wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
A horse-drawn cart trundles along a woodland path on the way to market. Two small boys and their dog walk alongside its giant wheel, while two girls sit perched on top of the produce. Carrots spill out of a basket, and turnips, potatoes and cabbages are loosely piled in. It is easy to imagine some of the vegetables tumbling out as the cart lurches through the water ahead. The older girl raises one arm, perhaps to shade her eyes from the flickering sunlight as they pass through the woods, or in response to the woodsman gathering fallen branches for firewood. Two weary travellers rest beside the road with their baskets, bundles and dog.

Gainsborough shows accurately how the horse is harnessed to the cart -- there are no reins, as this is an old horse who has made the journey to market many times and all he needs to keep him on the path is a tap from the young boy's fresh-cut stick. The original position of the horse's head, which was nearer the cart, can now be seen through the paint which has become translucent with age.

The canvas is six feet high and as large as some of Gainsborough's grand full-length portraits. It was painted at the end of 1786, about 18 months before Gainsborough died. The landscape elements -- the position of the trees, and the angle of the gently sloping, uneven track -- are based on a very freely painted unfinished oil sketch (private collection) that Gainsborough probably made in the same year. The solitary herdsman in the sketch, following his cows to a watering place, is replaced in the painting with the heavily laden market cart.

Gainsborough frequently drew and painted such ordinary country carts, as seen in his two versions of The Harvest Wagon of 1767 and 1784--5 (Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto). The horse and cart here are based on a black chalk and grey wash study probably made not much earlier than the painting. Gainsborough painted a slightly larger landscape, Peasant smoking at a Cottage Door (University of California, Los Angeles), in 1787, shortly after The Market Cart, and contemporaries considered that the two paintings went together as 'companion pictures'.

The Market Cart is neither an accurate representation of rural life in 1786 nor an idealised landscape. If the painting can be said to have a meaning, perhaps it is about transience. We glimpse the market cart as it passes with its glowing carrots, dark-curled cabbages and pearly turnips, which the pretty young girls will have to sell in the market if they are not to be brought back home in a wilted state. Perhaps at the end of his life Gainsborough was fondly recalling days of his Suffolk boyhood, all too quickly passed.

Style: Neoclassical, Romantic, Georgian
Two angels with golden wings and jewelled diadems invite us into this painting. They sit on a step, playing a lute and a violin, looking out at us. Behind them rises the Virgin Mary, seated on a stone bench. She supports the infant Christ, who stands on her lap, his right hand raised in blessing. The gauzy shirt he wears does little to protect his naked body, and the colour of the coral pearls of his chain and wristbands alludes to the blood he will shed at the Passion. As if anticipating this fate, his mother looks down with a sorrowful gaze. Her green headscarf matches the cloth wrapped around Christ’s belly, and her pearled ruby brooch, patterned mantle and velvety red undergarment identify her as the Queen of Heaven. Ten angels are gathered behind her, some with hands clasped in devotion.

This panel is the central part of an altarpiece made by Zanobi Machiavelli. The two side panels, which are also in the National Gallery's collection, show Saint Nicholas of Tolentino and a bishop saint, and Saints Bartholomew and Monica. Scholars have speculated that the panels, which were acquired with the Lombardi-Baldi Collection in 1857, came from the Florentine church of S. Spirito, but there is little evidence for this claim. Another possibility is that they came from the Tuscan hilltop town of Montepulciano, where they were recorded in a private collection in the early nineteenth century. It has also been said that the panels formed part of the same altarpiece as two others by Machiavelli, but their shapes and sizes do not correspond.

Six-petalled flowers have been incised into the gold background of this picture. The dense net of vertical lines would have shimmered in flickering candlelight, an effect that inspired devotion. The fringes of the Virgin’s mantle as well as her and her son’s haloes have been highlighted in a similar way, drawing attention to the main figures. Such richly decorated gold backgrounds are typical of Italian panel painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the pointed arch shape of the panel might have recalled a church window of that period. But both the gold background and the pointed-arch shape fell out of fashion during the second half of the fifteenth century, superseded by naturalistic landscape settings and rectangular picture fields. The framing elements that would have divided this altarpiece into at least three compartments are now lost.

