wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
In 1639, the Dutch painter Dirck Santvoort was commissioned by Elbert Dircksz. Spiegel and Petronella Roeters to paint portraits of their five daughters as personifications of the five senses. This portrait of Geertruyt Spiegel (born in 1635) holding a finch that pecks her finger shows her as Touch. The other portraits of her sisters show Rebecca holding fruit as Taste; Elizabeth with a recorder as Hearing; Margaret holding a dog in front of a mirror as Sight; and Petronella with a floral wreath as Smell.

Images of women as the senses were quite common in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, so for the Spiegels it was a clever and natural way to depict their five daughters. While four of the girls hold the emblems traditionally associated with each particular sense, the bird held by Geertruyt was one of several possibilities often used for Touch: hedgehogs and ermine (rough and smooth) were frequent alternatives.

The family’s wealth is evident in Geertruyt’s fine clothes, the pearls in her hair and her gold necklace and bracelet. Santvoort’s portraits could often be rather stiff and formal, but in this picture, the girl, with her ruddy cheeks and smile, is a lively presence and she is amused rather than disturbed by the bird’s gentle peck. Finches, and the goldfinch in particular, were a traditional emblem of the soul, especially in Renaissance painting, so one wonders if there was a reason her parents chose the bird for Geertruyt. Perhaps she had a soulful personality, or perhaps, as was not uncommon, she kept one as a pet.

Santvoort specialised in portraits and became known for his depictions of children. He came from a family of painters and probably trained with his father, Dirck Pietersz., also known as Bontepaert, who also taught his brother, the landscapist Pieter Dircksz. Santvoort (the brothers adopted the surname). Dirck was part of Rembrandt’s circle, and although there is no evidence he was a pupil he probably came into contact with him in the early 1630s when he occasionally worked for Hendrick Uylenburgh, the art dealer cousin of Rembrandt’s wife, Saskia. Santvoort was close enough to the great man to name his son Rembrandt.

Santvoort had a relatively short career as an independent artist, the majority of his works appearing between 1635 and 1645, after which there are no known dated paintings. He became a member of the Amsterdam painters’ guild in 1636 and even once he appears to have stopped painting he remained active in the guild, being appointed hoofdman or dean in 1658 and working as an appraiser of paintings until at least 1678, two years before his death.

This portrait of 1639 comes at the midpoint of his career (the date has been damaged but the last digit can be read in infrared photographs and is almost certainly a 9). It seems that he was far from jaded by the array of faces he had to paint and indeed was charmed by this fresh-faced little four-year-old.

Style: Baroque
This is one of four panels that originally made up a pair of painted shutters. The outside of each shutter was decorated with a saint, the inside with an angel. The shutters would have flanked and protected a central image, probably of the Virgin Mary being crowned in the heavens. The two angels that would have faced the central image when the shutters were open stand on plinths inscribed 'Hail Queen of the Heavens'.

When the shutters were closed, Saint Joseph would have been on the left. He wears a white turban, similar to those worn by Turks in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian paintings. It is not common to show Saint Joseph wearing a turban, but he wears one in other paintings by Moretto, such as the Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan. The turban and eastern-style dress may have been intended to express the exotic origins of the biblical characters.

Joseph's staff is blossoming with flowers of the oleander plant, which is sometimes known in Italian as mazza di San Giuseppe ('Staff of Saint Joseph'). The flowering rod represents the staff that broke into blossom to show Joseph was chosen to marry the Virgin Mary, as told in the Golden Legend.

Saint Joseph has a full black beard and does not look old, as he often does in other portrayals of him. Moretto painted a similar looking Joseph, full-length, with a flowering staff and tunic of the same colour in the altarpiece with the Virgin and Child with saints in S. Andrea Apostolico, Pralboino.

Style: High Renaissance
The Virgin Mary, seated in a large landscape, feeds the Christ Child; luggage is scattered around her. On the right, we see a grazing donkey and Saint Joseph with pack and walking stick. The holy family here rest as they flee to Egypt, driven away by King Herod's order to execute infants under the age of two.

