wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
A young man is depicted full length in plate armour and chain mail. This type of armour would have been used when the wearer was mounted on a horse. He does not have a helmet but is armed with a sword and holds a lance or possibly the pole of a standard, suggesting that a tournament or battle is imminent. His right arm rests at his side, his hand clutched in a fist. He appears to be standing on a stone ledge and emerges in three-quarter view from the dark background, which is only defined by the sweep of a curtain on the right.

Dramatic contrasts of light and dark, known as chiaroscuro, create a mysterious, charged atmosphere. Reflections and glimmers of light and shade define the hard polished surface of the steel armour. Finely observed details such as the shadows and reflections cast by the leather straps on the metal give a sense of tactile realism. The young man’s head, by contrast, is painted with great softness using a technique known as sfumato, literally a ‘smoky’ effect. He appears lost in thought, in the same way that his physical presence seems to dissolve into the darkness. His eyes are lowered, and his introspective mood seems at odds with his warlike costume. He embodies a combination of the active and contemplative life, as advocated by ancient philosophy and Christian theology.

This figure does not appear to be a portrait but seems to derive from the soldier saint, Nicasius, at the left of the altarpiece of the Madonna and Saints of about 1500 by Giorgione in the Cathedral at Castelfranco (his home town). In the altarpiece, Nicasius holds a standard with a red pennant with a white cross. His pose and armour are similar, but he holds a glove in his right hand and wears a helmet, and these are not shown in the National Gallery's picture.

The painting, which is first certainly recorded in the early nineteenth century, was for a long time considered to be by Giorgione, but is now thought to be the work of a seventeenth-century imitator.

Style: High Renaissance
The Virgin Mary, the smiling Christ Child on her lap, sits under a fanciful framework of architecture, sculpture and metalwork which forms the back and canopy for her throne. Stone columns rest on green cushions, which seem to be carved and coloured in a deceptive imitation of reality. Stone branches sprout from the column tops and are entwined in stone acanthus leaves. In the upper corners, two babies, carved from whitish stone, grasp the stems which meet over the Virgin's head.

The Virgin holds an open book in one hand but glances sideways at her son. He is playing with the Renaissance equivalent of a bubble maker. He holds what appears to be a mussel shell with a twig through its base for a handle. The shell has evidently been filled with soapy water, and Christ has blown through the yellow pipe or straw in his left hand to make the bubble. He has then withdrawn it, taking care not to burst the bubble. The bubble is a reference to an ancient proverb, homo bulla ('man is a bubble'), which was used by artists as a reminder of mortality.

There are many parallels with the style and content of the paintings of Jean  Bellegambe, who seems to have had a taste for images of babies and bubbles: both appear on his Anchin polyptych (Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai). The execution of our painting seems less refined than his work, however. Perhaps he delegated much of this panel to assistants.

Style: High Renaissance
A dark-haired young man turns to look at us sidelong. His head is framed against the dark grey-brown wall, focusing our attention on his face. But who is he? Tantalising clues have been included in the painting.

He wears two rings on the little finger of his left hand, one with a red stone, the other with small red stones surrounding a pearl. He appears to be holding a folded glove. It may be his own (although he isn't wearing another one) or it could be a gift from a lady. A folded glove symbolises a love pledge, and during the sixteenth century a lady would give one of her gloves to a gentleman she admired.

The man's other hand is resting on the table, which is covered with a carpet of a green and red-brown pattern. A few small traces of paint suggest that a coat of arms was once painted below his right wrist, but if so it is lost to us; it would have helped to identify the man's family.

The shape of the coat and its fur lining are hard to make out. The painting is very dark and is covered with a yellowed and opaque crackled varnish, making it difficult to see fine detail. The man's cuffs are unusual, with delicate translucent fabric appearing below the lace turned over his sleeve. His soft white collar is of a style worn between about 1590 and 1600.

An open window looks out over a landscape of farmland. There are two rustic buildings, possibly barns, with what look like thatched roofs supported on wooden trunks or poles. Perhaps these lands are part of the sitter's estates. Or perhaps he would like us to think they are. The rough, rapid way in which the landscape is painted is reminiscent of confirmed portraits by Domenico Tintoretto. This may be by him, although the condition of the picture makes a precise attribution difficult.

Standing on the table is a glass vase in the shape of an urn, with a narrow neck and white patterns between vertical gold bands. The vase appears to have handles with gilded ornaments and a gold metal collar. It is an unusual accessory in the painting and may suggest that the man had some connection with the Venetian glass industry. A vase can also be a symbol of purity or chastity.

