wrmthorne/National_Gallery_style_classification huggingface dataset:
This is a tiny and deceptively simple painting of the view of the south-east garden front of the Huis ten Bosch ('House in the Wood'), which was built just outside The Hague as a summer palace for Amalia van Solms. She was married to Prince Frederik Hendrik of Orange, the head of state of the Netherlands from 1625 to 1647 -- the period when it was becoming a global superpower, with a formidable navy, huge merchant fleet and a worldwide network of trade and political influence.  

We see the building in its original state, a decade or so after it was finished. Today it is used by the Dutch royal family as an official residence, though it has been substantially altered and extended, and the statues and lattice-work obelisks are no longer in the garden.

Van der Heyden was famous for his exquisitely detailed paintings of buildings and street scenes which depicted, as one contemporary put it, 'every little stone in the buildings so minutely that one could clearly see the mortar in the grooves in the foreground as well as the background'. That isn’t quite the case here: the canvas is too small to render such detail, though some of the mortar lines are visible in the brickwork of the house. But he painted at least six other views of the house and estate, including another from the same angle (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) which is almost exactly twice the size of the painting we see here.

We can use the larger picture to make sense of some the details of the smaller, such as the intricate scrolling patterns of the French-style box hedges in the formal flowerbeds, known as parterre de broderie. We can also see that the low white flat-topped stands which line the avenues between the statues, empty in our picture, were used to display terracotta pots.

While the scale reduces the scope for precision, van der Heyden has created a remarkably powerful illusion of depth in a highly compressed space: dark green horizontals are crossed by white pot stands, statues and obelisks, and combined with figures of diminishing size. These straight lines are countered by the strong curves of the topiary hedge in the foreground, which are reflected by the trees to the side of the house. And if you look closely at the hedge you can see how carefully van der Heyden has picked out the detail: the sheen of the sunshine on the top surface, the lighter green of the new shoots and the orange patches of old clippings which have died but remain stuck.

As often in van der Heyden’s paintings, there are more people present than at first appears. We’ve counted 11 here; if you can’t find them all, look between the two statues on the right hand side. They represent both the garden workers and the leisured classes who benefitted from their labour.

Style: Baroque
This saintly friar comes from a large paintings:group82|polyptych (a many-panelled altarpiece) that [[people:crivelli_carlo|Crivelli painted in 1476]] for the high altar of church of San Domenico at Ascoli Piceno in the Italian Marche. This is Saint Dominic himself, holding a white lily to symbolise his chastity and the book of his Rule -- the code of practice for the religious order he founded.

The Dominicans, often known as the 'Blackfriars' in England, were one of the two great mendicant or preaching orders founded in the Middle Ages to provide educated preachers in towns and cities (the other being the Franciscans). Mendicant comes from mendicare, or 'to beg' in Latin. Men who joined the mendicant orders took vows of poverty and travelled from place to place, preaching and living on what was given by their listeners. One of their main concerns was to combat heresy, both through scholarly debate and through the Inquisition, which they organised.

The saint presses his hand to his chest, his eyes humbly lowered to gaze at the sleeping Christ Child in the centre panel (now The Virgin and Child). The severity of his black and white robes -- the uniform of the Dominican Order -- contrasts with the damask tooling of the burnished gold background, and with the opulence of Saint Peter's papal regalia further to the left of the altarpiece. Showing off his skill at foreshortening, Crivelli has rotated the saint's beautifully bound book: we see the fore-edges with their gilded clasp straight on and the pink leather covered boards only at an acute angle.

Crivelli exploits the optical effects of the different gold surfaces, which must have shone and flickered in the candlelight of a medieval church, with the highly burnished gold of his halo acting as a spotlight on the saint's face. In a detail typical of Crivelli, Dominic's foot pokes out over the edge of the marble parapet on which he stands, and curls up slightly at the toe. The level of detail in the lilies with their golden stamens, in the sinews in the saint's hands and feet, is characteristic of Crivelli. His skill as a painter of drapery is such that even though Dominic’s robes are black, we can see folds and creases around the neck and shoulders, and creases in the tops of his shoes.