In the background on the left soldiers ride through a cornfield, and another three question a reaper and a child. This is the miracle of the corn:  while pursuing the holy family, Herod's soldiers met a peasant who told them, truthfully, that a mother and child passed that way when he was sowing his wheat; it had grown and ripened miraculously overnight. Further to the right, a man guides a horse pulling a chain harrow while the massacre is taking place in the village behind.

The huge building in the centre is a pagan temple, and worshippers are performing a fire ritual on top of the tower. It is repeated from The Rest on the Flight by Joachim Patinir (Museo del Prado, Madrid), where it is probably the temple of Hermopolis. According to the apocryphal gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, there were 365 gods in the temple; when Mary and Christ entered, all the idols fell.

This picture is basically a pastiche of elements found in Patinir's paintings. The group of the Virgin and Christ Child seems to have come from a lost composition by the Master of Flémalle or Rogier van der Weyden; it was normally used in reverse by Patinir and his followers. Other elements -- the central building, the miracle of the corn, the horse and harrow and the Virgin's luggage -- come from Patinir's Rest on the Flight in Madrid; the central rock is similar to that in his Rest on the Flight in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; the donkey recurs in another version in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Patinir seems to have specialised in paintings showing small figures in large landscapes. Of the seven paintings with inscriptions giving his name, all have landscapes in much the same style, although the figures are different. Little is known about his workshop, but it appears that Patinir and his associates concentrated on a relatively narrow range of subjects, notably the Rest on the Flight and Saint Jerome, which they reused constantly and varied in different arrangements, according to the requirements of the client.

The painter of this picture had so wide a knowledge of Patinir's repertoire that he was perhaps working during the artist's lifetime, possibly in around 1518 to 1520. His styles of underdrawing and painting are very distinctive. He liked to clearly outline shapes and tended to emphasise verticals and horizontals: the figure of Joseph is particularly characteristic of the artist's style. It should be possible to identify other paintings by him.

Style: High Renaissance
This picture is unusual among Moroni's secular paintings: the others that survive are all portraits. It is the only single-figure allegorical painting known by him and is likely to date from about 1560. The woman may be a personification of Chastity but she also represents the Roman priestess of Vesta, Tuccia.

According to legend, when the Vestal Virgin Tuccia was accused of breaking her vows she proved her chastity by carrying water from the River Tiber in a sieve. Moroni shows the sieve as a colander, and the water-line can be seen here just above the holes. The painting is inscribed: CASTITAS / INFAMIAE NUBE / OBSCURATA / EMERGIT ('Chastity emerges from the dark clouds of infamy'). These lines are from Dictorum et Factorum by the Roman author Valerius Maximus, a book of memorable deeds and sayings that was frequently reprinted during the Renaissance and was available in translation from Latin.

The story is also mentioned by other ancient authors. Saint Augustine, in his book City of God, cites Tuccia's sieve as something against the 'laws of nature' which was accepted by pagans, although their philosophers argued against the immortality of the soul. This passage was sometimes misread to suggest that Tuccia's miracle foreshadowed Christian ones.

Tuccia was frequently included in series of paintings of virtuous women made between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Another example is Mantegna's panel The Vestal Virgin Tuccia with a Sieve, which probably came from a piece of furniture, and is part of a group of Two Exemplary Women of Antiquity. Moroni's painting may have been made as part of a similar series, perhaps for a civic or judicial building, or possibly a convent.

The exposed breasts of Moroni's Tuccia are puzzling, since Vestal Virgins are usually shown fully dressed and veiled as pagan nuns. She may represent both Chastity and the naked Truth. The stone on which the inscription is painted is also puzzling. The frame is a development of a form found in classical architecture. Moroni used a similar shaped tablet in his Portrait of Lucrezia Vertova dated 1557 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The veined yellow marble insert is a feature seen in sixteenth-century north Italian architecture.

