wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
The sitter is almost certainly Girolamo Benivieni (1453--1542), a significant figure in Florentine literary and political circles. Benivieni and his adored friend, the humanist poet and philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, were among the group of intellectuals surrounding Lorenzo de' Medici, the cultured de facto ruler of Florence. However, they were quick to fall under the influence of the Dominican preacher and reformer Girolamo Savonarola, who persuaded the Florentines to expel the Medici and form a populist republic.

Benivieni denounced his own early love poetry and instead wrote songs to accompany the bonfires of frivolous and erotic books, paintings and other objects organised by Savonarola's youthful followers. He also translated Savonarola's teachings from Italian into Latin. In 1519 Benivieni signed a petition to Pope Leo X requesting the return of the body of the Italian poet Dante (1265--1361) from its resting place in Ravenna to his native Florence. He later retired from public life but his advice was sought by both Medicean and republican factions in the 1520s and 1530s.

Benivieni turns towards us with a steady, piercing gaze, his face not quite in full view. There is a strong sense that this is how he really appeared. Ghirlandaio has made a detailed and sensitive study of the deep wrinkles and criss-cross lines of the old man’s face. A few streaks of reddish brown remain in the wires of his white hair and white patches salt his dark grey eyebrows. The deep-set eyes in their dark sockets are rimmed with red and puffed with lines and bags as though from decades of study. A fine down of white hair lies above Benivieni's upper lip and streaks his jaw and chin. The cheek bones are very prominent, and the hollows emphasise the irregularity of his time-worn face. The colour palette is restrained – striking in its apparent simplicity but sophisticated in its relationship of contrasts and harmonies. The warm brownish tones of the face harmonise with those of the parapet, while the severe black costume and hat serve to focus our attention on the face set against the crystalline sky. The uninhabited, dream-like landscape lifts the sitter from the mundane concerns of daily life into the realm of thought and poetry occupied by his mind.

The pose and the hazy blue mountainous background suggest that Ghirlandaio had seen Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (Louvre, Paris). However, the crisp, carefully delineated face is more akin to the style of his father, Domenico Ghirlandaio, than to Leonardo’s subtle, smoky rendition of Mona Lisa’s features.

Style: High Renaissance
The Virgin Mary sits in the shelter of a rocky grotto. The infant John the Baptist, wearing his traditional camel skin, clasps his hands in prayer and kneels before Christ, who raises his right hand, perhaps to make the sign of the cross over his cousin. The Virgin looks at us as she gently draws the children to her. Figures move about the distant rocky landscape, through which a wide river meanders past a town towards distant blue mountains.

The plants growing in the foreground, painted in botanical detail, are native to northern Italy and probably all have a symbolic Christian significance -- lupin, dandelion, columbine, wheat and violet. Flowers were often used in paintings to suggest particular qualities and their meanings would have been familiar to a contemporary audience. Wheat is a symbol for those who believe in Christ, columbine symbolises the Holy Ghost, the dandelion represents Christ’s Passion (his torture and crucifixion) and the violet is a symbol of humility. The pinks or carnations growing in the rocks beside the Virgin are also symbolic of Christ’s Passion, the ivy of his everlasting life and resurrection. The flower beside the Virgin’s face appears to be white campion, which may symbolise her purity.

This is an early work by the Milanese painter Luini. He was deeply influenced by Leonardo da Vinci, who was working in Milan from about 1482 to 1499. The figure of the Virgin and the infant Baptist as well as the rocky backdrop seem to be derived, although inverted and with variations, from Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. Symbolic flowers were also prominently included in Leonardo’s painting. It is possible that The Virgin of the Rocks was being completed in Leonardo’s studio in Milan between 1506 and 1508, when Luini may have seen it. However it is unlikely that Luini’s own painting is of such an early date.

There is another version of this composition by Luini in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In that picture the Virgin looks down towards Christ and the distant landscape includes a gatehouse over a river. The flowers are mostly positioned beside the Virgin’s head, suggesting that they symbolise her qualities. Technical examination of the National Gallery’s picture reveals several changes were made during painting. The position of Saint John’s head has been moved; it was once inclined towards the Virgin in a position closer to that in the Fogg Art Museum’s version. There are other small changes to the figure of the Baptist, the most noticeable being in the position of the hands.

Style: High Renaissance
Boudin was born and brought up on the Normandy coast, retaining a lifelong affection for the area, which he painted throughout his career. But he was also drawn to Brittany, and made regular visits there in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, marrying a Breton woman, Marie-Anne Guėdès in 1863. His first paintings of the region reflected his fascination with its weddings and folk customs, such as pardons (religious festivals), that were widely regarded as 'exotic' and had already appeared in paintings by other artists, such as  Pierre-Charles Poussin's  Pardon Day in Brittany (1851). This  phase in Boudin's work culminated in  The Pardon of  Ste-Anne-La-Palud (Museum of Modern Art, Andrė Malraux, Le Havre),  a crowded figure scene of people on a religious pilgrimage full of anecdotal episode which he exhibited at the Salon in 1859.