His face is a rare demonstration of Crivelli's abilities as a portraitist. This is a highly individual face, with its long nose, deep-set eyes ringed with creases and wrinkles, and the line of an old scar running down his cheek. We know from other paintings that the figure is here in a double role: it is Saint Dominic, the founder of the Dominican Order, and a portrait of the Blessed Constanzo di Meo di Servolo (d. 1481), the leading Dominican in the Marche, the prior of San Domenico, and the commissioner of this altarpiece.

Style: Early Renaissance
This grand painting on a small scale uses the smoothness of its copper surface to paint intricate details on a minute scale. Saint Lawrence, a deacon of the early Christian church, is shown being stripped of his clothes in preparation for his execution -- his outer garment lies crumpled in the bottom left corner. According to the Golden Legend, Lawrence distributed church property to the poor on the orders of the pope. When the Roman authorities discovered what he was doing, they ordered him to hand over the treasures -- that is, precious objects and money -- to the city. Lawrence refused, and when pressed to give up his Christian faith or face execution, he chose death. He was killed in AD 258.

The figure in the red and gold robes is the Roman Emperor Decius. His patterned turban gives him the appearance of a figure from the Eastern Mediterranean. It might be a reference to images of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, who condemned Christ to death in Jerusalem: Pilate is portrayed in similar dress in a woodcut (a type of print) showing the Flagellation of Christ by Albrecht Dürer. Between the emperor and the saint, a Roman priest in a dark hooded cloak points to a statue of Hercules, son of the god Jupiter. The mythological hero stands in the same proud pose as Decius, a reference to the pagan gods that Lawrence refused to worship.

The saint's punishment for his refusal was to be roasted alive. In the background to the right, two men stoke a fire beneath a gridiron, the instrument of Lawrence's martyrdom. A mounted Roman soldier oversees their labour; he holds a banner inscribed with the initials SPQR, which stand for senatus populusque romanus ('the senate and people of Rome'). A crowd has arrived from the city to watch. In spite of the gruesome torture that awaits him, Lawrence does not struggle -- he has opened his arms to assist his captors as they undress him. His eyes are cast upwards and his expression suggests he is in a state of spiritual ecstasy: he looks towards an angel who points to heaven, the inspiration of his strength.

Adam Elsheimer settled in Rome in the spring of 1600 and the city's classical architecture provided inspiration for the backdrop to the scene. He has included minute decorative details, such as the frieze of the temple-like building behind Hercules, but the pagan structures are shown in decay: a vine encircles one of the columns, and the roots of small shrubs have fractured the pediment. In the dark sky above, three white birds fly towards the sunlit clouds; in the earth around the statue's pediment is a cluster of thistles and wild grasses. As was usual in Elsheimer's repertoire, he has included a huge amount of detail within a very small space.

Style: Baroque
This picture was painted by a seventeenth-century Dutch imitator of Jacob van Ruisdael and is possibly an early work by the artist's follower Johan van Kessel. It may be based on a lost work by van Ruisdael showing Bentheim Castle, which is on the border between Germany and the Netherlands, although the viewpoint is different from any of his known paintings of this subject.

The painting has atmosphere. The sky has some life and movement, and the buildings still dominate, but the picture has long since been lost under coats of discoloured varnish and it lacks the dramatic vitality of a van Ruisdael. Details on the trees aren't delicately defined and the river is little more than a muddy path. For a comparison, look at van Ruisdael's A Landscape with a Waterfall and a Castle on a Hill and A Waterfall at the Foot of a Hill, near a Village.

Style: Baroque
Venetian artists Canaletto and Guardi specialised in view paintings, which were so popular with local and foreign collectors in eighteenth-century Venice that countless imitations were made. These made their way, alongside genuine works by both artists, into art collections throughout Europe. Despite this painting entering the National Gallery's collection as by Guardi, it is now attributed to a nineteenth-century imitator.