Style: Early Renaissance
Although the title of this picture is Interior with a Sleeping Maid and her Mistress it has become known as The Idle Servant. The young woman is slumped on a stool, head in hand, taking a snooze after the hard work involved in preparing a large meal; heavy pots and pans litter the floor.

The pots -- incidentally giving us an idea of how little such utensils have changed in 400 years -- look clean and the maid herself, neat and respectable. Only the open neck and rolled up sleeves of her shirt and her heavy skirt mark her as different from her mistress in her snowy shift and impeccably pleated apron. Nicolaes Maes has posed the maid in the traditional position of Acedia, the personification of idleness -- perhaps the reason for the change in title -- but the mistress doesn't appear to be condemning her for a mortal sin. She shrugs her shoulders with a smile that seems to say, 'what am I to do with her?'

Pots left on the floor and the cat trying to eat the raw goose behind the maid -- a close look suggests that Maes had little idea about feline teeth -- are evidence that this is, at the least, a happy-go-lucky household. There was a popular saying in Holland at the time: 'A kitchen maid must keep one eye on the pan and the other on the cat.' This maid is not managing to do either. Pictures like this were entertaining, but could also be used as an example of good -- or bad -- household management (look at Jan Steen's The Effects of Intemperance, for example). Perhaps the rather staid-looking meal taking place in the room beyond the kitchen is an example of good behaviour in a polite family. The mistress's smile also seems to suggest she's glad to get away for a few moments.

The invention of showing a view of an interior room beyond the main room in the foreground, in this case up a short flight of stairs, is among the first of its kind. Maes took up the theme again several times, including in The Listening Housewife (Wallace Collection, London), though in that picture the scene in the smaller room is where the bad behaviour is taking place, with the maid, who is far from asleep, entertaining her admirer.

Maes was for a while a student of Rembrandt. Here he has used his master's technique of chiaroscuro ('light dark', contrasting use of light and shade to create a dramatic effect) to pick out the important points in the story. The contrasts and rich colour lend atmosphere and demonstrate Maes's considerable skills in portraying texture, mood and character -- seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting at its finest.

Style: Baroque
In this lively oil sketch, Rubens experiments with ideas for the design and composition of one of a series of paintings  on a hunting theme commissioned by Philip IV of Spain to decorate his hunting lodge, Torre de la Parade, just outside Madrid. Rubens's assistants would have used the sketch as a model from which they could complete the full-scale picture.

Diana, the goddess of hunting, gave the huntsman Cephalus a magic dog and spear, both shown by his side here as he reclines beneath a tree, shaded from the light. Lost in love at first sight, Aurora, the goddess of the dawn, steps from her golden chariot and runs towards the handsome young man. Her white horses rear up, anxious to be gone. Rubens has captured Aurora's eager rush towards Cephalus, leaning to him with outstretched arms. Her golden robes toss and fly behind her, and her gauzy underskirt clings to her bare legs as she runs, oblivious of the undergrowth. Cephalus sits up, his arms also outstretched, apparently eager to go with her -- but in the best-known version of the story, told by the Roman poet Ovid in the Metamorphoses, he remains faithful to his wife, Procris, and Aurora leaves alone.

Rubens has made his Aurora a strong, spirited and very human goddess, running through the undergrowth on sturdy legs, reminiscent of Titian’s Diana in his great picture The Death of Actaeon. Titian was a great influence not only on Rubens but on Flemish and European art in general in the seventeenth century.