The vase contains a sprig of dark green leaves that look like juniper. The plant may be the man's emblem or part of his coat of arms. Perhaps the juniper relates to the name of his beloved: Ginevra, the Italian for juniper, was a popular female name at the time. The man may be pledging his love to chaste Ginevra.

There is a high light source that sharply defines the man's features and casts a shadow below his nose. This is also a feature common to Domenico's portraits. The source of the light is not in the painting. It can't be the sun high in the sky outside the window, as the golden light low on the landscape appears to be that of dawn or dusk rather than the brightness of midday. The alert eyes, set lips and somewhat puffy hands with their tapering fingers are also common to many of Domenico's portraits.

Style: High Renaissance
The demure young woman in this portrait is Susanna Stefan of Nuremberg, and the picture may well have been painted around the time of her marriage to Wolfgang Furter, probably along with a pendant portrait of her husband. It is possible that this portrait still exists and may one day be recognised.

A very damaged and much retouched Latin inscription in the top right corner possibly gives her age as 18 and a date in the 1560s; the last number is illegible. In the same corner is a crest with two coats of arms topped by the half figure of a bearded man who holds an object, probably an arrow, in his left hand. The arms are those of the Furter and Stefan families, which appear on the epitaph for Wolfgang Furter and his wife Susanna Stefan in the cemetery of St John in Nuremberg. We know something about the couple from the epitaph and from an eighteenth-century manuscript. Wolfgang was an official of the Office of Alms, and he and Susanna were 'rich and respected' but not of the first rank of society. Susanna was described in the epitaph as 'honourable and virtuous'. An engraving by Cornelius Nicolaus Schurtz after a lost portrait of him gives his age as 56 in 1594, the year of his death. He was therefore born in about 1538; his wife may have been a little younger. They had no children.

Susanna is richly but modestly dressed, with plaited hair and a black hat, a high-necked white shirt decorated with red embroidery and a dress of watered red silk with crimson velvet facings and fur cuffs. The embroidered panel over her breast is worked in silver and gold thread and decorated with small gems. She has gold necklaces -- one with an elaborate pendant -- a gold belt, and silver and gold rings set with stones. At least nine other portraits, all apparently by Nicolas de Neufchâtel, show women similarly dressed. The government of Nuremberg regulated the lives of the city's inhabitants rather strictly -- they may have become used to conformity of dress as in other matters. The hands in a number of the portraits are similar, showing that Nicholas used stock poses. Most of his women crane their necks forward but retract their chins and clasp their hands, making them look submissive and modest, while his men tend to gesticulate.

Style: High Renaissance
A scowling man wearing a scholar's cap and brown gown appears before us. His drapery, wrapped tightly around him, has the smooth, solid look of a sculpted Roman bust. Half of his face is in shadow and the cold lighting emphasises his long, narrow nose, unkempt hair, unshaven face and furrowed brow. The low viewpoint makes it feel as if the man is looming over us. This, along with his intense gaze and the setting of his dark form against a stormy sky, creates a powerful impression and a slightly threatening mood.

The man thrusts a tablet bearing a Latin inscription towards us -- translated, it reads: 'Keep silent, unless your speech is better than silence.' The phrase is taken from Stobaeus's Anthologia, a fifth-century collection of extracts from Greek authors. Rosa later created his own compilation of witty sayings in Il Teatro della Politica, which included several on the virtues of silence, a concept associated with many philosophers of antiquity.

There has been much debate over the identity of the sitter. Due to an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century inscription on the back of the painting, the picture was thought to be a self portrait when it entered the National Gallery's collection, but recent scholarship has shown that it was originally painted as a personification of philosophy. It has a pendant, Poetry (now in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut) -- the woman depicted in that picture was probably based on a portrait of Rosa's long-term companion, Lucrezia. Philosophy reflects a wider interest in philosophical debates and the thinkers of antiquity that existed in Italy during the seventeenth century. The composition and sombre colouring recall the half-length depictions of philosophers painted in Naples by Ribera during the 1630s.

Rosa painted Philosophy during the early 1640s, while he was in Florence, for Filippo Niccolini, tutor and later chamberlain of Rosa's patron Giovan Carlo de' Medici. Niccolini shared Rosa's passion for theatre and belonged to the circle of learned men the artist had befriended during his stay. Rosa took inspiration from the philosophers, scientists and actors he met in Florence and Rome, many of whom shared his fascination with dark and disturbing subjects, such as the one explored in Witches at their Incantations. He wished to be recognised as a painter of philosophical subjects rather than a specialist in types of art considered inferior at the time, like landscapes and genre scenes. To his frustration, this was a reputation he never quite achieved, and he was most original as a landscape artist.