This composition is taken in part from Visentini's engraving of 1735 (Royal Collection, Windsor), after Canaletto's painting of the same scene -- see Venice: Entrance to the Cannaregio. The unknown artist has altered the view, narrowing the canal, bringing the bridge closer and adding a stone quay occupied by smartly dressed people to the foreground. There has been an attempt to adopt Guardi's style, with lively brushwork to convey poses and costumes, and hard, dark outlines to describe the buildings.

Style: Neoclassical
This half-length figure of a saint comes from the upper tier of a large polyptych that Crivelli painted in 1476 for the high altar of the church of San Domenico, in Ascoli Piceno in the Italian Marche. He is the great Dominican theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Compositionally and theologically he balances Saint Francis at the opposite end of the altarpiece. Both look up at the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, which was originally in the centre of the upper tier (now in New York). In contrast to Francis's agonised adoration, Thomas gazes unflinchingly upwards, his clear grey eyes wide open, jaw set and mouth turned down in determined lines.

With a realism reminiscent of the work of  Netherlandish artists such as Rogier van der Weyden, Crivelli has picked out every hair in his eyebrows and short, tonsured hair, and the veins pulse in his forehead. His strong features and the vigorous set of his jaw express his intellectual authority, as does the book he clasps in his left hand, his fingers holding open its fluttering pages. To show off his skill at foreshortening, Crivelli has painted the book half open, so that we see the crinkled edges of the parchment pages; a very similar detail was used at around the same time by Francesco del Cossa in Saint Vincent Ferrer. Crivelli's skill as a painter of drapery is such that even though Thomas’s robes are black, we can see the deep folds of the hood around his shoulders. The severity of his black and white robes -- the uniform of the Dominican Order -- contrasts with the opulent gilding of the background, and the combination of pastiglia with flat burnished gold in his halo must have acted as a spotlight on the saint's face in the candlelight of a medieval church. The burnished gold sun on his chest is a symbol of sacred learning.

Aquinas spent his life teaching and studying, producing one of the most important texts of the Catholic Church, the Summa Theologica, in which he reconciled the doctrines of Catholic Christianity with the philosophy of Aristotle. For the Dominican friars, Aquinas also represented their essential mission of teaching and preaching to protect the Church from heresy and dangerous doctrines. Unusually, Crivelli has shown him holding a model church, painted in extraordinary detail. It is an Italian fourteenth-century design, of the type that the Ascoli Dominicans must have seen every day, but is badly in need of repair: its masonry is chipped and plants grow out of the brickwork. The brick spire has clearly been repaired, however, and there are even tiny figures visible in the doorway. Is it a symbol of the decay into which the Church had fallen, and which Thomas's writings and the Dominican friars sought to renew?

Style: Early Renaissance
In the apocryphal Book of Tobit, Tobias travels to the city of Media to collect a debt for his blind father, Tobit, accompanied by the Archangel Raphael. When Tobias stops beside the river Tigris, a fish tries to devour him. Raphael directs him to remove the fish's heart, liver and gall bladder; these will later restore his father’s sight.

In this picture, the angel and Tobias are dwarfed by a wild and desolate landscape. They are framed by huge pieces of stone and a rocky grotto to the right and splintered trees to the left. The appearance of this picture has changed significantly over time as the varnish has darkened and turned yellow. The vast composition (it's a little over 2 metres high by 3 metres wide) was painted by an anonymous artist in the style of Salvator Rosa, whose Landscape with Tobias and the Angel is in the National Gallery's collection.

Style: Baroque, Academic
The Virgin Mary holds the naked infant Christ who stands on a stone ledge and raises his hand in blessing. His left hand rests tenderly on her thumb. The Virgin and Child form a broad-based triangle in the centre of the composition, giving the picture a sense of gravity and calm. Christ's elongated body echoes the curves of his mother's drapery; the saints, standing behind the Virgin and Child, tilt their heads at the same angles. These repeated parallel forms enhance the painting's feeling of stillness.