Two other artists of the same period -- Nicolas Poussin and Claude, both French and living in Rome -- were also working on paintings on the theme. In a dramatic painting entitled Cephalus and Aurora, Poussin shows the reason for Cephalus’ rejection of the goddess: a cherub holding up Procris’ portrait. Cephalus -- his pose is based on Bacchus in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne -- turns away and disentangles himself from Aurora’s clinging hands, a detail not included by Ovid. Claude depicted a later part of the story in Landscape with Cephalus and Procris reunited by Diana, his work of 1645. Procris, afraid that Cephalus was being unfaithful to her, went out into the forest to watch him. He mistook her for a wild animal rustling leaves and threw the spear with deadly aim, accidentally killing her. Claude's idyllic landscape scene shows the moment that Diana brings Procris back to life, reconciles the couple and warns them of the dangers of jealousy and unfaithfulness.

There is another oil sketch by Rubens in the Prado, Madrid, which shows the later part of the story, with Cephalus and Procris together after her revival. Also in Madrid is a painting by Peeter Symons, a little-known assistant of Rubens. The picture is based on the sketch of the second scene, but Rubens himself never painted a definitive picture of the story.

Style: Baroque
Mary Magdalene, wearing a red mantle over a startlingly see-through dress, kneels in prayer in a landscape. Although she is gazing inwards, her eyes unfocused, the object of her prayer appears before her: an angel holds a large wooden Crucifix from which hangs a figure of the dead Christ.

Beside her on the ground is a small covered pot -- her attribute, or symbol -- containing the ointment with which she anointed Christ's feet (Luke 7: 37). She has used the large, conveniently shaped rock in front of her as a support for a splendid manuscript, presumably a grand Book of Hours. Its illuminated borders are decorated with flowers, scrolls and birds, and at least one full-page miniature -- you can see a corner of blue sky on one of the turning leaves.

She appears again in the middle ground, similarly dressed and reclining in front of a grotto. She is reading or meditating on a book which lies on the ground; on shelf of rock behind her are her pot, a Crucifix, and what seems to be a skull, steeply foreshortened. According to legend, Mary Magdalene ended her life in Provence. She lived for 30 years at La Sainte-Baume, east of Marseille (baoumo is a Provençal word for cave) -- a popular pilgrimage site in the Renaissance. Her recumbent pose is taken from that of a statue displayed at La Sainte-Baume, images of which must have been available in Bruges where this painting was probably made.

The composition is borrowed from paintings of Saint Jerome in penitence in a landscape, like those made by the Bruges artist Gerard David and his followers (see Saint Jerome in a Landscape). The artist, Albert Cornelis, was one of the next generation of Bruges painters. He seems to have run a large business, but only one documented picture by him has survived, the Coronation of the Virgin and the Nine Choirs of Angels, produced between 1517 and 1522, and still in the church of St James in Bruges. The figure of Mary Magdalene here is very like the central Saint Michael in the Coronation: their heads are simplified and stylised to a remarkable degree, with little sense of bone beneath the flesh; they have rather low eyes and very straight noses with nearly white highlights. The same features are found in a panel that shows the donor Joris van de Velde and his family with Saints George and Barbara (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels). The landscape in the donor panel is so similar to that in our painting that they are doubtless by the same artist -- either Cornelis himself or a specialist collaborator.

The panel on which this is painted is oak; the reverse is not particularly neatly finished and was never painted, suggesting it was not meant to be on view. The original frame is lost, but unpainted edges around all four sides show that the frame was attached to the panel before the painting was done. The chalk ground seeped under the frame onto the unpainted edges in several places. There is nothing to suggest that this small painting was part of a diptych: it seems to have been designed to be seen alone and to be used in private devotion.

Style: High Renaissance
With a tender embrace, the Virgin Mary steadies the Christ Child who is perched on the ledge before her. Tottering slightly, the child leans into his mother’s body as his small hand moves to grip the neckline of her dress. With her right arm wrapped tightly around him, her left hand is poised to catch a fall. Their faces are a hairsbreadth apart and the contours of the child’s rounded forehead and the mother’s sunken eye socket mirror one another. They gaze towards each other, not the viewer; she looking down and he upwards. The scene's intimacy is emphasized by Mary’s brilliant red robe which is wrapped around their two bodies – a single burst of colour in an otherwise muted palette of earthy greens, greys and browns. Over his long-sleeved smock, Christ wears a short green tunic. The roundness of his small belly is accentuated by swaddling around his waist. The folds of the Virgin’s greyish-blue dress catch the light. Shown in a moment of domesticity, she wears no crown or jewellery, and her hair is hidden under a modest cap and veil. Their haloes too are understated, painted only with fine rings of gold.