This painting of  Hôpital-Camfrout, however, is devoid of such colourful folkloric detail. It is an overcast day in the small market town in western Brittany that takes its name from a medieval hospital on the pilgrim route to Santiago da Compostela. On a confluence of two rivers near the coast, it was a town Boudin knew well, as it was close to the home of his in-laws. The scene is almost deserted, although some people are rowing across the water and a few dabs of paint suggest activity on the shore.  In the background is the spire of the town's most prominent landmark, the church of Notre Dame de Bonne Nouvelle.

Boudin's palette is almost monochome, dominated by the blue-greys that reflect the town's granite buildings with their slate roofs, relieved by touches of white and a slash of red on the boat in the foreground. With its remarkably free handling of paint, this modest panel has the air of having been painted on the spot. It is a far cry from the  beach scenes of Trouville peopled with fashionably dressed holidaymakers such as Beach Scene, Trouville, for which Boudin is best known. Perhaps it is no accident that a visit to Brittany in 1867 was a catalyst that eventually led to a change of artistic direction. Observing the hard and simple life of the Bretons made Boudin begin to question his practice of painting well-to-do visitors idling on the sands.

Style: Impressionist
This panel of Saint Bonaventure and one showing Saint Louis of Toulouse are said to have come from a ceiling in the Scuola di S. Francesco ai Frari at Venice. The Venetian Scuole, or confraternities, were charitable and religious organisations for the laity and important patrons of the arts, commissioning cycles of paintings to decorate the walls and ceilings of their meeting rooms. The Scuola di S. Francesco ai Frari was a confraternity dedicated to the veneration of Saint Francis and attached to the church of the Frari; its fifteenth-century building stood at the west end of the Campo dei Frari.

The National Gallery's two panels are connected with a series of nine pictures by Pordenone described by the seventeenth-century art critic Boschini as made for a ground floor room in that building. The room must have been small, judging by the scale of the surviving pictures. The original arrangement of the ceiling is described as the Four Evangelists on square panels, with Saints Bonaventure, Louis, Bernardino and Anthony of Padua in separate octagonal compartments around a central full-length image on a smaller scale of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata. In his Descrizione of 1733, describing all the public paintings in Venice, Antonio Maria Zanetti reports that the paintings had been moved into an upper room as they were deteriorating in their original site. The Scuola di S. Francesco was demolished at the end of the eighteenth century and it is most likely this event that caused the paintings' sale, after which they were placed in the care of the vicar general of the Franciscan Order. The central panel of Saint Francis is lost but the Four Evangelists, Saint Bernardino and Saint Anthony are now located at the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.

Each of the surviving panels depicts a tightly cropped, imposing bust-length male figure. The perspective of the background in the square pictures of the Four Evangelists suggests that they would have been in the corners of the ceiling. The mouldings behind the evangelists’ heads form corners which would have been intended to blend with the corners of the room. The four Franciscan saints on octagonal panels would have been positioned at the sides. The foreshortened walls behind each figure functioned as imaginary extensions of the room’s real walls. The panels are characteristic works of Pordenone’s late style and closely comparable with his Beato Lorenzo Giustiniani altarpiece (Accademia, Venice) commissioned in 1532, so were probably made at a similar time.

This panel shows Saint Bonaventure pointing up, originally towards the central image of Saint Francis; his red cardinal's hat hangs on the wall behind him. Saint Bonaventure was included in the decorative programme because of his importance to the Franciscan Order. Born in Umbria, he entered the Franciscan order in 1243. His leadership made the Franciscans the most prominent order in the Catholic Church until the coming of the Jesuits. He was made Cardinal Bishop of Albano by Pope Gregory X in 1274 and died shortly afterwards. He was canonised in 1482.

Style: High Renaissance
Three men have followed a star -- you can see it just inside the stable -- to find and pay homage to the newborn Christ. These wise men, sometimes called kings -- here they all have crowns -- are shown kneeling before the Christ Child. One has set his crown aside and kisses the newborn's foot, showing reverence to him. This story is told in Matthew's Gospel (Matthew 2: 1--9).

Joseph holds the first king's gift, a detail that seems to come from earlier paintings of the adoration of the kings which, like this one, were made in Florence. The other kings await their turn; their gifts, housed in elaborate gilded boxes, are covered in transparent veils, a sign of their sacred nature. The biblical account tells us that they offered gold, frankincense and myrrh -- the first a fitting gift for a king and the other two the precious spices used to anoint Christ's body after his death. The artist has emphasised the wealth and splendour of the kings by including the attendants who have travelled with them; two pages restrain their horses in the background.