Tuccia's pose is a mirror reproduction of Christ's pose in the altarpiece Moroni painted of the Trinity for the parish church of of S. Giuliano in Albino in 1555--6. He may have reused the same full-sized drawing, or cartoon, in reverse. The pose of the head and torso are also very similar to Moretto's The Vestal Virgin Tuccia of about 1540 (Palazzo Taverna, Rome). Moroni frequently imitated his master Moretto's compositions or elements from his work.

The setting, manner of painting and the colouring, if not the subject, are typical of Moroni. The holes of the colander are painted with dashes of light paint on dark, and elsewhere with dashes of dark paint with light spots beside them. In one or two places the artist scratched through the wet paint. Although Tuccia's right hand and the colander are beautifully painted, her drapery is not very detailed.

Style: High Renaissance
A pencil description on the reverse of this painting identifies it as a landscape near Annecy, a medieval town adjacent to a large lake in the Haute-Savoie region of France. The exact location has not been identified, however, and the scenery depicted in the view bears little resemblance to the lake itself, which is several miles long, half a mile wide at even its narrowest point and surrounded on both sides by the Alpine foothills. Renoir has either adapted what he saw to suit his own purposes or found an unusual viewpoint (the area around Talloires on the north shore has been suggested) -- or perhaps this is a smaller lake, somewhere in the hills outside the town.

Whichever is the case, there is a sense of secrecy about the view he has chosen. We glimpse the lake through a gap in the thick vegetation around its banks, but slightly masked by a thin veil of high grasses. It is a view that creates a deep perspective and that hides as much as it reveals. There are no people to be seen and -- apparently -- no buildings, just the contrast between the trees and bushes surrounding the water and what seems to be sparser growth on the slopes of the higher ground in the distance.

As was usual in his landscapes, Renoir has used strong colour combinations, offsetting the bright greens with contrasting shades of red (pinks, ochre and rusts) to increase the vibrancy and intensity of the pigments. Here he also seems to be mirroring the optical effects we experience when we look into the distance. Things that are close to us or in our peripheral vision -- in this case, those grasses and the foliage on either side of the foreground -- go out of focus as our eyes see beyond them. So instead of painting what is closer to the viewer in more detail, Renoir has used broad dabs of the brush to create an impression of blurring, tricking the eye into looking deeper into the picture.

He was also experimenting with other effects produced by different brushwork. To evoke the reflections on the still surface of the lake, he has used mostly smooth, horizontal strokes, whereas the sky has been described with longer streaks of blue, pink, grey and white paint which are broadly vertical but slant down slightly from right to left. For the hills in the distance he has worked his brush to create a mix of angles in the thick paint.

Aspects of Renoir’s style in this painting are reminiscent of techniques used by his friend, Paul Cezanne. In particular, Cezanne’s influence is apparent in the short, intense brushwork describing the trees and foliage in the right background. It isn’t unusual to find Renoir working in this way -- seeing what he can learn from his contemporaries.

The painting is undated and there are no records confirming when Renoir visited Annecy, but it is close in style to the artist's landscapes of the second half of the 1880s. The apparent influence of Cezanne suggests that it may have been made after Renoir had stayed with his friend in Aix en Provence. He made two visits there, one in 1888 and the other in 1889.

Style: Impressionist
The story of the Passion, Christ's torture and crucifixion, unfolds across three crowded panels. On the left, Christ is led out from his trial; in the centre, he has been crucified; to the right his dead body is taken down from the Cross.

The tower of the New Church in Delft is represented in the centre panel and, since the donor wears the habit of a Premonstratensian canon, it seems likely that the altarpiece was made for a Premonstratensian foundation near Delft. The only Premonstratensian convent in the Delft region was Koningsveld, a community of Premonstratensian canonesses dedicated to the Holy Cross, the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist and All Saints. The house was under the control of a prioress and a provost. The triptych may therefore have been painted for one of the provosts of Koningsveld, probably Herman van Rossum, who was in that role in the early 1510s. Its subject -- the Crucifixion -- would have been appropriated for a church dedicated to the Holy Cross. The Premonstratensians followed the rule of Saint Augustine, who is represented on the reverse of the left wing. The church and convent at Koningsveld were totally destroyed in the 1570s.

