wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Boltraffio is known as Leonardo's best student, and was particularly praised for his portraiture. Isabella Sforza, the wife of Leonardo's patron in Milan, the Duke of Sforza, wrote that Boltraffio was 'highly skilled' in this area.

The profile view was a formal pose derived from medals, which themselves resembled ancient Roman coins. Its use here is unusual, as most of Boltraffio's surviving portraits adopt the three-quarter view that Leonardo had popularised in Milan. Perhaps the sitter specified this view: although it was outdated at this time, it remained fashionable with some patrons in Milan long after it had gone out of favour in the rest of Italy.

The man's face is further obscured by his cap, which is pulled right down over his brow. His right hand encircles his chest and rests tucked into his tunic, a pose that was favoured in portraits of this period. The dark colours, subtle contrasts and the use of shadow to describe the shape of the face are features of Leonardo's style.

That Boltraffio made this picture has never been doubted. The identity of the man, however, has been the subject of plenty of debate. At one time it was thought to be a portrait of Gerolamo Casio, a poet from Bologna. Boltraffio painted two other pictures of him -- the two were friends. They met in Bologna and Gerolamo mentions Boltraffio in some of his sonnets. Boltraffio was in Bologna in around 1500 and he painted an altarpiece commissioned by the Casio family which includes a profile portrait of the poet, kneeling in prayer before the Virgin and Child. The two profile views share the man's large jowls but the hair colour is quite different. Portraits of Casio show him with reddish-brown hair whereas this man's hair is certainly (and was originally intended to be) black.

This portrait has a long history with the National Gallery. The Gallery's first director, Sir Charles Eastlake, saw it in a private collection in Italy in 1855 and described it as a 'stern-looking' man. Several years later it was purchased by his successor, Sir William Boxall, for his personal collection. He left it to Eastlake's wife, Lady Elizabeth, on his death. It was eventually purchased by the chemicals magnate, Sir Ludwig Mond, whose collection entered the National Gallery in 1924.

Style: High Renaissance
The Virgin Mary supports her son’s head with one hand and his chubby leg with the other, laying him down on her deep blue cloak. The child's raised leg lifted to one side shows his genitals, proving this is a human child -- the son of man and the son of God, as had been promised in the scriptures. Christ sleeps, but holds tiny white flowers on his chest as a sign of his purity. His small body is so smooth and pale that he’s almost like a marble sculpture -- just a little pink on his cheeks and his fair curls bring him to life.

Mary gazes down at him. She is dressed in the simple, low-necked garment of a peasant woman of the early eighteenth century. Van Der Werff has pushed her back into the shadows, and what little light there is emanates from the infant Christ -- he is to become the 'light of the world' (John 8: 12). Even more in the background is the figure of Mary's husband, Joseph, just discernible as he sleeps behind Mary’s arm against the almost uniformly shadowed background. Just a glimpse of a tree and a distant hill against a small patch of evening sky high up on the right soften the bleakness.

After Christ's birth, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream, warning him that King Herod was searching for the child in order to kill him. Joseph took Mary and the infant to Egypt for safety, a story told in the New Testament and in biblical apocrypha. While the holy family’s rest on their journey is not actually described anywhere, it has been depicted frequently throughout the ages.

Van der Werff was for some time court painter to the Elector Palatine, Johann Wilhelm. It appears that the Elector commissioned the painting shortly after he had made the artist a knight for his services in adding to the decoration of the Elector's palace in Düsseldorf.

Style: Baroque
This unknown lady stands beside a table covered with an Ottoman carpet on which her small dog is lying. During the sixteenth century, Turkish carpets such as this one were luxury items and it was usual for them to be displayed on a table rather than placed on the floor.

The lady’s hands rest affectionately on the little dog’s back, while its paw lies on the inside of her arm. The dog may be a pointer puppy or possibly an Italian greyhound. Both the dog and the lady look directly at us. Our viewpoint is quite low, making it appear that the lady is looking down on us in a slightly austere manner, emphasised by her raised left eyebrow. The very high pleated ruff framing her face appears to lengthen her neck and accentuates this effect. The pair are depicted against a plain dark background, lit brightly from the upper left.

Dogs were often included in portraits to symbolise the sitter’s faithfulness, which may be the case here. The gold and ruby ring prominently displayed on the lady’s left hand may be a token to represent her marriage. It is possible that this painting was once a pair with a portrait of the lady’s husband, towards whom her body may have faced.

The lady’s clothes suggests a date in the late sixteenth century. Her sober black gown covers an expensive white silk costume that is closed with elaborate gold buttons and thick gold chains and decorated with gold embroidery or braid. The back of her hair is covered with a gold hairnet with a band of pearls and gold across the crown of her head. The white and gold colours of the dog’s coat match the white and gold of the lady’s clothes. The opulence of her dress and the expensive carpet suggest that she is a noblewoman.