This panel has been associated with the Florentine painter Zanobi Strozzi, who was also a highly skilled manuscript illuminator. The panel does resemble an illumination in a manuscript, which were richly decorated luxury objects. Here, the meadow is filled with a variety of tiny flowers and grasses -- some look like daisies -- and the costumes of the kings and attendants are embellished with gold patterns. In the 1430s, when this panel was made, Zanobi was working in a similar way to Fra Angelico whose style was also highly decorative, often described as ‘courtly’ (meaning it was suitable for a high-status, wealthy client). The Virgin's gesture -- crossing her right hand across her breast -- is similar to that in Fra Angelico's Linaioli Tabernacle, also dated to 1433 and now in the National Museum of San Marco, Florence.

We don’t know which altarpiece this predella panel belonged to but it has been connected with a scene of the Nativity of Christ (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Technical examination of the two panels show that they were painted on the same piece of wood.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
At the centre of the composition stands a building with four arches, the third of which leads to a furnace.  In the foreground, a cart drawn by two oxen is led by a man wearing a classical tunic. The cart is loaded with fuel for the furnace, the bundles of straw peppered with yellow and pink meadow flowers. A further figure heads towards the furnace with a bundle on his shoulder. Smoke pours out of the vents in the tiled roof. In the background a hill rises very steeply, densely wooded in parts, and a further group of buildings, including a bell tower, is clustered on the top. The wind is blowing from the right; the smoke drifts to the left and the rolling storm clouds at the left give way to rosy sky at the right.

The landscape is based on the hilly region to the north-west of Florence, where Fabre spent much of his life from 1793. It is particularly reminiscent of the area around the thermal town of Bagni di Lucca, its hills heavily wooded, predominantly with chestnut forests, which provided a valuable crop. Local industries included the manufacture of paper and building materials. Fabre made numerous sketching expeditions into the countryside, from which many drawings survive. He also painted a number of compositions based on the local landscape and villages, several of which feature similar groups of buildings set on distant hills. Yet the central building here appears to be unique. It has been tentatively identified as a charcoal burner, but is more likely to represent a lime kiln or even a furnace for smelting iron ore, of which a number existed in the region. Against the wall to the left lies a pile of rocks, which could be either limestone or iron ore.  This may be a fanciful element, alluding both to the area’s architecture and its industry.

In common with Fabre’s other landscapes based on the scenery of the area, this is essentially an ideal landscape with classical figures, painted in the studio. The central figure is based on one in a painting by Gaspard Dughet, Landscape with Drover (1664–8, Welbeck Abbey, Duke of Portland Collection). The image of the furnace itself recalls Italian landscape and genre paintings of the seventeenth century, examples of which Fabre owned as a keen collector. While no actual drawing of the region can be directly related to this painting, he did make a study of the cart and figure (Musée Fabre, Montpellier).

Style: Neoclassical, Barbizon
There’s a terrible irony at the heart of this painting which was made not by a single artist but by two working together. It appears to depict a moment of bliss: an idyllic landscape, painted by Jan Both, is suffused with the warm glow of a summer’s evening. On one side, goats rest peacefully among the trees, supervised by a watchful dog, while on the other two water nymphs quietly play in the shallows next to a river god. In the foreground, a group of elegantly poised nudes, added by Both’s collaborator Cornelis van Poelenburgh, catches the sunlight streaming through the riverside glade.

But this is not a moment of peace and harmony. We are witnessing a tragic turning point in mythological history: the Judgement of Paris. There are several versions of this in classical literature, but the one used here seems to have been drawn from Ovid’s Latin poem Ars amatoria ('The Art of Love'). Ovid recounts that the god Jupiter asks a shepherd called Paris to judge which of three goddesses -- Juno (Jupiter’s wife), Minerva (goddess of wisdom) and Venus (goddess of love) -- is the most beautiful. Each goddess attempts to bribe him. Juno offers power, Minerva wisdom, while Venus promises him the love of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world (even though Paris is already married to a mountain nymph called Oenone).

We see Paris as he makes his fateful decision, handing Venus a golden apple which has been inscribed 'to the fairest'. While she steps forward to accept her prize, her consort Cupid peeps out from under her robe. But the reaction of the other goddesses is telling. To the left, Minerva turns to catch our eye, while Juno seems to be raising her hand in alarm. They perhaps sense the tragic consequences of Paris’s choice. They know that he will soon discover that he is not just a simple shepherd but the abandoned son of Priam, King of Troy. When Helen, who is already married to a Greek king, is abducted by Paris with the help of Venus, it leads to the Trojan War and the destruction of Troy. Meanwhile, the shadowy woman in the background of the painting must be Oenone, turning anxiously to her father, who was a river god.

