wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This graceful golden-haired princess comes from a predella, a row of scenes along the bottom of an altarpiece or from the frame of an altarpiece. She is Saint Catherine, shown with her traditional attributes of a spiked wheel and a cactus-like martyr's palm.

Crivelli liked spatial games, playing with our knowledge that we are looking at a flat painted surface on which he has created an illusion of three-dimensional space. Here Catherine stands in a curved marble recess, rather like a statue. We can see her shadow on the wall behind her. To show off his skill with foreshortening Crivelli has shown her wheel sideways on, with its spokes receding at a sharp angle. Her skirts fall in heavy folds around her feet, and the toe of her shoe peeps out over the edge of marble parapet, as if she is breaking out of the flat panel into our space. To her left a fly seems to walk across the picture, casting its own shadow on the flat surface and reminding us that this is just a painting.

According to legend, Catherine was a scholarly Christian princess who lived in Alexandria under Roman rule. When she asked the Roman Emperor to stop persecuting Christians, he sent his best philosophers to debate with her and to try to persuade her to revert to paganism. They failed and many converted to Christianity on the strength of Catherine's arguments. The Emperor then asked her to marry him. When she refused, he had her tortured on a wheel and finally beheaded.

Another panel from the same altarpiece is also in our collection: Mary Magdalene.

Style: Early Renaissance
There is a cold grey dawn, but a promise of winter sun as the wind sweeps away the clouds on a Dutch seashore. A young horseman leans down towards a woman kneeling in the shadow of his mount -- she holds a large fish up towards him. In front of her a man kneels, gutting more fish. Patches of light pick out the rider's dog, the rump of a white horse laden with fishing nets and the white apron of a woman with red cheeks, arms crossed on her belly and smiling up at the horseman. The white horse turns its head to look out across the wide expanse of beach, its mane ruffled in the wind.

A man and a woman, heads together and huddled up in heavy clothes, sit just over the lip of the high sand dune on which the small group stand. The man's arm points out towards small boats in the distance, but his finger curves down towards a man with a huge pack on his back, making heavy weather of the climb up towards them. Wouwerman cut away a part of the sand dune in a sideways curve to open the view of the beach to us, and used the horse's gaze and the pointing arm to draw our eye to it. He seems to be suggesting that we could walk through the gap and on down towards the billowing white sails of the distant boats and the low hills beyond.

The patient white horse appears in many of Wouwerman's pictures, three of them in the National Gallery: The Interior of a Stable, A White Horse, and an Old Man binding Faggots and A Horse being Shod outside a Village Smithy. He was an expert in painting horses, capturing the texture of their coats, their soft eyes and the sensation of muscles moving beneath flesh. The white horse seems to have appealed in his imagination as an animal 'character', but also as a means of catching light and a way to make otherwise dark, shadowy scenes more lively.

Wouwerman was one of the most successful seventeenth-century Dutch artists, able to paint in almost any genre (except portraiture) but specialising in landscape and scenes of battle -- look at the enormous Cavalry attacking Infantry. In this delicate and atmospheric scene he is at his skilful best. He painted detail and subtle colour on an oak board, to facilitate the smooth running of the paint, achieving lightness and airiness in the fleeting clouds and depth in the shadows below.

It was once thought to be Wouwerman's last painting, although there is no stylistic reason to believe this. Perhaps it imparts enough of a feeling of time passing that the notion isn't entirely surprising.

Style: Baroque
The enchantress Armida and her bewitched lover, Rinaldo, a Christian knight, recline in a beautiful landscape, surrounded by attendant cupids and luxury goods. The scene shows a tender moment: from his position on her lap, Rinaldo looks up adoringly at Armida, who tends to her long golden hair and glances toward an upheld mirror.

The lovers' idyll is about to be disturbed. Armida's mirror will soon reflect two advancing intruders, whose Spanish-style helmets are just visible behind the bush on the left. These are Rinaldo's comrades, Carlo and Ubaldo, who compel him to return to fighting in the First Crusade (a Christian military campaign to recapture Jerusalem from Islamic rule).

This is an episode from Torquato Tasso’s epic La Gerusalemme liberate (1581), which, through Edward Fairfax’s English translation (Jerusalem Delivered, 1600), was particularly popular during the early seventeenth century. The tale of bewitchment and love on a ‘Fortunate Isle’ captured the imagination of the English royal court, and a large painting of an earlier episode of the story by Anthony van Dyck (thought to be the picture now at the Baltimore Museum of Art) was acquired by King Charles I.

The present picture is a reduced grisaille copy of a painting now in the Louvre, Paris. It has been suggested that the squared-up, grey, yellow and greenish grisaille might be a preparatory study for the finished painting, but it is more likely to be a model for the subsequent engraving of it produced by Pieter de Jode (1644), which is of exactly the same dimensions. Indeed, this copy and the engraving show more of the landscape at the top and bottom of the composition than the Louvre painting, suggesting that it has at some stage been cut down.