We do not know the identity of the young saint standing behind the Virgin on the left. He resembles Saint John the Evangelist in other works by Francia, but cannot be him, as he is holding a palm leaf which is the attribute of a martyr. The older saint may be Saint Jerome or Saint Anthony Abbot, both of whom are usually shown as a bearded elderly man wearing a monk's habit and holding a book.

Francia used the central image of the Virgin and Child several times for other compositions, changing the accompanying saints. The Madonna and Child with Saints Sebastian and Anthony Abbot (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) is almost identical to the National Gallery's picture. The same drawn cartoon was used to trace the design for both paintings. The baby's head and pose were also reused a number of times in other paintings by Francia. The degree of repetition and copying in these pictures suggests that Francia's assistants may have been involved in painting them.

Placing the Virgin and Child in a landscape setting was a recent innovation in Italian art, popularised by the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini, as seen in his Madonna of the Meadow. Previously the Virgin and Child were usually shown seated on a throne or in an architectural setting with saints, as in Francia's Buonvisi Altarpiece. The informal way that the holy characters here stand in the natural Italian countryside makes them appear humble, approachable and down to earth.

The soft, atmospheric quality of the landscape is achieved through soft rendering and blending of forms. The transition in the landscape here from green meadows to blue hills is achieved through gradual tonal changes. It suggests we are looking a long way into the distance, a phenomenon known as aerial perspective, as colours appear to change in the distance because of the nature of the atmosphere.

The ledge on which Christ stands is a feature commonly included in paintings of the  Virgin and Child by Giovanni Bellini and his workshop. The ledge separates us from the holy figures and creates a sense of depth, as though we are looking through a window. Using a ledge and landscape was a popular format for portraits in northern Italy and the Netherlands at this time, and can be seen in Francia's Portrait of Bartolomeo Bianchini. Francia's Virgin and Child with Two Saints almost looks like a portrait of the holy figures, and this is intentional to make them seem more real. Small-scale paintings of the Virgin Child and saints in a landscape like this one may have been made for altars in private houses, chapels or confraternities.

Style: High Renaissance
This portrait probably shows Cornelis van Someren (1593–1649), a prominent Dordrecht doctor who in 1649 was 56, the age inscribed on the picture. This seems to be confirmed by the portrait’s pendant (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), which says the female sitter is 49 years old, matching the age of Anna Blocken (1599–1671), Cornelis van Someren’s wife.

Aelbert Cuyp is best known for his Italianate landscapes bathed in warm sunlight. The National Gallery owns several of them, for example River Landscape with Horseman and Peasants.

Style: Baroque
The Virgin Mary bends over the sleeping Christ Child, the diagonal incline of her body paralleled by that of her son's. Her lips are parted -- perhaps she's singing her child to sleep. Christ is balanced rather precariously on a red cushion on a parapet. His head rests in his mother's hand and one arm hangs down limply. His sleep presages his death, and his coral necklace symbolises the blood he will shed during the Passion.

The artist has put the Virgin and Child in a rather confusing space: they are behind one parapet and in front of another, which bends away on the left behind Christ's halo. A silver brocade cloth of honour, creased from being folded, hangs behind the Virgin, and rich brocade curtains hang at the top. In the background a mountainous landscape recedes into the blue distance.

This is the finest among the surviving small-scale images of the Virgin and Child by Giovanni Santi, father of Raphael, and a successful painter, poet and courtier in Urbino. Santi, like other Renaissance artists, often borrowed figures and motifs from other painters. The Child's pose was probably invented by Giovanni Bellini, whose Virgin with the Sleeping Child on a Parapet of about 1465 (Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, Boston) is very similar, though in reverse. The parapet, Cloth of Honour and the rich textiles, as well as the landscape with its clumps of spherical trees and distant blue mountains, are all typical of Netherlandish paintings, such as The Virgin and Child by Dirk Bouts. Santi knew Justus of Ghent, and praised Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden in the rhymed chronicle he wrote.

Although he was clearly familiar with Netherlandish painting, Santi did not assimilate its techniques. He continued to paint in tempera, in contrast to the technique of applying layers and layers of semi-translucent glazes adopted by his contemporary Pietro Perugino, and his figures seem flat and hard. The flesh painting is solid and opaque, the result of using relatively large amounts of lead white pigment, not just for highlights but for mid-tones and shadows.