Van Poelenburgh’s reference for the group of figures was a well-known engraving designed over 100 years earlier by Raphael, but he has adapted it to emphasise the drama of the moment -- and perhaps the moral lesson implied. The fateful consequences of Paris’s preference for love over power and wealth are unlikely to have been lost on seventeenth-century Dutch viewers, who were benefitting from the fast-growing prosperity of a society built on commerce and trade. But no doubt they would also have appreciated the subject as an opportunity to enjoy the sensuality of the naked figures and the exoticism of the mountain landscape which frames them. Both van Poelenburgh and Both had studied in Italy before they returned to their hometown of Utrecht and were part of a group of Dutch artists who created a taste among their patrons for Italianate landscape painting.  

Style: Baroque
Here,  Guido Reni has illustrated an episode from an apocryphal addition to the Old Testament's Book of Daniel. The account tells of two lecherous elders who lusted after Susannah, a beautiful young woman. They hid in the garden where she came to bathe and threatened to accuse her of adultery -- a crime punishable by death -- if she refused to give in to their desires.

We see the moment when Susannah begins to undress and the men emerge and accost her. One grabs at her robe and puts his fingers to his lips, commanding her silence, while the other raises a hand, ready to touch her. Susannah looks on in shock and grasps at the yellow drapery around her, attempting to cover her breasts. A virtuous wife, she refused the men's advances and they carried out their threat. She was later arrested for the crime of adultery, but her innocence was proven when the false accusers were cross-examined and caught in their lie.

The flesh tints of the male figures are a deep earthy orange colour (almost matching their robes), contrasting greatly with the pale, creamy hue of Susannah's body. The varying skin tones may be a rhetorical device used by Reni: Susannah's bright paleness could allude to her innocence and purity, while the ruddy complexions of the men may reflect their lecherous intentions.

In the 1590s Reni studied at the Carraccis' artists' academy in Bologna. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Reni's biographer, relates that Ludovico Carracci, the eldest of the three Carracci painters, was instrumental in Reni's training. Ludovico painted his own version of the subject around a decade before Reni completed his work. Though the two compositions appear in different formats, they share several similarities: in both, Susannah is on the right, pulling her robes from the grasp of one of the men, while they lean across a stone parapet on the left, dressed in red and orange draperies. The same variation in flesh tones is also apparent in Ludovico's painting, suggesting that Reni may have taken inspiration from the work of his former master in the creation of his own Susannah and the Elders.

This painting hung in the Palazzo Lancellotti, Rome, in 1640, alongside Lot and his Daughters leaving Sodom. It was believed for some time that these paintings were created as pendants, as they are similar in size and each addresses an Old Testament subject with erotic undertones. However, cleaning in 1984 revealed brushwork that suggests different dates for the works -- Susannah and the Elders was painted later than Lot and his Daughters and the two were likely not originally intended as a pair.

Style: Caravaggist, Academic
The Virgin Mary kneels in prayer before the newborn Christ, who radiates heavenly light. Saint Joseph seems to look at her sadly as he holds back the infant Saint John the Baptist, who is trying to step towards his baby cousin. Little Saint John holds a cross made from a split stick with another stick resting in the cleft -- a symbol of Christ's destiny. It is unusual to find the infant John the Baptist included in an image of the Nativity.

Two shepherds arrive on the left looking for the newborn Messiah. One of them raises his hand to his eyes as though still searching, the other carries a lamb on his shoulder as a gift to the newborn king. The lamb recalls Christ's identity as the 'lamb of God' who will be sacrificed for the salvation of humanity.

In the right background we see an earlier moment, when the angel appeared to the shepherds in the sky to tell them about Christ’s birth. Three angels in the golden heavens hold a long fluttering scroll. The ox and the donkey behind the holy family in the foreground can also be seen grazing in the distant fields. This technique, where the same figures are represented at different times in the same picture, is called a continuous narrative, as more than one part of the story is told.

In the centre background, the Three Kings are guided by a star to Bethlehem to honour Christ. We see the procession crossing a crenellated bridge over a river. In the far distance, the hazy mountaintop town has been brushed in with dynamic strokes of pale blue and white. The landscape with its sweeping vista and incidental details is the most accomplished and appealing part of the painting.

This picture was probably not painted by Sodoma or his workshop but is more likely to have been by an artist copying various elements from Sodoma’s pictures. Some of the elements may have been copied from his Adoration of the Magi in S. Agostino, Siena. The National Gallery's painting is damaged by splits and cracking in many places. The predominance of brown in the landscape suggests that parts of it may originally have been painted in a green pigment which has faded over time, changing the overall colour balance in the painting.

Style: High Renaissance