Alvise Vivarini painted the Virgin and Child many times, always placing them in a sparse interior behind a parapet, against a dark green curtain pulled back from a window overlooking a mountainous landscape. Even so, his treatment of this subject was never repetitive, as we can see by comparing this painting with another, The Virgin and Child, of the same subject by him in the Gallery’s collection. The creased cartellino (Italian for small piece of paper) lying on the sill almost certainly originally bore Alvise’s signature and perhaps a date, just as in The Virgin and Child, but the inscription is no longer visible. Nonetheless, the painting is easily identifiable as the work of Alvise in the early 1480s, during which time his art moved away from the traditionally linear style of the Vivarini family workshop to a more softened approach, focused on modelling over line. This transition reflects the innovations of the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, whose work in Venice between 1475 and 1476 had a profound effect on local artists, not least Alvise. He used the newly adopted oil medium to model form using soft gradations of light and shade, together with strong outlines.

Since this painting’s provenance can only be traced to the late nineteenth century, we do not know the identity of the original patron. However, its small size and muted colours suggest that it was intended for private devotion, probably within a home.

Style: Early Renaissance
We do not know the identity of the man in this very damaged portrait. His clothes are typical of Venice and suggest a date in the early sixteenth century. He is shown three-quarter length, facing the left, his hand holding the stola (cloth sash) draped over his shoulder. His sleeve is lined with grey fur, and his only ornament is the delicate gold ring with a green stone on his finger.

The artist has meticulously recorded the lines and wrinkles of the man’s ageing face, with an attention to naturalistic detail that derives from Netherlandish portraiture. In the past the portrait has been attributed to Giovanni Bellini, Gentile Bellini, a follower of Gentile Bellini, Titian, Giorgione and Domenico Morone. However, it is too damaged to tell with certainty who painted it.

Style: High Renaissance
Two saints, Peter and Paul, are deep in conversation over an open book, one pointing out a particular passage to the other. This painting comes from a polyptych painted for the high altar of the parish church of Porto San Giorgio, the harbour of the city of Fermo on the east coast of Italy.

We can identify Peter and Paul, who shared a feast day and were usually shown together in medieval art, by how they look. As apostles, both carry books and have bare feet and haloes. Saint Peter is conventionally shown as an old man with tonsured grey hair and a beard. He has a weighty set of keys hanging from his left wrist: the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, given to him by Christ (Matthew 16: 18--19). Saint Paul, who is younger with dark hair and a long beard, leans on the sword used to execute him. Shown together they symbolise the Catholic Church: Paul as Apostle to the Gentiles (non-Jews) and Peter as Vicar of Christ and first Bishop of Rome (that is, pope).

Although these saints are biblical figures, the detail of how they are shown would have had immediate relevance to viewers in fifteenth-century Italy. Both hold manuscripts of the Gospels, elaborately bound as befitted the word of God. Saint Peter, his brow furrowed with thought, is pointing to a page in his book and instructing Saint Paul, who peers earnestly over his shoulder. Paul's book is closed, but a protruding bookmark shows the passage in the volume that they are discussing. When this altarpiece was painted, the political issue of the day was whether the pope or the General Council had ultimate authority over the Church. Fermo was under papal control, and so here Paul is shown as subordinate to Peter, conforming with the doctrine of papal supremacy.

Crivelli was renowned for his highly individual style and way of handling materials to create a three-dimensional effect in his paintings. Here we can see how he emphasised important parts of the painting: the haloes, Peter's keys, Paul's sword and the brass furnishings of the books have been built up in layers of gesso and then carved so that they stand out from the flat surface.

The altarpiece probably remained at Porto San Giorgio until the church was demolished in 1803. It was split up in the mid-nineteenth century.  Originally, a painting of the Virgin and Child (now in Washington) appeared in the centre of the polyptych, with this panel on the left and Saint George and the dragon (now in Boston) on the right. The whole was topped by an image of the Lamentation, now in Detroit.

Style: Early Renaissance
The painting shows the mythical winged horse Pegasus on Mount Helicon. He is surrounded by the nine Muses, who make music in the glade around him. Some of the ladies sing from music books while others play instruments. They are accompanied by three men -- the one on the left with his hand extended may be conducting. The ladies on the left play the recorder and the rebec, while the standing lady on the right plays a lira da braccio. The circle of women in the background may be the daughters of Pierus, who sang in contest with the Muses.

This is the moment, described in Ovid's Metamorphoses (V, 312: 36, 374: 430), when Mount Helicon swelled with pleasure at the sound of the Muses' music. Poseidon, the father of Pegasus, ordered the winged horse to stamp his hoof. Mount Helicon ceased to swell and subsided but a spring gushed forth from the ground. The spring became known as the Hippocrene, or Spring of the Horse. Here the artist shows several thin streams flowing down to feed a larger body of water in the plain.

The whole picture is covered with a thick nineteenth-century varnish that has yellowed. The foliage of the tree behind the second group of figures on the left has darkened and is not now easily distinguished from the slope behind. On the hill is a group of houses and a tower linked by a wall with an arched entry between two of the houses, typical of a Lombard village.

The nine ladies in the foreground who represent the Muses are all wearing Lombard costume of around 1540. The style of the costumes is similar to those in Romanino's murals in Palazzo Salvadego, Brescia, of about 1543. The facial types in the National Gallery's panel are typical of Romanino as are the short, curled shading lines beneath the arm of the man to the left. However, it's not certain that the painting is by Romanino; it shows a slightly timid restraint in the rendering of the figures and landscape that is not typical of his very gestural handling of paint.

The reverse of the panel is also decorated, although much of the painting has worn away. There is an oval shield painted in the centre with an unidentified coat of arms. Quatrefoil ornaments are painted to left and right.

The painting was probably the lid of a keyboard instrument or the case in which one was kept. The festive and musical subject as well as the size and shape of the panel would have fitted this function, as would the decoration on the back and the type of damage it has sustained. Burn marks may have been caused by candles used to read music. There is no evidence of hinges having been fitted, but it is clear that the painting has been cut down at the top and sides. The whole panel may have been irregular in shape as was common with many virginal lids. A similar instrument can be seen in Bernardino Campi's Portrait of a Musician.

Style: High Renaissance
A saint with a bald head and curly beard stands on a marble platform, his large, deep-set eyes looking straight out at us. He can be identified by the large keys which he holds: he is Saint Peter, the first pope, to whom Christ gave the keys to the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 16: 18--19). As an apostle, he also holds a book. This is the side panel of an altarpiece painted in 1479 by Benvenuto di Giovanni, other parts of which are also in our collection: The Virgin and Child and Saint Nicholas.

The shimmering silks, burnished gold background and decorative detail are typical of Sienese painting of the late fifteenth century. But Benvenuto was trying to combine the traditions of Sienese art (perhaps in opposition to the styles being practised in its powerful and much-hated neighbour Florence) with some of the innovations of his own time. He varied the stance of the two saints shown in the side panels, searching for a more naturalistic solution in place of earlier, more rigid compositions. Saint Peter faces forward, his feet at slightly different angles to the picture plane. The toe of his left foot protrudes over the edge of the marble platform, an idea that Benvenuto derived from Carlo Crivelli. The book in the saint's left hand, which has been foreshortened and rotated so as to be seen from the edges, supports the weight of the large keys, which rest on its upper cover.

Style: Early Renaissance