Style: Early Renaissance
Lippo di Dalmasio has placed his signature, 'Lippus Dalmasij pinxit' (‘Lippo di Dalmasio painted this’), at the bottom edge of the picture among the plants and grasses of a lush meadow.  Seated amid the clover, ferns and dandelions is the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child on her lap. Mother and son gaze into each other's eyes and Christ, in a childlike gesture, tugs on the Virgin's fine, white veil. Two groups of angels hover above watching over this tender scene of maternal love.

The figures are silhouetted against a golden disc representing the sun. It is made from gold leaf which the artist has scored with the point of a compass, creating fine lines for the sun's rays. The gold stars surrounding the Virgin's head and the detailed decoration of her robe, including the sunburst pattern at her shoulder, are also made of gold leaf; this was applied carefully over a sticky material called bole. These elements of the picture would have shone brightly in its original candle-lit church setting.

Scientific analysis has revealed that the Virgin's cloak is painted with a pigment called azurite. When fresh, azurite is a bright blue and would have contrasted strongly against the golden sun. It is also prone to darkening over time and now appears almost black. At the Virgin's feet there is a crescent moon. It was once luminous, as Lippo layered silver leaf over white paint to create a pale glow. The silver, however, has darkened over time.

Despite their dazzling effect, the inclusion of stars and planets is not purely decorative. These cosmic elements appear in many images of the Virgin in this period with the aim of drawing to mind the so-called Woman of the Apocalypse, who appears in the New Testament as 'clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet and upon her head a crown of twelve stars (Revelation 12:1). Lippo has followed a tradition in northern Italian painting by depicting the Virgin as the Woman of the Apocalypse, seated on the ground in a pose that has come to be known as the ‘Madonna of Humility’. The term refers to the Virgin’s lowly background as well as her acceptance of her role as the Mother of God.

This is the only Bolognese painting of the fourteenth century in the National Gallery; Bolognese painting of this period is rare in British collections. It is representative of Lippo’s work as he painted several images of the Madonna of Humility as the Woman of the Apocalypse, both in fresco and, as here, on canvas. The use of canvas rather than wood is unusual in this period, leading to some debate over the function of the image. Pictures were often painted on canvas to create banners, used in religious processions. Documents reveal however that Lippo painted two altarpieces on canvas for the church of San Petronio in Bologna, where he was living when he made this painting.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance
We don't know who these people are, but they wear the restrained costume of prosperous, Protestant Dutch people in the 1660s. Either woman could be the man's wife; it has also been suggested that the younger woman is a maid, or the couple's daughter.

There may be some clues. The younger woman holds a rose, perhaps a symbol of love, and points out of the painting; she looks down with an intent expression. The man rests one hand on the globe, which is possibly a symbol of faith, and points at the fruit on the table with the other. The older woman holds a peach, perhaps symbolising truth.

For some reason, half a globe on half a plinth appears to cut off the composition in an odd and rather unsatisfactory way -- perhaps there was once a companion piece that completes the story. In its absence, you are left to decide on an interpretation of the symbols and, from them, the painting's meaning.

Style: Baroque
This fragment comes from the border decoration of a large painting in fresco -- a technique that involved painting directly onto wet plaster -- which showed the fall of Lucifer, the rebel angel who was cast out of heaven. It once decorated a wall of the church of the confraternity of Sant' Angelo in Arezzo. There are two other fragments in the our collection: Saint Michael and Other Angels and Decorative Border with a Kneeling Flagellant and Saints Michael and Stephen.

The fragment shows two figures in decorative shapes with white borders. The creature with red wings on the left is a Seraph, a type of angelic being; on the right is Saint Catherine, identifiable by the traces of a spiked wheel (she was tortured on one). Their haloes were originally gilded but now only a tin underlayer remains. The spaces between are decorated with foliage, painted to look like stone carvings.

Style: Gothic, Early Renaissance