wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
Not many portraits by the Venetian painter and miniaturist Jacometto survive, but the National Gallery has two: this one, and Portrait of a Boy. The man is dressed in the normal outfit of a Venetian citizen or patrician, which included a black cap and stole (the strip of fabric across his chest).

Blue was worn by members of confraternities, but this is as close as we can get to understanding his identity. Apart from a fleshy chin, the man's face lacks definition -- his cheek bones are low and his jaw is soft. His most distinctive features are his small beady eyes and his long thin nose.

This painting, along with the Portrait of a Boy, reflects the portrait style popularised in Venice by the Sicilian artist Antonello da Messina: a dark background, three-quarter view and the effect of strong lighting from a single source to the sitter's right. The light effect is more subtle here and the contours appear softer than those in Antonello's portraits. The picture more closely reflects the work of Jacometto's other contemporary in Venice, Giovanni Bellini.

Two fronds of laurel bound together with a ribbon are painted in gold on the painting's reverse, on a dark background. Between them is an inscription, from the Roman poet Horace's Odes, in Latin: FELICES TER ET AMPLIVS/QVOS/IRRVPTA TENET COPVLA ('Thrice happy and more are those bound together ').  A Renaissance patron would've known that laurel symbolised eternity, and the rest of Horace's ode relates to romantic jealousy: he encourages the woman to whom the poem is addressed to seek happiness in a peaceful, faithful and enduring relationship. The message here seems to be that marriage is hugely desirable; it seems likely, then, that this portrait was commissioned to celebrate an engagement or marriage. Another panel, representing the man's wife, may have been ordered at the same time.

Several portraits attributed to Jacometto include painted reverses. These include a pair -- probably commissioned to celebrate a marriage -- at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  They are of a man called Alvise Contarini and a woman, most likely his wife. The reverse of his image shows a deer chained to a painted stone background and includes the Latin word aiei, meaning forever; it alludes to the importance of sexual faithfulness within marriage.

Painted reverses were a popular way of adding meaning to the portrait and often included heraldic devices or symbols and mottos. The idea came from Netherlandish paintings -- at the Courtauld Gallery in London there's an example of a Netherlandish portrait of man with a sprig of holly and a Latin motto, which dates to the 1430s.

Style: Early Renaissance
Hogarth’s self portrait is a statement about his professional ambitions. His oval canvas is propped up on books by famous British authors. The curved line on his palette represents the ‘Line of Beauty and Grace’, which he believed underpinned all harmony in art and nature. His casual clothes create a down-to-earth appearance. His pet pug, Trump, alludes to the artist’s own pugnacious character.

This painting was purchased from the collection of Sir John Julius Angerstein to found the National Gallery in 1824. Hogarth’s celebrated series Marriage A-la Mode and Sir David Wilkie’s The Village Holiday also formed part of the original purchase. Hogarth’s The Painter and his Pug and the work by Wilkie were both transferred to the Tate Gallery, Millbank, during the twentieth century.

Style: Georgian
On 8 August 1632, Charles I authorised payment to Van Dyck for £20 for 'One of our royall Consort'. This was perhaps the first single portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria painted by Van Dyck after his arrival in London, and it provided a type from which many variations by the artist and his assistants followed.

The charm of the portrait is matched by the lightness of tone and touch with which it is painted: the silvery-grey dress, against dark green, setting off pale pinkish scarlet bows and the pink roses under her right hand. The flesh is modelled with extreme delicacy and her fashionable dress is also recorded with great care. The curtain originally projected more to the left and seems to have been altered by Van Dyck to its present form, and there are signs of alterations down the shadowed area of the Queen's left sleeve. This painting was probably the source of the Queen's portrait in the series of royal portraits in the Mortlake tapestry at Houghton Hall, Norfolk.

In his early English portraits Van Dyck includes fashionable details of dress (such as the spiky lace cuffs seen here) that he later tended to omit or simplify. The queen's bodice and skirt have been pinked with with wavy lines to produce a decorative effect in the lustrous silvery-blue silk, while the 'carnation' pink ribbons add warmth to the cool palette. As part of her dowry Henrietta Maria brought a pair of large teardrop-shaped pearls, probably the earrings seen here. Later known as the Mancini pearls, they still survive today.