We don't know who the painter was but he seems to have worked in Delft in the early years of the sixteenth century. A second, larger triptych of the Crucifixion in Cologne is in the same style and closely related. He was an eclectic artist, borrowing freely from works by others, including Martin Schongauer, Hans Memling, and Rogier van der Weyden. He was perhaps connected in some way with Lucas van Leyden, as many of his figures are taken from engravings after Lucas' painting. Indeed, prints from the past as well as contemporary ones were a hugely important resource for late medieval artists; many owned collections of them. All the borrowings in this painting come from prints made in or before 1509 but not from those of 1510, so it seems likely the painting was done around 1510.

Style: High Renaissance
These two panel paintings formed the altarpiece for the Laderchi chapel in the church of S. Andrea in Vineis, Faenza (the church was rebuilt in the eighteenth century and rededicated as S. Domenico). The main panel represents two episodes from the New Testament: the visitation of the Virgin Mary to her cousin Saint Elizabeth, who was pregnant with Saint John the Baptist; and the baptism of Christ in the river Jordan by Saint John. The lunette, or upper panel, shows the dead Christ sitting on his open tomb, supported by two angels.

On 9 April 1504, Giacomo di Francesco Laderchi dictated a will in which he expressed his wish to be buried in the Dominican church of S. Andrea in Vineis, Faenza. He ordained that after his death, his brothers Giovanni Battista and Marco should spend 100 lire in adorning the chapel of the Visitation, which he had paid to have built in 1489. Given the prominence of John the Baptist in this altarpiece, Giovanni Battista was probably the brother most closely involved in the commission. It is likely that the treatment of the subject was suggested by the Dominicans, perhaps with reference to a specific text concerning the Visitation.

Bernardino and Francesco Zaganelli were brothers who lived and worked together, owning everything in common. They often jointly signed their paintings. Bernardino was probably chiefly responsible for the designs, Francesco for the painting. This picture is signed by Francesco.

The composition was clearly influenced by Giovanni Bellini's Baptism of Christ of about 1500--2 for S. Corona, Vicenza. The figure of Saint John the Baptist is similar, the holy women and angels are standing on a rocky river bank, and Bellini's angels are also wingless. In Bellini's Baptism, Christ, God the Father, the dove of the Holy Ghost and John the Baptist's cup are all aligned on the central axis; this was impossible for Zaganelli, who needed to shift Christ's baptism to one side in order to accommodate the Visitation. The landscape setting, the voluminous creased draperies and sinewy bodies recall the work of German artists such as Patinir, Dürer and Altdorfer, whose work Zaganelli may have known through prints or seen in north Italian collections.

The paintings were bought by the National Gallery in 1922. Together they constituted the last large and virtually complete Italian Renaissance altarpiece to be acquired by the National Gallery, though the frame is missing. However, they have not always been admired. In 1926, the painter and art critic Roger Fry described Zaganelli's altarpiece to Vanessa Bell, a fellow member of the Bloomsbury Group, as: 'a vast horror by him which hangs fortunately in a dark room in the N.G. Do you remember it? It's a Baptism with J.C. wading disconsolately in a shallow stream, his head bent to avoid two or three vastly overfed Glaxo babies who are trying to avoid falling on him, in the air above.' Fry appears to have misremembered the number of babies.

Style: High Renaissance
This altarpiece is the earliest known example to show the baptism of Christ as the central image; the Virgin and Child usually took this position in large multi-panelled altarpieces.

It was made for a chapel dedicated to the feast commemorating Saint John the Baptist's death, in the infirmary of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the Camaldolese monastery in Florence. One of the monastery's monks, Don Filippo Nerone Stoldi, commissioned it in memory of his mother, Monna Agnola (Angela), and his deceased relatives. The church contained several similar altarpieces which were privately commissioned, often by families of the monastery's monks, which served as memorials. We know from the monastery's records that one of the monks’ duties was to say prayers for the souls of the dead on days specified by the families.

