The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (65 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1602–76).
French engraver. His large output (more than 1,500 prints) provides a rich source of documentation on 17th-cent. French life and manners. Many of his engravings are
genre
scenes, and even his religious works are in modern dress. Bosse taught perspective at the Académie Royale (see
ACADEMY
) from its foundation in 1648 until 1661, when he was expelled for quarrelling with his colleagues over his opposition to
Lebrun's
dogmatic theories. He wrote treatises on engraving, painting, perspective, and architecture and he occasionally painted.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1932– ).
Colombian painter. His early work was influenced by various styles, including
Abstract Expressionism
, but in the late 1950s he evolved a highly distinctive manner in which figures look like grossly inflated dolls; sometimes his paintings are sardonic comments on modern life, but he has also made something of a speciality of parodies on the work of Old Masters. Since the early 1970s he has lived mainly in New York and he has acquired an international reputation accompained by huge prices for his work in the saleroom.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(
c.
1618–52).
Dutch painter, with Nicolaes
Berchem
the most celebrated of the Italianate landscape painters. He came from Utrecht, where he studied with
Bloemaert
before moving to Italy for a period of about four years,
c.
1637–41. Although he died young, his output was large, but none of the more than 300 paintings attributed to him can be convincingly dated to his Italian sojourn. His landscapes are typically peopled by peasants driving cattle or travellers gazing on Roman ruins in the light of the evening sun. Such contemporary scenes were an innovation, for
Claude Lorraine
and the earlier Dutch painters of the Italian countryside had populated it with biblical or mythological figures. They express the yearning of northerners for the light and idyllic life of the south, and proved immensely popular with collectors, not least in England, helping to shape ideas about Italy for two centuries. Jan's brother
Andries
(
c.
1612–41) lived with him in Rome 1639–41; they are said to have collaborated, but Andries is best known for paintings and drawings of lively peasant scenes that have little in common with Jan's idyllic tone. He was drowned in an accident in Venice.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1444/5–1510).
Florentine painter, neglected for centuries but now probably the best-loved painter of the
quattrocento
. The name ‘Botticelli’, meaning ‘little barrel’, was originally given to an older brother, presumably because he was portly, but it became adopted as the family name. Sandro trained with Filippo
Lippi
, who was the most important influence on his style. By temperament he belonged to the current of late 15th-cent. art which reacted against the scientific naturalism of
Masaccio
and his followers and revived certain elements of the
Gothic
style—a delicate sentiment, sometimes bordering on sentimentality, a feminine grace, and an emphasis on the ornamental and evocative capabilities of line. Almost all Botticelli's life was spent in Florence, his only significant journey from the city being in 1481–2, when he worked on the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, where he painted side by side with
Perugino
,
Rosselli
, and
Ghirlandaio
. The fact that he was called to Rome for such a prestigious commission shows that he must have had a considerable reputation, and by this time the most characteristic idiosyncrasies of his style had already gained shape in the celebrated poetic allegory known since
Vasari
as the
Primavera
(Uffizi, Florence,
c.
1478). There is evidence that the patron who commissioned this and two of his other famous mythological paintings (
The Birth of Venus
and
Pallas and the Centaur
, both in the Uffizi) was Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de'
Medici
(second cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent), a wealthy Florentine with strong interests in Platonic philosophy. It has been suggested that it was this philosophy that prompted the new idea of large-scale pictures with a secular content; the classical deities represented are not the carefree Olympians of Ovid's tales but the symbolic embodiment of some deep moral or metaphysical truth. Given that the Neo-Platonists regarded Beauty as the visible token of the Divine, there would be no blasphemy in using the same facial type and expression for Venus and for the Holy Virgin. According to Vasari, Botticelli later fell under the sway of Savonarola's sermons, repented of his ‘pagan’ pictures, and gave up painting. The final part of this statement is definitely incorrect and the rest is doubtful, but it is certainly true that Botticelli's later paintings are more obviously ‘serious’—solemn, intense, sometimes ecstatic—than his early work. The most telling example is the
Mystic Nativity
(NG, London, 1500), which bears a cryptic inscription seeming to imply that Botticelli expected the end of the world and the dawn of the millennium.
Botticelli ran a busy studio (his most important pupil was Filippino
Lippi
) and his surviving output is large for a painter of his period. Apart from religious and mythological pictures, he produced some memorable portraits and also some marvellously delicate drawings—mainly in pen outline—for a lavish manuscript of Dante's
Divine Comedy
(now divided between the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, and the Vatican Library). Although little is known of his life, it seems clear that at the peak of his career he was the most popular painter in Florence. His patrons included some of the city's finest churches and most distinguished families, and several of his paintings (particularly those on the theme of the Virgin and Child) exist in several versions or copies, attesting to the vogue they enjoyed. After
Leonardo's
return to the city in 1500, however, Botticelli's linear style must have looked archaic and he died in obscurity. His fame was not resurrected until the second half of the 19th cent., when the
Pre-Raphaelites
imitated his wan, elongated types,
Ruskin
sang his praises, and Walter
Pater
dedicated to his art one of his most eloquent essays. At the end of the century his work was a major influence on
Art Nouveau
.