Style: Baroque, Academic
A naked golden-haired youth sits on a rock, playing the panpipes; another set of pipes hangs from the tree behind him. An older bearded man sits on the ground nearby, his panpipes also hanging from a branch. This is perhaps the satyr Marsyas, who challenged the god Apollo to a musical contest and was skinned alive when he lost (as in The Flaying of Marsyas). The youth is probably Olympus, described in classical sources as a composer, follower and occasional favourite of Marsyas.

The musical theme is especially appropriate, as this panel is part of the case of some kind of harpsichord, possibly the lid of the keyboard. Silenus gathering Grapes and  Putto gathering Grapes may have come from the same instrument, or possibly a pair of instruments. Stylistically they belong to Annibale Carracci's Roman years, and are probably contemporaneous with his most intensive period of activity in the Farnese Gallery, from 1597 to 1600.

Both figures in this painting are based on antiquities in the collection of the Farnese family.  The original instrument was perhaps owned by Fulvio Orsini, librarian and curator to successive Farnese cardinals from 1558 until his death in 1600. His will speaks of a pair of musical instruments, which he had had finely decorated and which he left to one of his executors, Orazio Lancellotti. Since the first certain reference to these panels records them as part of a 'Cambalo' (harpsichord) in the Palazzo Lancellotti during the seventeenth century, there is good reason to think that they are connected with Orsini.

Annibale was a prolific draughtsman, and worked out the composition for these figures in preparatory drawings. Marsyas is based on a drawing for a seated satyr (now in the Louvre, Paris) whose pose derives directly from two antique gems then in the Farnese collection. There is a preparatory drawing for Olympus (Royal Collection, Windsor) based on an antique sculpture of Pan teaching Olympus, also then belonging to the Farnese family. There is also a related pen drawing in Frankfurt for the whole composition, with a seated Cupid in place of Olympus.

Style: Baroque, Academic
The subject of this triptych (a painting in three parts) is the birth of the Virgin Mary, a popular theme in Sienese painting.  The story does not appear in the Bible but comes from the account of Mary's life in the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century compilation of the lives of the saints.

In the central panel Saint Anne, the Virgin’s mother, props herself up in her elegant curtained bed. It is decorated with intarsia (inlaid panels of different types of wood) -- a luxurious detail appropriate to her status as the mother of the Virgin. The infant Virgin stands, diagonally opposite her mother, on the lap of one of the midwives; another midwife pours water into a large dish.

The artist borrowed these details and the design of the central panel from other scenes showing the birth of the Virgin, in particular the large altarpiece made by Pietro Lorenzetti for Siena's cathedral in 1342. It may seem unusual to show a newborn baby standing rather than sitting on the midwife or wet-nurse’s lap, but this can also be found in Sienese paintings such as our predella panel showing  the birth of Saint John the Baptist. Both pictures may have been inspired by frescoes painted by Pietro and his brother Ambrogio in 1335 -- now destroyed -- for the facade of the Ospedale (orphanage) in Siena.

The outer panels or ‘wings’ of the triptych would have folded inwards to cover the central image. It could then be transported safely and conveniently with its owner, providing a focus for prayer on their travels. The left-hand wing also follows the design of Lorenzetti’s altarpiece: in both we see a small boy with folded arms deliver the news of Mary's birth to her father, Saint Joachim, in what looks like the hallway of the house. The right-hand panel shows two servants in the kitchen. One kneels before a pot of food which she is probably about to bring to Saint Anne, while the other balances a terracotta jug on her head. This is a slight deviation from the usual imagery that accompanies the scene, where the maid dries a cloth before the fire. Similarly unusual are the golden rays of light surrounding the Virgin Mary, normally reserved for images showing the Nativity. They might refer to the words in the Golden Legend that tell how she was 'filled with the Holy Spirit from her mother's womb'.

The artist made a large altarpiece of the birth of the Virgin for the church of Sant’ Agatha in Asciano, a town outside of Siena. Although the design of our picture is quite different from this altarpiece, the two have been connected, and our painting may have been commissioned by Matteo Angeli, the chaplain of the church of Sant' Agatha. The Angeli family, together with the Pasquino family, founded the chapel dedicated to the birth of the Virgin Mary for which the altarpiece was made.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
Salome displays the severed head of John the Baptist as his executioner places it in a footed bowl. Her mother Herodias persuaded her to ask for this grisly prize from Herod as a reward for her dancing (Mark 6: 21--28). Herodias held a grudge against John the Baptist for saying that her marriage to Herod was unlawful. Salome, her head crowned with myrtle like a bride, seems to smile as if pleased that her wish has been granted. We are placed in the role of her mother, presented with the object of our desire. The table-top is supported by a stone harpy -- a half-woman and half-bird personification of storm winds.