Surviving documents reveal that the chapel was founded according to Angela's wishes. She left money in her will for the foundation of the chapel and all its furnishings; the will also instructed that Mass should be said for her and her husband on 20 April as well as the feast day of the martyrdom of John the Baptist (29 August).

Although the chapel was dedicated to the saint's martyrdom -- he was killed on the orders of King Herod -- the central panel depicts the key moment in his life: when he baptised Christ in the river Jordan. The gory moment of his decapitation was reserved for a small panel in the predella. We don’t know exactly why Angela chose Saint John the Baptist for her chapel. Perhaps her son was called Giovanni but changed his name to Filippo after becoming a monk or, more likely, because John the Baptist was the patron saint of Florence.  There were two other chapels in the church that were dedicated to him.

The altarpiece was moved in the fifteenth century to the church of San Giovanni Decollato (literally meaning 'Saint John decapitated') in the town of Sasso, near Arezzo. The church had become a Camaldolese institution in 1414 when it was united with Santa Maria degli Angeli.  The subject matter made it the ideal altarpiece to use as the church's high altar.

It was probably originally much larger. The predella is missing a central scene and there might have been two more saints on the main tier-- possibly Saint Michael the Archangel, in honour of Angela, and Saint Philip, in honour of her son.

At some point before it entered the National Gallery the uppermost panels that sat on top of the main tier were replaced with three small panels by Giovanni di Milano showing the Virgin Mary, Saint John the Baptist and the Apocalyptic Christ (Christ as the judge of mankind). These panels belonged to a different altarpiece altogether and they have now been removed and are displayed separately. Three panels by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini -- including an image of the blessing Redeemer (Christ seated on the clouds), now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich -- have been identified as the original pictures that crowned the altarpiece.

Style: Early Renaissance, Gothic
These two panels once formed the shutters of an altarpiece in the Benedictine abbey in Liesborn, a town in the north-western German region of Westphalia. Placed on either side of the centrepiece, the shutters would protect and conceal it when closed.

The artist's identity is unknown, but he has been named after the altarpiece that he made for the high altar of the same church. Several fragments of the high altarpiece are in our collection.

Style: Early Renaissance, Gothic
These two paintings -- Saint Luke painting the Virgin and Child and The Virgin standing in a Niche -- are, in fact, the back and front of the same panel, which has been sawn through its thickness. Both are painted on single boards of Baltic oak, cut from a tree growing between 1429 and 1508. They once formed the right wing of a triptych. Although they have been cut on all four sides, not much has been lost and the triptych must have been tall and narrow in format.

The centre panel (now missing) probably showed the Virgin and Child enthroned, much as they appear in the picture Saint Luke is painting. The Virgin must have looked rather as she does in The Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine and Barbara. The infant Christ in Saint Luke's picture twists his body to look away from his mother, and we can assume that in the centre panel he also looked away from the Virgin and towards the triptych's left wing (also missing). This may have shown a donor, or a donor presented by his patron saint (as in Saint Ambrose with Ambrosius van Engelen by Albrecht Bouts, for example).

Technical analysis shows that, although originally opposite sides of the same painting, the pictures were painted in slightly different ways. Both are on chalk ground, but while Saint Luke painting the Virgin and Child does not have a priming, The Virgin standing in a Niche has a grey priming which has been applied across the surface in broad roughly horizontal brushstrokes. Infrared reflectography has revealed underdrawing on both panels, but that for Saint Luke was done freehand, with straight lines incised using a ruler, while that for the Virgin appears to have been based on a cartoon. There is much diagonal hatching for Saint Luke's headgear and draperies, whereas there is none for the Virgin.

The differences in the styles of underdrawing and some of the painting techniques suggest they were by different painters. Both, however, are close to the style of Quinten Massys and follow many of his technical procedures (such as using very thin scumbles of paint to modify colours and suggest textures, and blotting with fingers to soften tonal transitions). They may well have been produced by two or more assistants in his workshop or by painters who trained there and continued to work together after leaving.

Style: High Renaissance