The portrait is probably North Italian, and was formerly attributed to Sofonisba Anguissola (about 1527--1625). The painting shows some similarities to the style of Bartolomeo Passarotti (1529--1592), who worked mainly in Bologna.

Style: High Renaissance
Buildings crumble and collapse along a seashore harshly illuminated against a dark sky. These unstable structures are probably assembled from elements of ancient and modern architecture familiar to the artist. The domed building beside a Gothic church-like tower with damaged stained glass windows is based on the ancient Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, near Rome. Stone statues lie in pieces, sit in niches or are part of reliefs on an altar or sarcophagus. The curiously tall grey stone pillars that stand apart from the buildings may have been based on examples studied by the artist in Italy and France.

At the bottom of the picture are two tiny figures with awkward, elongated bodies. They are Saint Augustine and the child, whose legend provides the theme for this dream-like scene of fantasy architecture. Augustine was a Father of the Church and Bishop of Hippo in north Africa. One day, as he walked by the shore, he saw a small child trying to empty all the water out of the sea using a seashell. Augustine told the child it was impossible, and the child replied that it was equally impossible for Augustine to explain the mysteries of the Trinity, God's three roles as Father, Son and Holy Ghost. In the seventeenth century the subject was often painted for Augustinian convents, but because of the insignificance of the figures it would seem unlikely that this work was intended for worship.

Acquired in 1923 as the work of an unknown Dutch painter, the picture is now attributed to François de Nomé, also known as 'Monsù Desiderio', who came from Lorraine. There is little attempt to create an impression of depth or three-dimensionality, though white impasto paint has been used generously and in freely applied brushstrokes to suggest the effects of stone. Transparent layers of grey paint have been used for the buildings positioned further back in the composition.

Style: Baroque
It is the end of the day, and a fishing boat heads into a secluded inlet, guided by a lone figure in a distinctive red cap. To the right is a wooded promontory, the branches of the trees stretching out over the water. The far shore of the lake is indicated with a series of brushstrokes in light green paint, and misty hills lie beyond. It is a scene of stillness and peace. The sun’s last rays are caught by one or two of the clouds, but the overall light is pearly, and the blue sky fades to creams and pinks near the horizon. The gentle rippling of the water is rendered in long strokes of many colours, from greys, blues and purples to yellow-greens, olives and pinks.

This work encapsulates Corot's mature style. Particularly characteristic is the complex area of sky and tree at the right. As was his habit, Corot painted the sky at a late stage, bringing it round and over the tree. Its branches, in a variety of browns and greens, are painted both under and on top of the sky paint. Among these branches the touches of olive-green and smoky, milky grey, extending down into the water, add a sense of mystery to this shadowed area.

This painting was once in the collection of leading British artist Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830–1896), who also owned Corot's The Four Times of Day. Leighton was an early British collector of Corot’s landscapes, which he displayed in the drawing room of his London home, Leighton House, alongside works by Daubigny and such British landscapists as  Constable.

Style: Barbizon
Christ’s body has been taken down from the Cross and brought to be entombed by his grief-stricken mourners. His lifeless corpse rests against his mother’s knees. His forehead, still crowned with thorns, seeps blood that trickles along his neck. The Virgin Mary looks down at her son and gently touches his hair and face. The open wound from the soldier’s spear continues to seep blood.

On the right, Mary Magdalene, her long hair uncovered, takes Christ’s hand tenderly in her own and seems to feel for a pulse. Beside her, a holy woman wipes her eyes. Saint John the Evangelist clasps his hands while Nicodemus raises his in despair. Only Joseph of Arimathea, recognisable by his expensive cloth of gold damask clothes, looks to see our reaction to Christ’s death. His acknowledgement of our presence includes and implicates us in the scene, demanding our emotional involvement and dissolving the dividing line between the image and reality, past and present.

The palm trees on the hills tell us that this landscape is the Holy Land, and in the distance the three crosses still stand on Calvary, surrounded by mounted soldiers. The setting sun stains the clouds pink and casts a tinted light over the scene, while figures travel to and from the riverside town, unaware of the momentous event unfolding. A fruiting fig grows from between the rocks of Christ’s cave-like tomb, symbolising his imminent resurrection.

The scene is set back behind a stone parapet that is carved with a delicate antique pattern of scrolling leaves and masks. An unknown figure is outlined in the central circular cartouche, and a piece of paper, or cartellino, is attached to the ledge. The inscription on it has been translated as 'Andrea Busati, disciple of Giovanni Bellini, made this', but it is hard to read the second line. Two grieving infant angels sit on the parapet, unable to bear the sight of the dead Christ.

This was formerly considered to be the earliest known work by Sebastiano del Piombo. The figure group is derived from a Lamentation by Cima da Conegliano (Pushkin Museum, Moscow) which has been dated to about 1512. The town and bridge appear in a picture by an unknown Venetian artist, Augustus and the Sibyl of about 1500, the landscape of which derives from a work by Giovanni Bellini. Andrea Busati worked in Venice and was influenced by both Giovanni Bellini and Cima. The intense emotions expressed in the figures’ faces and gestures also reveal the influence of Northern art.

Style: High Renaissance
The Virgin Mary sits in the countryside outside a distant town, holding the naked, wriggling Christ Child on her lap. Archangel Michael is identified by his name inscribed on the neckline of his robes. Saint Veronica holds the veil on which the image of Christ’s face was miraculously imprinted when he passed her on his way to be crucified. The two unidentified donors of the altarpiece, probably husband and wife, may have been named after the saints who present them to the Virgin and Child.

The pose of the Virgin and Child occurs frequently in the work of Bissolo and was probably invented by Giovanni Bellini in about 1500. It seems to first appear in the Madonna and Child with a Patron by Giovanni Bellini and workshop, recently in the collection of Barbara Piasecka Johnson in Princeton, for which Bissolo painted the donor portrait. Bissolo is described as a pupil of Bellini and seems to have been a frequent collaborator, employed to add donor portraits to Bellini’s Madonnas.

Style: High Renaissance
This small oil sketch on paper, mounted on canvas at a later date, shows a dense mass of trees in a deep ravine. At the bottom of the picture you can just see the tops of some pale pink flowering plants, suggesting that we are at the edge of a cliff (which continues on the left of the painting) looking across a gully that drops steeply below us. Most of the picture is filled with the dense foliage of the trees on the other side of the gully, which are set against a light creamy-brown sky. Although Jean-Michel Cels was a skilled painter of cloud studies, he gives little attention to the sky here, which is simply a neutral backdrop.

By painting the individual petals and leaves of the flowers at the bottom of the painting, Cels heightens an impression of distance between the immediate foreground and the trees on the other side of the ravine. Although the picture is less than 30 centimetres wide, there is a strong sense of the deep gulf that separates the foreground from the bank of trees in the distance. In effect, there is an empty space at the centre of the painting, encircled by two arcs. A descending arc, formed by the cliff face as it drops down on the left and by the tall tree rising from the bushes on the right, is mirrored by a gently ascending arc created by the distant treeline across the top of the picture.

Cels’s method of applying paint further enhances this play between proximity and distance. For the trees in the gully, he first applied a dark green underpaint. He then added highlights of lighter greens to create a relief effect of layered foliage. He reversed the process for the tall tree on the right, as its dark green leaves are placed against the bright green of the tree behind it. Cels used a stippling effect for its foliage by applying small horizontal dabs of paint, perhaps with the end of a small bristle brush. For the foliage elsewhere, a more loaded brush was used to build up the surface with multiple dabs of paint. Longer, more fluid, strokes of brown and yellow ochre were used for the side of the gully.

Artists had made sketches directly from nature since the seventeenth century, although the practice became more popular from the mid-eighteenth century, particularly among artists working in Italy. Cels’s father, Cornelius Cels, an academic painter who had spent seven years in Italy, most likely introduced his son to painting outdoors. As a landscape painter, Jean-Michel would have made small oil studies on location directly from nature either on paper, such as this one, or on a small panel. Paul Huet’s Trees in the Park at Saint-Cloud is a similar example.

Around 20 oil sketches of clouds and trees by Cels are known to exist. All date to between 1848 and 1852, when he was in his early twenties. This study was probably painted in Belgium, possibly in the area around Brussels, where he had his studio.

Style: Barbizon
The Virgin Mary looks away, seemingly deep in thought, as the infant Christ leans forward from her lap to touch his cousin Saint John the Baptist beneath the chin. Christ’s pose and gesture are extremely unusual in Italian art of this time. He supports himself by holding on to his mother’s neck with his left hand, while turning his head to look down at his cousin. The scene is set against a cloudy sky, the bright daylight accentuating the complex creases of the Virgin’s headdress and robes. Saint John crosses his arms against his chest in a gesture of humility and reverence and does not meet Christ's gaze. Christ may be gently lifting his cousin's face to make him look up at him to reassure him. The presence of the infant Saint John suggests the influence of Florentine art, as he is rare in Venetian art before this date.