It is most likely that this copy was made from the original painting while it was in Van Dyck's workshop in Antwerp, or possibly from another copy soon after. It then apparently remained unused until it became the basis for the 1644 print. Several documentary references suggest that there existed another oil sketch of the subject of the story of Rinaldo and Armida, now lost.

The painting was once owned by the leading portrait painter of Regency London and fourth President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769--1830).

Style: Baroque, Stuart
This is one of the most perfectly preserved paintings in the National Gallery. It is also one of the only small paintings by Correggio whose original patron is known. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari records a painting by Correggio in which ‘Our Lady puts a shirt on the Christ Child’ in the collection of Cavaliere Francesco Baiardo. Baiardo was Correggio's friend and protector, and later became Parmigianino's greatest patron.

The Virgin Mary sits under a tree, her work basket with its iron shears and ball of grey wool at her side, trying a grey jacket she has just made on the Christ Child. It may be the seamless coat that legend claims grew with him and for which the soldiers cast lots at the foot of the Cross (John 19:23--4). The wriggly child stretches his arms out in a manner that may be meant to foreshadow the Crucifixion. He reaches towards the sun-dappled leaves, his right hand in a gesture that recalls the act of blessing. Mary is not wearing her traditional regal robes of ultramarine blue but a simple gown of faded rose.

The picture is a soft harmony of grey-pinks and grey-blues. Correggio learned his famous softness from the gradual smoky fade from shadow to light that he saw in Leonardo's Milanese paintings. His approach to colour and the blur and shimmer of his brush also reveal the influence of Venetian painters such as Titian. The atmosphere is one of innocence, and maternal and filial love, suffused with tenderness. In its intensity of emotion, the Madonna of the Basket is very close to Correggio’s Lamentation of 1524 (Galleria Nazionale, Parma), suggesting a similar date. The diagonal composition (falling from top left down to bottom right), the twisting pose of the Virgin and the extreme foreshortening of Christ’s leg are made to seem effortless, demonstrating Correggio’s mastery of his art.

Joseph can be seen in the background, pale as if in a haze of sawdust in the sunshine, at work with a plane in his trade as a carpenter. The family's simple home has been built alongside grandiose ruins -- a symbol of the new faith rising out of the wreckage of pagan antiquity. The ruins and image of Joseph working recall Dürer's print of the Holy Family in Egypt (British Museum, London), revealing Correggio's interest in German art.

Correggio has depicted the modest domestic life of the holy family to stress the humility of Christ and the Virgin and their all too human sufferings. These down-to-earth, familiar details and the deep sentiment of the scene are intended to make the holy family seem approachable and emotionally open to us. This approach prefigures developments in seventeenth-century religious art.

Style: High Renaissance
Although damaged, we can tell that this is an original work by Anthonis Mor. His sitters are usually lit from above and the left; their noses are narrow but have deep shadows and the eyes are too widely spaced.

We don't know the identity of the sitter, although the painting was once thought to be a self portrait. Although the clothes, haircut and beard are similar to those in Mor's self portrait in the Uffizi, Florence, there is no real resemblance between the two faces: the man could simply have been from the same social class as Mor. The cut of his hair, and the long beard with very long moustache, suggest a date in the early 1560s, after Mor's return from one of his trips to Spain.

Across the background on the left of the man's collar is a Latin inscription: A Morro f(e?c?)[it]. This covers, and may be an attempt to preserve, an earlier, damaged signature which probably read 'Morus' rather than 'Morro'. Mor signed some of his portraits in this unusual place, including his Mary Tudor (Prado, Madrid). 'Morro' could be a misunderstanding of 'Morus'.

Mor was renowned for painting very fast: his Portrait of Hubert Goltzius (Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels) is supposed to have been painted, without any preliminary drawing, in under an hour. This picture may have resulted from a similar swift sitting. Infrared reflectography does not reveal any underdrawing, and the original paint is rather thin and has been applied very quickly, with great economy and skill.

Style: High Renaissance
Philips Wouwerman was famous in his time for his skill at depicting horses in many different situations -- at rest in the stable, being shod in the forge, out hunting or, as here, in the frenzy of battle. In what is a relatively small painting -- not by Wouwerman himself but produced in his studio -- the artist has crammed in at least 14 of them, charging, stumbling, tumbling and wheeling across the canvas.

Despite this crowded field, more than half the picture is taken up with a smoke-filled sky, used to underscore this frozen moment of violence, with a series of dramatic silhouettes of swords, flags, guns and rearing horses.

