably of velvet, underneath it. Her hair is scraped back under a headdress consisting of a layer of red fabric edged with gold, covered with a shoulder-length frontlet edged with gold embroidery.

As part of a double marriage uniting their family, the Hapsburgs, with the Spanish royal family, Margaret married Juan, son of Ferdinand and Isabella, at around the same time that her brother married their daughter Juana. Six months into marriage her husband died, and two months later she gave birth to her only child, a stillborn girl. Margaret's next husband, the Duke of Savoy, also died young in 1504, after three years of marriage.

A slightly later portrait of Margaret by the same artist (now in the Royal Collection at Windsor) was sent to Henry VII by Philip in around 1505, when Henry was negotiating for her hand in marriage. But Margaret refused to marry again and returned to the Netherlands, becoming a grande dame of European politics. Because of the early death of her brother and the mental illness of her sister-in-law she acted not only as regent of the Netherlands but also as foster mother to their children.

She was an avid collector, owning Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife and paintings from the Passion cycle of Juan de Flandes among many others. She was a patron of art, literature and music, and her palace at Malines was packed with books, illuminated manuscripts, tapestries and even curiosities from the Americas.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
As ruler of the expanding Islamic Ottoman Empire, Sultan Mehmet II was one of the most powerful men in the world when Gentile Bellini painted his portrait in 1480. Mehmet was fascinated both by portraiture and by European culture, and in 1479 he sent a request to the Venetian authorities for a portraitist. They chose their most celebrated painter, Gentile, who was well qualified for the task having recently completed a series of portraits of the doges of Venice. Gentile's stay in Istanbul lasted about a year and a half, and was a diplomatic as well as artistic mission -- both sides were keen to develop a good political and trading relationship.

Like the doges in Gentile's portraits, the Sultan is set against a dark background behind a marble ledge. But while the majority of those portraits were painted in the traditional profile view, Gentile has shown the Sultan's face and body turned slightly towards the viewer. This pose may have been chosen as it was a new fashion in portraiture in the late fifteenth century and particularly popular in Venice. Artists like Antonello da Messina used it to create more engaging portraits, the sitter often making direct eye contact with the viewer. Here, however, Gentile makes sure to maintain the Sultan's authority and distance by showing him ignoring the viewer and looking straight ahead.

The painting is quite badly damaged and was repainted in areas in the nineteenth century, but we can still see many of its intricately detailed and minutely painted decorative features. Mehmet is framed within a stone arch carved with classical-style motifs: acanthus leaves and vases, tendrils and scrolls. Again, Gentile is making references to Venetian art: the illusionistic carved pillars look very similar to those that frame the doorway of the Venetian church of San Zaccaria. He also painted an elaborately embroidered cloth hanging over the edge of the ledge, enabling him to include a number of gems and pearls -- signs of the Sultan's wealth and magnificence. To further glorify the Sultan's greatness he included three golden crowns on either side of the arch, probably intended to represent Greece, Trebizond and Asia, which Mehmet ruled. His glorious status is underlined -- and exaggerated -- by the inscription on the right of the parapet. Only part of it is legible: imperator orbis ('ruler of the world' in Latin).

Although Gentile probably painted more than one image of Mehmet during his stay, this is the only one that survives. Mehmet must have been pleased with Gentile as he honoured him with the titles 'Golden Knight' and 'Palace Companion'.

Gentile used these as his signature on a medal depicting the ruler (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) -- the only medal that he would ever make. A number of drawings survive from Gentile's visit and provide fascinating insights into Mehmet's court. The diplomatic mission was clearly successful as Gentile even presented Mehmet with an image of the Virgin and Child. Unfortunately, Mehmet's son was less interested in Gentile's work and seems to have sold the portrait at the bazaar after his father's death.

Style: Early Renaissance