wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The sitter, wearing a lynx-lined coat, holds up a medal showing a bearded man dressed as a cardinal; the Latin inscription identifies him as Mercurio Arbono di Gattinara, Grand Chancellor to Emperor Charles V. The sitter is probably Alfonso de Valdés, one of Gattinara's closest associates.

Judging from the costume, the portrait was perhaps painting shortly after Gattinara's death in 1530. Alfonso was in the Low Countries in 1531; in October of that year he wrote to a friend and mentioned a portrait left unfinished in the Netherlands, of which copies were being made (he didn't name the artist of the original or the copy).

Although the painting has been trimmed and is damaged and discoloured by retouching, stylistically it can be attributed to the principal associate of Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen, painter and tapestry designer to the Habsburgs. Vermeyen seems to have had a colleague who trained in the workshop of Bernaert van Orley and who worked on a number of his portraits, including this one.

Style: High Renaissance
Giovanni da Milano, as his name suggests, came from a town near Milan but spent much of his working life in Tuscany. His name first appears in records in Florence in 1346. It has been suggested that he also spent some time during the 1340s in the nearby town of Siena. Giovanni painted large altarpieces, wall paintings and small-scale panels for private contemplation, like this one.

Christ and the Virgin Mary are shown as King and Queen of Heaven, holding orbs and sceptres. They are seated on a large wooden throne with curved sides, decorated with intarsia (wooden inlay) in red, gold, and black geometric patterns. The central decoration is a sunburst within a sphere. Images showing Christ and the Virgin seated on a double throne are rare but appear in a few Tuscan paintings, such as a fresco by Cimabue in the convent church of San Francesco in Assisi and a triptych by the Sienese painter Duccio, now in the Royal Collection. Here the Virgin sits at Christ’s left, a rare variation which occurs only in one Florentine manuscript illumination and a painting by the Sienese artist, Rinaldo da Siena. Rinaldo’s picture was made for a convent of the Poor Clares, the popular name of the religious order founded by Saint Clare.

Saint Clare also features here, wearing a black veil and brown cloak -- the habit (uniform) of the Poor Clares. Like Clare, most of the saints can be identified by their clothing and the objects that they hold. They were probably chosen specifically by the patron. Saint John the Baptist is shown with bare feet and a tunic of camel hair, recalling the time he spent in penance in the desert. Saint Lawrence wears a robe with decorated borders and carries the grill on which he was martyred. Saint Catherine of Alexandria stands opposite him, and the palm each holds is the symbol of martyrdom. Before being beheaded, Saint Catherine survived torture on the wheel, which she holds to her left. Saint Lucy is also shown with a palm and with a lit torch -- a play on her name, lux meaning light in Latin. The central male saint has not been identified, though his mitre shows he was a bishop.

This panel probably dates from early in Giovanni’s career when he was in Siena. Particular motifs -- such as the triple incised lines, visible just below the uppermost floral border and between the heads of Saints Catherine and Lawrence -- were popular decorative features in Sienese painting of the period. Furthermore, the border of miniature rosettes resembles those used by the Sienese painter Naddo Cecarelli. The edges of the panel’s frame do not show any evidence of a hinge, ruling out the possibility that the picture was connected to another panel to form a diptych; small-scale independent devotional pictures were popular in Siena. These parallels and the presence of Saint Clare indicate the picture may have been made for a Sienese convent of the Poor Clares.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
The objects in this still life appear simple and modest, but in the artist's own time they would have been recognised as costly and luxurious. Luscious strawberries spill from an expensive Wanli bowl, imported from China. Olives glisten in a pewter dish and a salmon is cradled in its own crisp skin and sprinkled with capers. Fresh walnuts and a crusty loaf complete the meal, accompanied by white wine in the roemer (the heavy glass with a beaded stem) and beer in the tall, octagonal passglas behind it.

Still-life paintings of this kind were designed to celebrate the good things of life and the prosperity of the Dutch nation. Newly opened trade routes meant that the huge merchant vessels being built could travel to both East and West Indies and the countries in between, to bring back previously unknown fruits and exotic spices and textiles. But the pictures also demonstrated the skill of the artist in painting texture and perspective and in invoking the senses.

The pewter and silver vessels are arranged one behind the other to suggest distance, growing smaller in proportion as they recede. The ornate knife in the foreground pointing away from us, its tip resting on a pewter plate to reveal a shadow beneath it, shows the artist's skill in painting perspective. He excelled in painting texture. The difference between the pewter plate holding the strawberries and the upturned silver beaker behind it is portrayed by making the silver glint more than the pewter and by subtly altering the colours. The slightly coarser linen of the table cloth contrasts with the brilliant white of the silk cloth hanging over the edge of the table. The slender passglas is made of heavier -- and therefore probably less expensive -- glass than the roemer, which has reflections on its surface that help to make it seem delicate and more fragile.

Where is the arrangement placed? The reflection on the roemer suggests that it's in a room, and yet the grey background with the suggestion of autumnal leaves and perhaps even clouds, may mean a meal taken on a balcony perhaps, or by an unseen open window. But you wouldn't see brown leaves and strawberries at the same time of the year, so it's likely that the picture is a purely imaginative concoction of objects sketched at different times and put together in the painting for the pleasure of the viewer.

Pieter Claesz. lived in Haarlem, where he was the most successful still-life painter of his time. For a while he painted in a 'monochrome' style, using a limited palette and soft, muted colours. But in his later career, when he painted this picture, he returned to more dramatic colours and compositions, possibly influenced by the sumptuous still-life paintings of Jan Davidsz. de Heem (look at Still Life, for example).

Style: Baroque
This is one of a pair of panels from a piece of painted furniture, a cassone (large chest). The panels show a story from the life of the Roman Emperor Trajan, widely known from Jacopo da Voragine’s Golden Legend of about 1260 and retold by Dante in the Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century.

Trajan was preparing to leave for a military campaign when a widow asked for justice for her son, who had been killed by Trajan’s own son. The Emperor promised this on his return, but, after the widow pointed out that he might not come back, he duly held a court. Here, in the second scene in the story, Trajan sits on the left on a raised marble throne, dispensing justice. The widow stands before him, while soldiers and civilians look on.

Cassoni were often associated with weddings: they were one of the items of furniture that a groom was expected to acquire for his home in expectation of his new bride's arrival. Although the stories told here might seem ill suited to such a setting, the tale had a happy ending: Trajan married his son to the widow in recompense for her loss. This was perhaps shown on the front of the chest, as on a cassone panel of around 1450 by Giovannai di Ser Giovanni (Lo Scheggia), now in a private collection.

Style: Early Renaissance
The Lottery in Piazza di Montecitorio shows Panini's gift as both a master of architectural perspective and a painter of picturesque scenes of everyday life. In this monumental painting, a large crowd awaits the results of a lottery draw, which is taking place on the balcony of the Palazzo di Montecitorio, Rome. The lottery was held nine times a year from 1743, around the time this work was painted, until 1870. The proceeds were used for charitable and religious purposes.

The artist has depicted this popular event in a highly theatrical way. A man standing on the balcony of the palazzo's facade has released the winning ticket into the air -- you can just make out a small piece of paper to the right of the building's entrance fluttering towards an excited group beneath. But the foreground activity is in many ways more intriguing and captivating than the main event. The animated throng plays an equal role with the architecture. Touches of vivid colour make up the clothing of the figures, contrasting with the warm, pinkish tones of both the buildings and the earthy ground, and bright sunlight accents some of the details of gesture and dress.

Panini seems to have relished the opportunity to depict a wide variety of characters. Some of the people watching may be too poor to participate in the lottery, while others are so wealthy they don't need to. Elegantly dressed ladies and gentlemen enter the scene from either side, on foot or in horse-drawn carriages. While they show little interest in the lottery, several men in black robes at either side of the scene study their tickets. In the left-hand corner, a market seller stands next to a cart full of produce as a number of men climb on the masonry beside him. On the far right, a mother and child sit at the base of the column of Antoninus Pius -- which had been excavated nearby and moved to this square -- alongside a group of men who drink merrily. Behind this we see the column of Marcus Aurelius, the greatest ancient monument in the area; in reality it would have been just out of view, but Panini has altered the perspective a little in order to include it.

This work was painted for Cardinal Domenico Orsini according to an inscription on the preparatory drawing now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. His reason for commissioning it is unclear; he was not associated with the lottery and his great-uncle, Pope Benedict XIII, condemned the lottery as an immoral practice in 1725.

Panini was the greatest view painter in eighteenth-century Rome, whether depicting real settings, such as The Interior of St Peter's or imaginary scenes like Roman Ruins with Figures. This is considered to be one of his most accomplished works and is a rare depiction of this contemporary event in Rome.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
A mountain massif in central Switzerland, Mount Rigi rises above the waters of Lakes Lucerne, Zug and Lauerz, its main summit reaching some 1,800 metres above sea level. Turner had painted a series of iconic watercolours of its majestic profile under varying light conditions during a series of visits to Lucerne in the late 1830s and early 1840s. This view is from Mount Rigi itself, looking west over Lake Lucerne to Mount Pilatus. To the left stands the Bürgenstock, with the Stanserhorn behind. The long shadows thrown by the foreground chalets suggest a time in the late afternoon.

Calame spent several days on Mount Rigi in 1858. By this time, beginning with his first trip into the Bernese Oberland in 1835, he had spent over twenty years exploring the breathtaking scenery of his native Switzerland. During his excursions, he made countless drawings in sketchbooks and executed studies in the open air. He also painted what he termed ‘études achevées’, or finished studies, of which this view is an example. It is one of four versions known, of which one other is in the Neue Galerie in Kassel. Both these are given dates of 1861, suggesting that Calame worked them up from sketches he made on the spot during his visit. It both retains the crystalline quality of outline and colour which characterises his open-air studies, and demonstrates the Romantic sensitivity present in his larger-scale studio works.

The foreground is a study in light and shade, the ruined and abandoned chalets deep in shadow, apart from the brilliant sunlight falling on their roofs. The grass is bright emerald green, punctuated by rocks and hillocks. By contrast, the misty backdrop of water and mountains, behind which the light emanates, is shown in pearly blues and purples. The crisp handling of the foreground is juxtaposed with the atmospheric veiling of the mountain backdrop, demonstrating the full range of Calame’s approach and technique. The sensitive way he paints the grandeur of the mountains set against the afternoon sun can be viewed as a reflection of his belief that they bore the mark of the divine creator.

Style: Barbizon
This portrait by Jean-Léon Gérôme is of his younger brother, Claude-Armand. It is related to an almost full-length portrait that was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848 (Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge), and it is possible that it is a preparatory study. Born in 1827, Claude-Armand was 21 when the portrait was painted, but he died of meningitis only two years later.

The Fitzwilliam portrait remained with Gérôme until his own death in 1904 and was presumed lost until it was rediscovered in 2013 and auctioned in France. Until then, the only record of it was a drawing in which Claude-Armand is holding his bicorne hat rather than wearing it. In both painted portraits Claude-Armand is dressed in the uniform of the Ecole Polytechnique, a prestigious school of higher education in Paris that was founded in 1794. In the Fitzwilliam version, Claude-Armand leans against a marble balustrade, his dark olive green and black uniform contrasting with the pale grey stairs behind him. In the smaller portrait, we see a flat dark brown background rather than stairs. Together with his uniform this highlights his pale face.

Both paintings display Gérôme’s skill as a portraitist as he captures the slight droop of Claude-Armand’s left eyelid and perhaps just a hint of youthful arrogance. The smooth application of the paint in thin glazes, the minute attention to details of clothing and Claude-Armand’s cool reserve also recall portraits by Ingres, whom Gérôme greatly admired. There are, for example, similarities between Gérôme’s painting of Claude-Armand’s head and Ingres’s portrait of The Duc d’Orléans. Ingres’s picture of just the duke’s head and shoulders is a later modified copy of an earlier full-length portrait. The copy was painted after the young duke’s premature death in a riding accident in 1842, and it may be that Gérôme painted his smaller portrait of Claude-Armand as a commemorative image of his younger brother following his early death at just 23 rather than as a preparatory study.

Gérôme was awarded a Second Class medal at the Salon of 1848 for the full portrait, an award which helped consolidate his reputation early in his career. In his commentary on the portrait in his review of the Salon, the writer and critic Théophile Gautier noted that there was at first glance something slightly disturbing about it, but that  Gérôme's work had originality and distinction. He concluded, 'It is not bad that a work has within its beauty something shocking.'

Style: Realist
A bearded saint stands in a scalloped niche in this small painting. This is Saint Paul, the so-called Apostle to the Gentiles (non-Jews), holding his usual emblems of a book and a sword. Paul was a Jewish convert to Christianity. He was originally hostile to the new faith -- he took part in the stoning of Saint Stephen -- but experienced a dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus (as depicted in The Conversion of Saint Paul) and went on to be a Christian missionary.

The book represents the series of letters he wrote to the different early churches and which are part of the New Testament. The sword is the instrument of his martyrdom: he was beheaded -- as was his right as a Roman citizen -- during the persecution of Christians by the Nero, the Roman emperor.

Once part of a larger altarpiece, this picture was painted in Milan in the late fifteenth century. Another panel probably from the same altarpiece is now in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. We don't know who the artist was but he was one of a group of painters who were influenced by Leonardo da Vinci. Named after a large altarpiece (also in the Pinacoteca di Brera) made for Ludovico el Moro, the Sforza Duke of Milan, he is known as the Master of the Pala Sforzesca. He also painted The Virgin and Child with Four Saints and Twelve Devotees, and a very similar figure of Saint Paul appears in a cycle of frescoes in the church of San Giorgio, Annone Brianza, about 40 km north of Milan.

Technical analysis has revealed a lot about how the painting was made. Infrared reflectography shows underdrawing with short overlapping strokes rather than a continuous line, perhaps the result of transferring the design from a cartoon. Both the hand and the book were enlarged during the painting stage. The blade and hilt of the sword were incised with the help of a straight edge, as was the ledge at the bottom, and incisions were made with compasses for the circles in the top corners and for the arch of the niche.

Some of the colours have changed and the picture was probably once brighter. The saint's robe now appears brownish, but the paint beneath the varnish and overpaint is probably a warm grey. The cover of his book was perhaps bluer: it was painted with azurite pigment, applied over the red drapery.

Style: Early Renaissance
The theme of this painting goes back to the early sixteenth century and derives from the earlier idea of the danse macabre (dance of death), in which the figure of Death summons people from all stations of life and dances them towards the grave. It symbolised the fact that no one, king or commoner, could escape death. The maiden -- a symbol of youth, beauty and purity -- being confronted by Death made this grim inevitability all the more poignant.

Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Burgkmair and Barthel Beham were among the German Renaissance artists who depicted the subject, and there was renewed interest in it in the Romantic period. Franz Schubert, for example, set the theme to music in his song Der Tod und das Mädchen of 1817, which he reused later in his string quartet of 1824. Schubert’s song was well known in nineteenth-century France and probably gave Puvis de Chavannes the idea for this painting.

This small version is a study for a work of 1872 (now in the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts). It differs from earlier representations in that Puvis has treated the confrontation not as a morbid encounter but as a moment of respite -- in fact, this is not really an encounter at all. He has painted not a solitary maiden but six girls who gather flowers on a hillside meadow and play together; they don't appear to have seen the figure of Death. This sense of carelessness has more in common with Nicolas Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time of about 1636 (Wallace Collection, London) than the sixteenth-century pictures with their frisson of horror.

The symbolism of Puvis’s picture is simple and pure. Death is sleeping, resting from reaping flowers, which are merely another version of the girls themselves: both are beautiful and in full bloom. As long as he sleeps the oblivious girls can enjoy their lives. The group of four in the background are jubilant and the foreground pair serene. One of them blows on a dandelion, another symbol of mortality, and while they inhabit the sunshine of the meadow, a dark wood lies just beyond. Puvis is showing us that although Death will eventually wake and claim the maidens, they -- and therefore also we -- should make the very most of life.

Puvis used his rapidly worked oil sketch to plot out both the general composition and the colour harmonies. He changed little in the finished painting other than moving the position of Death and swapping the colours of some of the girls’ dresses to more pastel shades. This has the effect of smoothing the flow of the viewer’s eye down the picture, making the transitions from one girl to another more musical and increasing the contrast between them and the black figure of Death.

Style: Symbolist
This is the lunette, or upper panel, of the altarpiece painted by Francesco Zaganelli for the chapel of the Visitation in the church of S. Andrea in Vineis, Faenza (the church was rebuilt in the eighteenth century and rededicated as S. Domenico, Faenza).

The dead Christ sits on the lid of his stone tomb, supported by two wingless grieving angels who kneel beside him. The angel on the left seems to look down at the wound in Christ's side; its companion gazes up sorrowfully at Christ's face. Christ's legs hang over the front of the tomb, which is made of brown breccia marble. Breccia is a kind of rock composed of broken fragments of minerals or rock naturally cemented together.

The lid of the tomb is placed obliquely so that it seems to project into our space, as do Christ's legs. The sole of his right foot is foreshortened and seen from below. Both soles are marked by the wounds from the nails hammered into Christ's feet during the Crucifixion (known as the stigmata), and Christ still wears the crown of thorns placed on his head by his tormentors. Zaganelli has represented Christ's body in our space to emphasise that it is the origin of the Host (consecrated bread) that would be placed on the altar below the painting during the sacrament of the Eucharist. In the lunette, Christ's tomb itself resembles an altar, and perhaps the distinctive pattern of the breccia marble that Zaganelli has painted matched that of the front of the actual altar originally below the painting.

The scene of the dead Christ forms the culmination of the prophecy and episodes depicted in the main panel of the altarpiece below, which represents the Visitation and Christ's baptism. A scroll inscribed ‘Ecce Agnus Dei’ (‘Behold the Lamb of God’) is attached to the reed cross that Saint John the Baptist holds. This refers to Christ, who was to be sacrificed like a lamb for the salvation of humanity. The Baptist pours water from the river Jordan onto the head of Christ, who clasps his hands in prayer and accepts God's will.

The other Latin inscription, held by the hovering angel with the shroud-like cloth, translates as: 'This is my beloved Son.' It represents the word of God. According to the Gospels, after Christ had been baptised, the Holy Ghost descended upon him in the form of a dove and a voice from heaven said: ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased’ (Matthew 3: 17). In the scene of the Visitation, Saint Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, looks at the Virgin Mary and points to the scene of baptism which foretells the future of her unborn son. The crucified Christ rising from the tomb in the lunette above shows the destiny accepted by Christ, the Virgin Mary's son, at his baptism.

Style: High Renaissance