Wouwerman's war paintings did not usually depict identifiable conflicts, but another version of this picture (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg) has been described as a battle between Poles and Swedes. The horsemen advancing from the left have red flags, coats, hats or capes -- a colour associated with Poland -- while their opponents, apparently in retreat, seem to wear the blue of Sweden. The two countries were at war from 1655 to 1660.

Style: Baroque
The story of the rape -- or abduction -- of the Sabine women would have been well known to Rubens and his clients. It was a famous moment in the legends surrounding the founding of Rome, referred to by several classical writers, including Plutarch, Ovid, Virgil and Livy. The accounts vary, but key details are consistent: Romulus, founder and then king of Rome, had built an impressive city, but there was a desperate shortage of young women. He came up with a ruse to resolve the problem. He invited the Sabines, who lived in the mountains north-east of Rome, to bring their wives and daughters to a festival of chariot racing in celebration of the god Consus. At a signal from Romulus, the Romans betrayed their guests -- they abducted the young unmarried women and drove the rest away, then forced their captives into marriage.

In this monumental painting Rubens has conjured up a complex scene of high theatre. He has used classical columns and arches (which are hung with garlands celebrating the games) to evoke a stage, and has created a sense of depth by arranging the figures in three planes. Those in the foreground are depicted in more detail and with stronger colours, those in the middle ground are in paler pastels and those in the distance are only sketched in.

The drama unfolds from the right-hand side of the canvas, where Romulus is seated in silhouette. He points towards the dais, a signal for the women -- who have apparently been placed there so that they can watch the games -- to be taken. They reel back in distress, a writhing mass of gesticulating limbs and anxious eyes. In the foreground, meanwhile, we get a close-up view of the first victims being carried away. The scene of men fighting in the background is harder to interpret, but as two of the women are clearly appealing to the soldiers for help and one horseman is looking at them in alarm, it most likely represents the Romans holding off the attempts of the Sabine men to protect the women.

Rubens was clearly concerned to emphasise the violence involved in the abduction. There is a clear contrast between the dark, muscular figures and determined frowns of the Romans and the pale-skinned, wide-eyed helplessness of the women. And while he has depicted the soldiers in classical dress, the women are wearing seventeenth-century costume -- as far as the viewers were concerned, they are not Sabines but contemporary Flemish ladies. The figure nearest us summarises their plight. Held in in the sinewy clutch of her abductor, she clasps her hands in supplication to the gods, her facing shining with tears. But for all the violence involved, Rubens also eroticised the moment -- several of the women have their breasts exposed, while a soldier lifts the skirts of another.

The pose of the soldier on the extreme left with the short sword and shield, is reminiscent of the Borghese Gladiator, an antique sculpture that Rubens had seen when he was working in Rome. The woman in a pink dress looking down from the back centre of the dais may be a portrait of the artist's second wife, Hélène Fourment.

Style: Baroque
This is one of four paintings of saints and angels made to decorate a pair of shutters. It was quite common at the time for altarpieces to have shutters to embellish and protect them. Each of this pair of shutters had a saint on the outside and an angel on the inside. The central image they would once have flanked is now missing. By the mid-nineteenth century, the shutters had been divided into four paintings, making them easier to display in a gallery.

The androgynous, golden-haired angel clasps its hands in prayer. The flow of its draperies suggests it is moving towards the left, where the now missing central image would have been. The Latin inscription on the plinth beneath the angel's feet says 'COELORUM' meaning 'of the Heavens'. When read with the inscription beneath the other angel's feet, the whole phrase is: AVE REGINA COELORUM ('Hail Queen of the Heavens'). This message would have been read when the shutters were open and it suggests that the missing central image was one of the Virgin Mary crowned in the heavens.

The central painting may not have been by Moretto. The shutters could have been commissioned to protect or embellish an earlier picture or sculpture that had attracted new attention or veneration. Gaudenzio Ferrari's altarpiece of about the same date (Santuario della Pietà, Cannobio) includes angels kneeling either side of an earlier panel of the Man of Sorrows from which blood was believed to have issued in 1522.

Style: High Renaissance
This is a portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, at the age of 40. It is based on Bronzino's official portrait of the Duke of 1559, but is unlikely to have been painted by Bronzino or his assistants.

Prior to Medici rule, Florence had been a republic. Cosimo was Duke of Florence from 1537 until 1569, at which point he became Grand Duke of Tuscany until his death in 1574. He was married first of all to Eleonora of Toledo and then to Camilla Martelli, and fathered 15 children.

He was a great patron of the arts, building the Uffizi ('offices') which now house one of the world's greatest art collections, completing the Pitti Palace as a Medici residence and creating the Boboli Gardens which surround it. Cosimo commissioned many works of art from artists including Bronzino, Pontormo, Vasari and the sculptor Cellini.

Style: High Renaissance, Mannerist
This is one of five paintings intended to hang together, each of which denotes one of the five senses -- a common theme for painting in the Low Countries in the seventeenth century. In each of these paintings Gonzales Coques used a traditional activity to represent the relevant sense.

Here Taste is depicted as a smiling figure who is lifting an oversized rummer of wine and seems to be gesticulating to indicate his enjoyment of the prospect of drinking it. Some bread and a plate of oysters -- standard fare in the taverns of the time -- sit on the table in front of him.

Each sense is also a real portrait. We don’t know who this is, but as three of the other paintings in the series are artists, this man may be one too. Some have speculated that it could be a self portrait, but there's no evidence for this. This painting is probably a copy after a lost original.

Style: Baroque
This is a nineteenth-century copy of a much larger painting Murillo made for Seville Cathedral in 1660 (Louvre, Paris). Murillo's original was displayed in a lunette, a semi-circular wall surface, in the chapel of the Immaculate Conception. Sevillians were especially devoted to the Immaculate Conception -- the belief that the Virgin Mary was conceived without sin -- and Murillo often painted the subject.

In his painting, Murillo explored the theme of the Virgin's infancy. Here we see her in a domestic setting, as a newborn baby being taken out of the bath. Several women and angels gaze affectionately at the infant, and a group of angels descends from heaven -- two are already on the ground, removing a towel from a wicker basket. The Virgin's mother, Saint Anne, lies in a canopied bed in the background and her father, Saint Joachim, is seated nearby. On the right, two servants dry clothing by a fireplace.

During the French occupation of Seville by Joseph Bonaparte, this painting and numerous other works by Murillo were removed from ecclesiastical buildings and sent to France. The Birth of the Virgin was taken to Paris and hung in the Louvre (then called the Musée Napoléon) during or shortly after 1810, when this copy was almost certainly painted. We know that it was made after 1804: infrared photography revealed that cobalt blue, a pigment only discovered after this date, was used for the blue shawl of the kneeling woman on the right.

The work we see here is very sketchy and does not reproduce every detail of the original composition. It is rather accomplished as a copy, even though we do not know who painted it.

Style: Neoclassical
Philip IV, King of Spain, was normally shown in fairly sombre clothing, so the unusual splendour of his costume here suggests that this work was made to celebrate something particular. Philip stands beside a plain wooden table covered in a red velvet cloth, matching the draped curtain behind him. His expression is impassive but assertive, and his luxurious clothing conveys his power.

Philip's sleeveless jacket and breeches are made from purplish-brown fabric (now faded to brown) woven with silver motifs, and further embellished with silver appliqués and buttons; silver lace adorns the edge of his cloak. The white sleeves, shimmering with silver, are probably made of silk. His hat, on the table beside him, is decorated with delicate feathers. He wears the badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece (a prestigious chivalric order) on a gold chain and rests one hand on the hilt of his sword.

The King holds a petition signed by Velázquez, identifying his position as 'Painter to Your Majesty' and presumably declaring his allegiance to the monarch. Velázquez rarely signed his works, only those he considered important. He became court painter through his skill as a portraitist, and painted Philip IV and his family over four decades. Although the King would not have posed for every painting, this portrait was apparently done from life and the head served as a prototype for other half- and full-length portraits of the King, both by Velázquez and by his workshop. It was probably painted shortly after the artist returned from Italy in early 1631, as it shows a significant change in the King's appearance compared to portraits from the 1620s -- notably his facial hair, styled into a curly moustache and beard.

In 1629 Philip's son and heir, Baltasar Carlos, was born and the Cortes of Castile were invited to pledge an oath of allegiance to the crown prince. This was one of the most important ceremonies of Philip's reign and took place in the church of San Jerónimo in Madrid in 1632. A contemporary account of the King's costume during this event suggests it was similar to the one we see here; Velázquez was perhaps commissioned to commemorate the occasion.

Velázquez experimented with his painting technique in this portrait: the daubs and squiggles of paint might appear haphazard close up, but from a distance they conjure a brilliant impression of light and texture. The surface effects in this picture are especially dazzling because it is one of Velázquez's best-preserved works.

During the mid-seventeenth century this portrait was recorded in the Escorial Library, housed within the Monastery of San Lorenzo near Madrid, and it may indeed have been commissioned with that location in mind. The painting was part of a group of four portraits that included the King's predecessors -- Charles V, Philip II and Philip III -- thus establishing Philip's place in the Habsburg dynasty.

The National Gallery's collection also includes the bust-length Philip IV of Spain by Velázquez, while Philip IV hunting Wild Boar shows the King and his courtiers taking part in a rural hunt.

Style: Baroque