Text adapted from the Royal Collection website

Style: Baroque
This painting belongs to a series depicting the Seven Works of Mercy that Sweerts painted during his stay in Rome. The central figure is a bald pilgrim poised to drink from a bowl. Sweerts shows the fundamental Christian charitable act of quenching the thirst of others, set amidst the vibrant backdrop of modern Rome. For another painting by Sweerts belonging to the same series, see Feeding the Hungry (L1320).

Style: Baroque
These  two paintings -- The Soul of Saint Bertin carried up to God and A Choir of Angels -- were once the upper parts of the wings of an elaborate altarpiece that was made for the high altar of the abbey church of St Bertin at Saint-Omer in northern France. It was commissioned by Guillaume Fillastre, Abbot of St Bertin, and was consecrated in 1459.

The wings are thought to have been painted at Valenciennes, where Simon Marmion was almost certainly the leading painter; he had moved there from Amiens between 1454 and 1458. Marmion was also well known as an illuminator -- according to the sixteenth-century historian Jean lemaire de Belges he was the 'prince of illuminators'. The style of the wing panels is very close to that of some of the most beautiful manuscripts of the 1450s, made for Guillaume Fillastre and presented by him to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. Many of the manuscripts in this stylistic group can be shown to have been made in or near Valenciennes. There is no proof that Simon Marmion painted the wings of the St Bertin altarpiece or the related manuscripts, but there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence in favour of this theory.

The main parts of the wings are now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. On the inside these show Fillastre himself with scenes from the life of Saint Bertin. On the outside are biblical kings, prophets and evangelists, painted to look like stone statues, on either side of an image of the Annunciation. The central section is known only from written descriptions, but was in the shape of an inverted 'T' and was made of gold, gilded silver and copper, rock crystal, diamonds and other precious stones. It had three-dimensional figures of Fillastre and Saint Bertin, and scenes from the life of Christ. All the statuettes were gilded but with faces and hands painted in flesh colours. At the top was a gilded Tree of Life surrounded by angels and topped with a pelican feeding her young (a symbol for the  Passion). From the Tree of Life hung a golden dove, in which the Host -- the consecrated bread of the Eucharist -- was kept.

Fillastre was an important man. A favourite of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, he was successively bishop of Verdun, Toul and Tournai. In 1447 he became abbot of the important Benedictine Abbey of St Bertin and was an active patron of the arts. Many of the records of the abbey have been lost, but surviving accounts list four payments for it. The total cost was over 1895 livres Artois or pounds, an enormous sum, especially as the precious metals and jewels came from the abbey treasury.

The altarpiece and its shutters remained on the high altar until 1783 when it was moved to another part of the church. They were still there in 1791 but the central section was destroyed soon after and the wings passed into the hands of a local baker, and from him to a local art-lover, perhaps the painter Louis Francia. The fragments here were separated from the main portions by a nineteenth-century dealer and bought by the National Gallery as part of the Beaucousin Collection in 1860.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
These three saints -- An Evangelist, A Bishop Saint and another Evangelist -- probably formed part of the frame of some large composition.

Unlike the vast majority of medieval and Renaissance paintings in our collection, these three fragments were not painted on panels or even linen supports. They are frescoes, and were painted on an internal wall of a public building in Assisi. The Palazzo del Podesta, also more accurately known as the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo, was built between 1275 and 1288. It was the headquarters of the 'people's captain', the chief officer representing the populares, wealthy urban professionals who were increasingly playing a role in the town's civic life. Such buildings were often extensively decorated in the Middle Ages. For example, Ambrogio Lorenzetti's famous fresco series, An Allegory of Good and Bad Government -- painted on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1338--9 -- is bordered by decorative bands containing busts in similar quatrefoil medallions.

The pictures were acquired by the National Gallery in the 1920s. They had been removed from their original setting in 1923, before the building was sold and the interior reconstructed. At that time it was thought that the Palazzo had been the home of the artists who worked on the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi (the mother church of the Franciscan Order) in the late thirteenth century, but these fragments were soon redated to the mid-fourteenth century. They have recently  been attributed to the so-called Master of San Crispino, who decorated the Oratorio di San Crispino at Assisi in the 1330s.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
This large altarpiece was painted by Carlo Crivelli in 1491 for a family chapel in the Franciscan church in Matelica, a small town in the Italian Marches. The Ottoni were the local ruling family -- you can see their coat of arms placed conspicuously on the bottom edge of the main panel.

Size, shape and content were all heavily influenced by the intended location. This is a pala, an altarpiece with a single main panel, like The Vision of the Blessed Gabriele, rather than a polyptych. The Ottoni chapel was tall, and needed a tall altarpiece: including the frame and predella the painting is approximately 2.5 metres high. There was a large window on the back wall of the chapel -- which was unusual -- so the altar and altarpiece had to be on the side walls. In this case, there were two altars, one on each side wall (the other one, attributed to Gentile da Fabriano, remains there to this day). This painting was on the left wall; the light in it comes from the upper right, mimicking the actual light in the  chapel.

Unusually, the contract for this painting survives. Dated 11 March 1491, it reveals that the expense of the altarpiece was to be shared between Ranuccio Ottoni and Fra Giorgio di Giacomo, prior of the Franciscan convent at Matelica. The prior paid by far the most -- it cost 310 gold florins, of which Ottoni only paid a fraction, perhaps because he had already paid for the chapel's other altarpiece. The two saints flanking the Virgin reflect this joint enterprise: the scholarly Saint Jerome stands for the interests of the cleric and the soldier Saint Sebastian for the knightly Ottonis.

This painting is one of only three large Renaissance altarpieces in our collection in their original frames. The pala form and the frame's classical pillars and simulated marble must have seemed modern compared with the gilded Gothic polyptychs chosen by many of Crivelli's patrons. Such altarpieces were a relatively new phenomenon in Italy; a similar one is Pesellino's  Pistoia Santa Trinità altarpiece. Although the frame would have been made by a specialist craftsman, the designs of the pillars are very similar to those in The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius, painted by Crivelli in 1486. The Ottonis had just built a palace in the fashionable classical style close to San Francesco, and were keeping up with the newest styles in both painting and architecture.

Style: Early Renaissance
These two small parlour paintings were almost certainly made as a pair. They are the same size, and both were probably originally rectangular and shaped into ovals at a later date. They also have a similar setting, probably an inn, a cast of three and comic undertones. But whether they represent two complementary variations on the same theme or two contrasting ones is open to debate.

Two Lovers at Table seems relatively straightforward. A love-struck man holding a wine glass stares lustfully at a young woman, while she meets our eye with a knowing smile. The vertical thrust of the wine glass in the man’s hand, not far from his groin, and the flask with an open neck, just beneath the woman’s seat, would have been interpreted by many viewers as sexual references. If we were in any doubt about the situation, we need only peer into the gloom at the back of the room where a brothel-keeper is looking in at the door. Here is a man succumbing to erotic temptation and being exploited by women.

There is less certainty about its companion piece, A Woman Playing Cards with Two Peasants. Here we see the woman reaching for her winnings from a disconsolate male opponent; another man looks on with amusement. It either reinforces the idea that women make fools of men, as in Two Lovers at Table or presents the opposite view, depending on the way you interpret the scene. It may be that the woman has tempted the man into a game of cards, and we see her trump his trick and reach out for his money. But it may be that the deceit is working the other way: her amorous opponent has allowed her to win in the hope of gaining her favour, or he is subtly rewarding her in advance for the favours he hopes she will confer on him.

If we accept the latter interpretation then one of these paintings illustrates the deceit of men, the other the deceit of women. If we see the woman as the trickster in both, then they become a warning to men against the manipulations of women. Perhaps the artist deliberately left the meanings unresolved -- all part of the fun of the pairing.

Style: Baroque
According to the Old Testament Book of Numbers the Israelites, tired of walking through the desert in search of the Promised Land, criticised both Moses (their leader) and God. In retaliation, God punished them by sending a plague of venomous snakes to bite them, causing the death of many. The Israelites repented and pleaded with Moses to pray for God’s forgiveness. God instructed Moses to erect a bronze serpent which instantly cured all those who looked at it.

Giaquinto focuses on the moment in which the Israelites can be saved by looking at the bronze serpent. Moses, identifiable by the two rays of light emanating from his head, gestures towards the snake coiled around a tall pole. Some men and women stare upwards seeking salvation while others are sprawled on the ground, suffering the effects of the serpents’ poison. In the background is the Israelites’ encampment, consisting of numerous large tents and their cattle. Behind Moses is an altar, covered with a pink cloth and with liturgical instruments such as a chalice, censer and basin. These objects, combined with the presence of the Levite priests dressed in white robes and Eliezer in his golden vestments, emphasise the sacred nature of the scene.

This is a modello, or highly finished painted sketch, for a fresco in the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome. As with the related Moses Striking the Rock, also in our collection, the dimensions are slightly larger than is usual for a painted sketch. This is probably so that the design could be approved by the Pope and the procurator of the Cistercian Order, Raimondo Besozzi, before its enlargement in fresco on the wall.

The National Gallery has other examples of painted sketches for frescoes in its collection. These include Luca Giordano's modelli for the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, and The Banquet of Cleopatra by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo who, like Giaquinto, worked both in Italy and in Spain.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
Costly blooms like roses and tulips are tumbled together with humbler flowers like morning glory and marigolds, forming an exuberant, almost wild, bouquet. It’s as if nature is brimming over. Tiny insects burrow through the petals, while a cabbage white butterfly balances precariously on top. A bird’s nest looks like a precious bowl of sculptured feathers.

But the painting isn’t as spontaneous as it appears -- it’s entirely artificial. These flowers are never in bloom at the same time; Paulus Theodorus van Brussel painted each from sketches made when they were. Most of all, he achieved the unkempt, haphazard look of the bouquet through careful design. The blue iris, one of the most prized blooms, takes centre stage, the single upright flower. It’s supported by a strong diagonal of flowers in paler colours, from the pink rose at the bottom on the left up to the striped tulips on the right at the top. This allows stems and smaller blooms to straggle seemingly at will, many of them overblown and dishevelled, helping to create an artful disorder.

Style: Neoclassical
This is one of seven illustrations of the story of Jason from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (Book VII), made by de Troy as a series of sketches for cartoons for the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris. This sketch was finished by February 1743. The Gallery has another work from the same series: 'Jason swearing Eternal Affection to Medea'. The tapestries were woven in several sets, one of which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In this picture the dragon has been put to sleep by Medea's potion so Jason can take possession of the golden fleece. Jason stands over the dragon, while Medea, a sorceress and his betrothed, stands to the left. In the background on the left, are the Argonauts' ships which are being prepared to take them back to Greece.

Style: Baroque, Rococo
This painting illustrates a story told by the Roman historian Pliny: at a banquet held for the Roman general Mark Antony, Cleopatra, ruler of Egypt, dissolved one of her priceless pearls in a goblet of vinegar and drank it (Natural History, Book IX). Here, she sits at the top of a flight of stairs framed by a classically inspired portico. Her hand is poised to drop the pearl, despite the glass still being on a tray nearby. Antony, wearing a red robe at the left, pulls back in surprise.

A servant in the bottom left-hand corner struggles to prevent a fine white horse from prancing into the room, increasing the tension in the scene. The court dwarf climbs the steps to tease a tiny dog, and this is balanced by the servant walking towards us at the other side; both lead our eye towards and frame the main scene. All the details are carefully realistic, like the crisp folds of the tablecloth or the onlookers's expressions and body language as they wait for Cleopatra's next move.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painted Cleopatra's banquet several times, and this small painting may be an early oil sketch for his famous fresco in the Palazzo Labia in Venice, which he completed in around 1746 (although the scenes are slightly different and the finished work is a vertical composition). Because this work is a preliminary study, intended to show his patrons how he would decorate their room, Tiepolo's style is much looser and more rapid than in his finished works. But he still achieves a delicacy of colour and a pale, atmospheric light similar to that in his fresco paintings. His sensitive approach to colour is apparent in the elegant cream silk of Cleopatra's dress to the subtle pinks of the surrounding architecture and the stronger reds and yellows of the clothing worn by servants and onlookers.

Tiepolo may have taken inspiration for this subject from the work of his great Venetian predecessor Veronese, who painted grand banquet scenes with magnificent architectural settings, such as the Marriage at Cana (Louvre, Paris).

Style: Baroque, Rococo
This panel comes from the same altarpiece as an image of Saint Mary Magdalene that's also in our collection, and other panels are housed in collections around the world. This is Saint Peter, the apostle entrusted with the keys to the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 16: 19).

The artist has taken great care to paint the keys. Different techniques help to create a three-dimensional effect: incised curved lines and cross-hatching makes the shaft of each key seem rounded, while the crossed end of the silver key is painted with black and white to give a sense of depth to the indentations. The saint's striking blue eyes are painted with the expensive pigment ultramarine, as has his tunic.

There is burn damage to the right of the book, probably caused by a candle placed on the altar below.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance