wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Saint Anthony was revered for his devotion to the sick and the poor, but here we see one of the stranger episodes in his life. A young man named Leonardo confessed to the saint, who was then a Franciscan friar, that he had kicked his mother. Anthony replied, 'The foot of him who kicks his mother deserves to be cut off'. The friar may not have intended to be taken literally but, in a fit of remorse, Leonardo went home and took a hatchet to his own ankle. When Saint Anthony heard what had happened, he miraculously reattached the foot and healed the wound. We see him here standing on the steps in his monk’s habit, holding the newly restored limb of the swooning Leonardo.

This is a preparatory sketch for one of a series of eight frescoes that Giordano painted on the walls just below the dome of the church of San Antonio de los Alemanes in Madrid. All eight depict miracles performed by Saint Anthony. The church had originally been built for Portuguese subjects attending the Spanish court and was dedicated to Saint Anthony, who been born in Lisbon and was patron saint to the city and many other Portuguese towns. Like the other seven frescoes in the series, Giordano designed this one to look like a tapestry held up by the two angels at the upper corners -- they seem to be unfurling the picture so as to reveal the miracle to the congregation in the church below.

This sense of a privileged insight into a highly significant moment is emphasised by the dramatic shafts of sunlight which break from behind the cloud and shine on the face and halo of Saint Anthony. It is enhanced still further by the figures in the foreground. They form an audience for the events on the stage in front of them, and also create a deeper, more dramatic perspective. In the foreground of the final fresco for which this was the preparatory sketch, Giordano added two more men and a flight of steps, which further add to the sense of drama, depth and distance.

Giordano was famous for his ability to work at speed -- his nickname 'Fa Presto'  literally means 'does it quickly' -- and this painting shows the remarkable economy of technique which allowed him to do this. His bold use of white paint and highlights leads the eye around the picture and creates the key structure for the scene, from the edges of the steps and the framing curtains to the dramatic streaks of sunlight in the background, the bright dresses of the figures in the foreground and the helper holding the boy’s legs right in the centre of the painting. It is a simple strategy, but it creates a remarkably effective sense of depth and space, energy and light.

The church itself had been founded in 1604 as San Antonio de los Portugeses, but Spain lost control of Portugal in 1668, and in 1689 -- a few years before Giordano’s commission -- it was re-dedicated to German pilgrims at the Spanish court. Its name was changed to San Antonio de los Alemanes, which is still in use today.

Style: Baroque, Academic
Willem Maris trained at the Hague Drawing Academy, as did his two older brothers, Jacob and Matthijs, who were also artists. His paintings are of traditional Dutch subjects -- particularly animals and landscapes -- but painted in a lyrical manner that, in his later work, comes close to French Impressionism. His favourite motifs were cattle, and later ducks and chickens, in meadows or landscapes that typically include willow trees and also ponds, canals and rivers.

In this small painting we see a duck pond near the artist’s home at Voorburg. The sparse foliage and pale sky suggest it is winter or early spring. A mallard in full blue-green head plumage approaches a white duck that is perhaps about to alight on the water. Maris has created an atmospheric scene using a mesh of delicate brushstrokes and by limiting his principal colours to cool grey-greens and olive-browns.

Style: Realist
Christ carries the Cross on which he will be crucified to Golgotha, the site of his execution (John 19: 17). He is surrounded by soldiers and guards who goad him on his way as he struggles under the weight of the Cross. His body is doubled over and large teardrops fall down his face. The thorns plaited around his head to form a makeshift crown -- a punishment for the claim of kingship he was falsely accused of making -- have cut his forehead, which is red with blood. Two of the guards hold him by a rope which is tied around his waist.

Christ's tormentors wear contemporary northern European dress, to make the scene appear more real to viewers. The walled city in the distance represents Jerusalem, but includes Gothic towers with pointed spires. The painting may have been part of a series of images showing Christ's Passion (the name for the events including his arrest, torture and death). Each panel probably would have included a similar fictive frame of slender columns and a gilded decorative arch made up of stylised branches that bear flowers and foliage.

The panel was once thought to be painted by a Westphalian artist, but is now regarded as reflecting the work of painters in Lübeck in North Germany.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
This is a view of Lake Thun, which is on the River Aare in the Bernese Oberland (Bernese Highlands), Switzerland. We are looking south from the northern shore of the lake. The sunlit snowy peak in the distance has been identified as the Blümlisalp, but it also has some resemblance to the Jungfrau.

Raised near Lake Geneva, Alexandre Calame knew the Swiss landscape well. Beginning in 1835, he regularly exhibited at the Paris Salon and soon became the leading Swiss landscape painter of his generation. Demand for his paintings was fuelled by the growing popularity of Switzerland, particularly the Alps, as a destination for tourists who especially valued the landscape's restorative effects. Lake scenes were among Calame's most popular works. He received a number of orders for views of Lake Thun, which he had visited from 1836 to 1852, although no sketches of the lake survive. This view of the lake was commissioned in 1852 by the British collector, Henry Vaughan (1809–1899), who owned important watercolours by Turner. He asked for ‘a picture with distant snows and trees of even, warm and misty colouration'.

This is a tranquil, even idyllic, lake scene. On the water, two fishermen in a boat gather their nets. A rocky inlet fills the foreground. A grassy bank and a group of trees take up much of the right-hand side. The slight browning of some of the foliage suggests it may be late summer or early autumn. Calame mostly used small precise brushstrokes to produce an extremely smooth picture surface that complements the calm water of the lake and the clarity of the light. The stillness of the water is further emphasised by the sharpness of the fishermen’s reflection and by the unbroken reflection of a white sail in the distance. Where brushstrokes are visible, they suggest just a hint of texture -- for example, the leaves against the sky and the ripples of the water at the shoreline. Calame painted the natural world with an almost scientific precision. If you look closely, you can see how he shows different types of foliage and has even painted the cracks and tiny fissures on the mossy rocks.

The picture is divided into two complementary areas of colour. On the right, the palette is largely restricted to greens, browns and greys, although small highlights of other colours are also used -- for example, the dots of blue for the glints of sky through the leaves. On the left, Calame mainly uses blues and whites together with a pinkish-beige for the mountains closest to the lake. The use of white creates an almost milky effect for the water. This complements the pearly hue of the light to achieve the ‘misty colouration’ specified in Vaughan’s commission.

Calame often received requests for pairs of pictures of contrasting subjects – for example, a peaceful lake might be paired with a waterfall or storm. His slightly later painting, At Handeck, which shows a solitary tall pine set high above a deep valley as a storm looms, is an example of a more dramatic view. Vaughan only commissioned this one painting from Calame.

Style: Barbizon
Christ stands upright with the support of his mother, the Virgin Mary. He holds a transparent crystal orb and is clutching his semi-transparent drapery, which hangs over one shoulder like a Roman toga. He is intended to look like a miniature Roman emperor, a pose which conveys his spiritual authority even though he's still an infant.

The size and intimacy of this image of the Virgin gazing lovingly at the infant Christ suggest that it was made for private prayer at home. Since it would have been viewed up close, every detail is painted with delicacy and precision. We can see every petal and all the stamens of the roses strung on the hanging garland that frames the Virgin's head, and the highlights of her cloak are painted with fine gold lines so that she appears to be radiating light. Even the leaves of the tiny trees in the hazy landscape background are tinted with gold as they catch the early morning light.

The artist created a beautiful and precious possession as well as an object for spiritual reflection: the garland is tied with a gold ribbon that flutters of its own accord in elegant ripples; the Virgin's cloak is clasped with a gold brooch, a faceted ruby at its centre and pearls around its edge. She stands behind a low wall covered with a bright red and gold carpet -- a precious and expensive textile which, in the fifteenth century, was never placed on the floor. Behind her is another low wall, this one of carved marble with a blue and gold frieze decorated with antique-style motifs.

Although this artist is most likely to have been working in Perugia, the main town in Umbria, this type of image derives from those made by the Florentine painter Verrocchio. There are similarities, too, in the way the artist has painted the Virgin's face: compare the heavy lids, wavy lips and fleshy chin to The Virgin and Child with two angels by Verrocchio. The picture has been associated with a number of artists working in Perugia in the 1470s, including Raphael's master Perugino, and another Umbrian painter,  Pintoricchio. The frame is 'engaged', meaning that it is original and is attached to the panel.

Style: Early Renaissance
Demand for Bellini's small-scale images of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child was so high that he had a large workshop of assistants who worked under his supervision, producing paintings in his style. And while they made a number of such images, each was different.

Here the child is dressed in a white tunic, a gold cloth draped around his chubby body, and propped up against two luxurious tasselled cushions. The Virgin, whose skin is so smooth and white that she resembles a marble statue, looks down towards Christ with a solemn gaze, resting her fingertips together in prayer. She is shown wearing a red mantle, rather than the more traditional blue, and the Child's clothing is unusually modern -- they were possibly intended to resemble a contemporary mother and child. The decision to paint the Virgin in red might also have sprung from the desire to create a visual contrast with the background. This simple backdrop was more straightforward than many of the landscape settings Bellini himself used for this type of image.

As in many pictures of the Virgin and Child that are actually by Bellini, the infant Christ is lying on a marble parapet. Often used in portraiture to create the illusion of depth, it also deliberately recalls the 'unction slab' -- the stone upon which Christ's body was anointed with oil before his burial. The Virgin, then, worships Christ in the knowledge of his future suffering (which was, according to Christians, crucial to salvation) and demonstrates to the viewer the correct response to the Child before them.

Since these works originated from his workshop, Bellini's assistants were able to place his signature upon them. When this picture was cleaned, it was discovered that Bellini's signature was not original, nor was the cartellino on which it was painted; both were removed. It might have been added by a former owner -- or a dealer -- who wished to give the impression the picture was by Bellini himself. This intervention, however, suggests a misunderstanding of the meaning of signatures in the fifteenth century: it was customary for the master's name to appear on paintings made by the workshop where it simply denoted that the work was made to the master's design, under his supervision.

Style: Early Renaissance
Domesticity reigns in this exquisite little picture. A delightfully pretty Virgin Mary balances a squirming, curly-haired Christ Child on her knee.  She herself is perched rather precariously on a laundry basket, and her nephew, the young Saint John the Baptist dressed in an animal skin,  tugs at her blue mantle. On the other side the elderly Saint Joseph has taken off his glasses to peer at the child, taking care to mark his place in his book. Christ is playing with an apple -- a symbol of the fall of humankind, of which he is the Redeemer. Behind them is a classical landscape with ruins, serving as a stage set on which the drama of the picture takes place.

Known as the 'Montalto Madonna' after its patron, Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, this small painting on copper was one of Annibale Carracci's most celebrated and copied works, but was presumed lost for 300 years. The composition was famous in the seventeenth century -- it was described in early literary sources, including Giovan Pietro Bellori's Lives of the Artists (1672), and was reproduced in both engravings and painted copies.  When this painting was rediscovered in 2003 its high quality and refined execution allowed it to be identified as Annibale's original. This was confirmed by an inscription and an inventory number on the back, which it was given when in the collection of Filippo III Colonna in Rome in the eighteenth century.

There is no documentary evidence for when this painting was made, but it must have been painted after 1594, when Annibale went to Rome. Annibale's  monumental fresco cycle for the ceiling of  the Palazzo Farnese became his crowning achievement in the city, but while he was there he also came across other artists working on a much smaller scale in copper, such as Adam Elsheimer. This encouraged him to make several small pictures on copper, including Christ appearing to Saint Anthony Abbot during his Temptation and this painting. Here, the scene's natural tenderness is rooted in Annibale's admiration for Correggio, while the slightly later works he painted in Rome have a more classical style, which can be seen in Christ appearing to Saint Peter on the Appian Way.

The poses of the figures look spontaneous, but the composition has been carefully composed. The Virgin and Child form a pyramid in the centre, the outer edges of which are paralleled by the forms of Saints John and Joseph. They both look inwards at the central group, directing our eyes towards the principal characters. Annibale also uses colour and light to focus our attention,  giving Mary and Jesus stronger, more saturated colours and lighting them more brilliantly than the other figures. The Virgin leans out and looks towards us, engaging us with her bold gaze, while the Christ Child wriggles on her lap and looks away to the side.

The rich balance of colour, the harmony of form and movement, and the play of light make this one of Annibale's greatest small paintings, and reveal the impact of Correggio on his work.

Style: Baroque, Academic
An enormous, almost grotesque pile of fish is brilliantly illuminated amid the gloom of its surroundings. The heap seems to consist mainly of skate, and propped up against it is what may be a red mullet, its mouth open seemingly from its last gasp. A second such fish lies at an angle directly underneath, its head propped up on sacking.  Apart from the fish there are other highlighted objects breaking up the gloom, from the saucepan hanging up at the right to the basin propped up underneath, whose brass interior captures the light. The rest of the scene is in semi-darkness. The combination of pillars, low ceiling and dark brown tones makes for a claustrophobic scene.

In the shadows to the left, a woman at the far end of the table is gutting a fish. On the right a young man is faintly visible. Through openings at the back can be glimpsed the white coiffed hats of more women, either market goers or further workers. Philippe  Rousseau was a great exponent of still lifes, from flowers and food to kitchen utensils.  He was particularly influenced by the French eighteenth-century artist Chardin. Here the juxtaposition of what is essentially a still life with a genre scene of market day is also reminiscent of Flemish market scenes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where detailed depictions of the produce on offer dominate the foreground, and market traders and customers inhabit the background. One example is Beuckelaer's Fish Market of 1568 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A similar display of fish is presented in his The Four Elements: Water. It  has been suggested that the dimly lit figures were the work of fellow artist  Eugene Isabey, but there is no firm evidence to back this up, and Rousseau could have easily been imitating Isabey’s style.

Style: Realist
It is unusual to see these four images grouped together like this. This arrangement and the evidence of hinges at the panel's right edge suggest that it was once part of a larger work, perhaps a diptych or a triptych where -- along with another panel with multiple images -- it would have framed a central picture, now lost.

The scenes are underlined by a row of half-length 'portraits' of the Twelve Apostles. Gold leaf was commonly used as a background on panel paintings but this one stands out for its liberal use of ultramarine, an expensive, rich blue pigment made from the rare semi-precious stone lapis lazuli.

At the top left we see the coronation of the Virgin. This event, when Christ crowned his mother the Queen of Heaven, is described in the Golden Legend as a glorious moment accompanied by angels playing music. The angels in the front row play a portable organ and the nakers -- a set of kettle drums strapped to one of the angel's backs.

To the right of this is a representation of the Trinity, the one Christian God made up of three divine figures: God the Father, who glows with golden light within a blue mandorla; the son, Christ, shown on the Cross; the Holy Ghost, a dove descending upon Christ as though being blown from God's mouth. All three figures emanate golden rays of light. They are surrounded by the symbols of the authors of the four Gospels: John is shown as an eagle, Matthew as a winged man or angel, Luke as an ox and Mark as a lion. The Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist, who were both present at the Crucifixion, are seated on the ground at the foot of the Cross.

The busy scene below the Trinity shows the Crucifixion. The two thieves who were crucified at the same time as Christ appear on either side of him. The Virgin Mary faints in grief, supported by three other women. John the Evangelist, wringing his hands, stands behind. Mary Magdalene, long hair flowing, reaches up to the Cross.

Finally, we see the Virgin and Christ Child seated on a makeshift throne. A man and woman, probably the people who commissioned the picture, kneel before them. We know that two other pictures made by Barnaba da Modena were sent to Spain and also include figures of the patrons; one was probably made for the chapel of the Manuel family in Murcia Cathedral. The woman in those pictures has been identified as Juana Manuel, a powerful noblewoman who became Queen of Castile through marriage in 1369 -- as has the blonde woman in our painting, her crown indicating her royal status. The man in front of her does not have a crown; rather than being her husband, King Henry of Castile, he might be her father, who died before this picture was made. The Archangel Raphael presents him to the Virgin and Child in heaven.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
This landscape is typical of Diaz's late work, which was imbued with strong natural and dramatic effects. The view is across the desolate heathlands near the village of Barbizon, and features rocky outcrops in the scrub and a few sparse trees.  A path runs through the plain, leading the eye into the composition . The combination of the dominant stormy sky with its mass of grey clouds and the bleak plain conjures up the terrors of a storm out in the open. The sky breaks only at the centre to show patches of blue and whiter clouds, an unseen sun casting light onto the path below.

To the right of this path a man carrying a gun is accompanied by two dogs. Such lone hunters are a frequent image in Diaz’s paintings of this period. Here the man is painted almost entirely in monochrome, emphasising his vulnerability in the face of nature’s forces. Diaz has adapted his brushstrokes to the drama of the scene. The landscape is painted in short, choppy, horizontal and diagonal strokes, whereas the treatment of the sky, with multi-directional and expansive brushwork, echoes the stormy weather it describes. At the centre, vertical strokes are brought down over the tops of the bushes, perhaps suggesting rainfall.

Style: Barbizon
The marshy pond in the left foreground blends into land rising to a small hill on the right, where two buildings are nestled behind a row of tall trees. Coubron, which lies to the east of Paris, was the home of Corot's friends the Gratiots, and he made the first of many visits there in 1867. By the early 1870s Corot was a successful and sought-after artist, and in 1872, seeking the peace and quiet which it was no longer possible to have in Paris, he decided to have a small studio built adjoining their house, which was unveiled on 15 April 1873.  It was at this time that the idea for this view came to him, but he actually painted it in May, after a small sketch, while he was staying in Ville-d’Avray.

It was not unusual for Corot to paint landscapes in the studio in this way, particularly during his later years, and many of his ‘souvenirs’ are memories of places of special importance which he had visited over his life.  It does not mean, however, that everything in these landscapes was necessarily true to what he had originally observed, and he would often draw on a stock of images to construct a  composition. The houses,  for example, with their distinctive gable ends appear in a number of his late paintings. A very similar grouping of a taller house flanked by a lower one stands in the background of Pulling in the Fishing Nets of 1871 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and a more complex cluster appears in the background of A Flood, also an evocation of a watery landscape.

The handling is typical of Corot’s late style.  While the sky is quite substantially painted, the landscape has an extremely thin first layer in grey-green, with the texture of the canvas showing throughout. The trunks of the trees are also very thinly painted and the foliage has been rendered with a mass of horizontal strokes in milky greys and greens, creating the shimmering surface which is so characteristic of his mature work.

Style: Barbizon