The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (384 page)

 
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(1805–73).
American sculptor, active in Italy from 1837. He first achieved success with portrait busts, but his great international fame came with his marble statue
The Greek Slave
(Corcoran Gal., Washington, 1843), which caused a sensation at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and was for a time one of the most talked about and reproduced works of art of the age. The naked girl is bound in chains and the astonishing popularity of the statue (which now seems rather insipid) no doubt depended on the way in which its sentimentality licensed its eroticism.

 
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(1836–1919).
English painter and administrator, son of the architect Ambrose Poynter . He formed his academic style in Italy (1853), where he met Frederic
Leighton
and admired
Michelangelo
above all other artists, and in Paris (1856–9), where he studied with
Gleyre
. His reputation was made with the huge
Israel in Egypt
(Guildhall, London, 1867) and he became one of the most popular painters of the day with similar elaborate historical tableaux in which he displayed his great prowess as a draughtsman. In the latter part of his career, however, he confined himself to much smaller works, similar to
Alma-Tadema's
classical
genre
scenes, as he devoted himself much more to administration; most notably he was first
Slade
Professor of Fine Art at University College, London, 1871–5; Director of the National Gallery, 1894–1904; and President of the Royal Academy, 1896–1918.

 
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(1642–1709).
Italian painter and architect, one of the greatest exponents of the
Baroque
style of
illusionist
ceiling decoration. He became a lay brother in the Jesuit order in 1665 (he is sometimes give the courtesy title ‘Padre Pozzo’) and worked much for Jesuit churches, both as a painter and architect. His masterpiece is the huge ceiling fresco,
Allegory of the Missionary Work of the Jesuits
(1691–4), in S. Ignazio, Rome, perhaps the most stupendous feat of
quadratura
ever painted. Pozzo worked in several other Italian cities apart from Rome, and from 1702 until his death he was in Vienna, where he decorated the Jesuit Church, the University Church, and the Liechtenstein Garden Palace. His influence was spread not only by his paintings, but also by his treatise
Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum
(2 vols., 1693 and 1700), which was soon translated into several European languages and also (by Jesuit missionaries) into Chinese. As an architect, he designed several churches and numerous altars, but his work in this field was unexciting compared with his paintings and engraved designs.

 
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Prado
, Madrid.

Spain's national museum of art, founded in 1818 by Ferdinand VII and opened to the public in 1819. The building, one of the finest examples of Spanish
Neoclassical
architecture, had been intended for a Museum of Natural Science but had never served that purpose. The major part of the collection derives from the royal collections made in the course of three centuries by the Habsburg and Bourbon kings of Spain, who were some of the most discriminating and lavish patrons in Europe. The museum is remarkable less for comprehensiveness than for unequalled representation in certain fields. Above all, it contains what is far and away the world's greatest collection of Spanish painting, El
Greco
,
Velázquez
, and
Goya
, being supremely well represented. It is among the richest of all museums in works by Hieronymus
Bosch
and
Titian
, and has superb collections of
Tintoretto
,
Veronese
,
Rubens
, and van
Dyck
.

 
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