The picture is very carefully composed, with the three arms of the figures parallel to each other. Salome’s pose is elegant and graceful, her drapery decorated with a pattern of tiny dashes. The executioner’s pose and the turn of his head echoes that of Salome, making more obvious the contrast between her pale beauty and his swarthy, muscular physique. The serpentine line of the fabric train she clutches to her is continued in the folded-back edge of the table cloth. There is an implied diagonal line running down the executioner’s back, along the crease of Salome’s drapery and down her left leg, which is crossed by an implied diagonal running down Salome’s arm in the other direction. The actual centre of the composition is empty, and its focus is not on the Baptist’s head, as one might expect, but on Salome’s hand presenting the gruesome object to us.

There are three variants of this composition; the original is probably the one in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. There is another version in the Volterra Collection in Florence. The National Gallery’s painting is possibly a studio replica of the painting in Vienna. The London and Vienna pictures are very similar except for the colours. The sash worn by Salome in the National Gallery’s painting does not appear in the Vienna picture and may not be original, as it is painted on top of the dress and various ornaments which correspond closely with the Vienna version. In the National Gallery’s painting, Salome’s brooch and collar appear very unfinished and the details of drawing are less defined than in the Vienna version -- there is a knot in the executioner’s shirt in the Vienna picture but none in the National Gallery’s painting. There are at least four surviving drawings relating to this composition. Two of them include additional figures in poses that reveal Cesare’s awareness of Raphael’s Transfiguration (Vatican Museums).

Cesare da Sesto worked mostly in Milan. His earlier works are influenced by Leonardo, his later ones adopt Raphael's late style. Here Leonardo’s influence can be seen in the dramatic lighting effects and the ‘smoky’ manner in which Salome’s face is painted. When the original of the painting was in the collection of Rudolf II in Prague it was believed to be by Leonardo. The subject was popular among artists working in Milan and it appears in several well-known pictures by Luini and Andrea Solario.

Style: High Renaissance
If it weren’t for the angel spreading his wings, just left of centre, this moody and evocative landscape might seem to be no more than a simple pastoral scene. Against a background of rolling countryside, dark forbidding forest and the dappled reflections on the river, a peasant, probably a shepherd, sits by a rickety fence playing a pipe. In the distance, two tiny figures are walking down the path towards the cottage tucked around the corner.

Strangely, the shepherd seems oblivious to the miraculous scene in the foreground where an angel, his white gown reflecting in a patch of sunlight, is guiding a youth across the river. But the shepherd’s nonchalance isn’t surprising: while the angel’s heavenly attributes may be visible to us, to the shepherd and the youth, he looks like an ordinary mortal.

We know this because the presence of the angel and the youth is a clear sign that this represents a scene from the story of Tobias. The source is the Book of Tobit, which is considered to be part of the Bible by Roman Catholics but is not included in Protestant versions. So this painting was probably made for a Catholic client while the artist was in Antwerp between 1635 and 1644. The story itself is quite complicated, but the main elements are clear and were very familiar to a seventeenth-century audience.

Tobit was blind and so asked his son Tobias to go on a journey to collect a debt on his behalf. He took his dog with him and was escorted by the Archangel Raphael, who disguised his true identity. They set on their way, and as Tobias crossed the River Tigris he was attacked by a fish. Raphael rescued him and then helped him catch the fish, instructing him to save the heart, liver and gall bladder. When Tobias finally returned home, Raphael told him to rub his father’s eyes with the gall. The old man’s sight was restored and Raphael revealed his true identity.

In this painting, it’s hard to be sure which moment the artist has chosen to depict. Clearly Tobias, guided by Raphael, has just started stepping out across the river. But this is not a painting of fine details -- the brushstrokes are bold and suggestive. Tobias is carrying something under his arm, but it is hard to make it out. Almost certainly it is the fish, which normally features in paintings depicting the story. But it could just possibly be his dog, in which case this would then represent the moment just before he is attacked by the fish, which is an unusual moment for an artist to choose.

The painting is not signed but is considered to be by Jan Lievens -- who had the same teacher as Rembrandt and was later influenced by Rubens -- partly because of similarities which have been detected with the landscape in the background of Lievens's Self Portrait.

Style: Baroque