The picture has an intriguing connection to a painting believed to be a self portrait by Giorgione, which is now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig. In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari describes a self portrait of Giorgione in the guise of David, the biblical slayer of the giant Goliath. At some time in the past, the Braunschweig self portrait was cropped, possibly to remove the gory head of Goliath. An engraving by Wenceslaus Holler of 1650 (British Museum, London) shows the self portrait with the giant’s severed head held by David on a ledge along the lower edge of the picture. The portrait, however, does not include the part of Goliath's head one would expect still to be visible, judging from the engraving, which has raised doubts as to it being its model.

In 1957, an X-ray image of the self portrait was published, which clearly showed another earlier picture beneath the paint layers, which had also been cropped. It is a Virgin and Child very similar in design to the National Gallery’s painting, which also includes the Christ Child’s very unusual pose and gesture. It may be that the idea for Christ’s pose in the National Gallery’s picture originally came from Giorgione. There are several versions of this design which may date from around 1506, the period when Catena and Giorgione were in partnership.

The painting is very damaged, particularly down the centre of the panel. The Virgin’s blue mantle, which is painted over red underpaint, and Saint John the Baptist’s green tunic are the only parts still in reasonably good condition.

Style: High Renaissance
A young man is shown in half length, his body turned slightly but with his gaze fixed firmly on us. His black jacket, buttoned down the front, and ribbon tied around his white shirt cuff imply that he is a man of some means. His features are quite particular – a wide mouth, long and prominent nose, dark wavy hair and brown eyes – but his identity remains a mystery. He is clearly a painter: he holds a brush in one hand, with which he is mixing colours on the painter’s palette he grasps in the other.

This may be a portrait of an artist or possibly a self portrait – it is difficult to tell which because in both instances artists were often shown in the act of painting. When this work entered the National Gallery’s collection in 1906, it was thought to be a self portrait by the Bolognese painter Benedetto Gennari (1633–1715), who was the nephew and pupil of Guercino. This identification cannot be sustained if you compare the man’s features with those in Gennari’s self portrait today in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Nor can the painting be attributed to Gennari on stylistic grounds.

Although both the artist and sitter have yet to be convincingly identified, the picture is probably Emilian (painted by an artist from Emilia-Romagna) and datable to the mid-seventeenth century.

Style: Baroque, Academic
This small picture could be the ruined remains of a competently painted portrait -- it's in very poor condition, but the near eye has a complex catchlight consisting of at least three brushstrokes.

There are large losses of paint in the upper third, along the top edge and extending into the hat and forehead. The paint surface is badly rubbed, much repainted and obscured by dirt and discoloured varnishes. Thin brown overpaint covers the man's clothes, hat and background. His jacket was once black and painted with a fine pigment, and his hat seems to have been grey (grey paint is visible in some places through losses in the overpaint). His eyes are grey under greenish overpaint; little or nothing remains of his hair or beard.

The panel is a single board of oak, and it seems not to have been cut down: the ground seems to reach to all four edges. The ground is chalk, with a thin greyish priming. Infrared reflectography does not reveal any underdrawing.

The panel's wood  -- oak -- was grown in France between 1400 and 1535. Dendrochronological evidence, together with the fashion of the collar and hat and what can be made out of the original shapes of the beard and moustache, suggests the picture was painted in France towards the middle of the sixteenth century.

Style: High Renaissance
Saint Anthony of Padua, wearing the grey habit of the Franciscan Order to which he belonged, stands before the infant Christ. A white lily, Saint Anthony’s attribute, lies at Christ’s feet and the saint splays his hands in a gesture of adoration as Christ reaches out to embrace him.

The Christ Child’s upturned feet and flying drapery indicate that he is floating, not standing, before the saint. While preaching, Saint Anthony had a vision of Christ appearing on his open book -- its pages are roughly sketched at the lower left. The subject was popular in Italian and Spanish art, particularly during the Counter-Reformation period.

The vaporous brushwork, which creates this painting’s hazy atmosphere and almost blurry impression, is typical of Bazzani’s technique. The paint is swiftly applied, appearing soft in certain areas (like Saint Anthony’s hair) and impastoed in others (such as the highlights in Christ’s drapery). The colours Bazzani uses are subdued, though Christ’s red drapery has faded considerably and would originally have been as vibrant as it is in the shadows.

Bazzani's light, flickering brushwork is akin to that of the Rococo painter Franz Anton Maulbertsch and to Venetian eighteenth-century artists like Francesco Guardi, whose atmospheric effects of light and colour Bazzani emulated. When the painting was presented to the National Gallery in 1922 it was attributed to the Venetian painter Jacopo Amigoni.

Style: Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical