The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (192 page)

(1628–1715).
French sculptor. He ranked with
Coysevox
as the outstanding sculptor of Louis XIV's reign, but his style was more restrained and
classical
, embodying the ideas of the Academy. Much of his work was done for Versailles, where he collaborated with
Lebrun
, and his group
Apollo Tended by the Nymphs
, commissioned in 1666, has been considered the most purely classical work of French 17th-cent. sculpture. (The group was originally in a grotto room, but is now in the palace gardens.) His other work includes the monument to Cardinal Richelieu (1675–7) in the church of the Sorbonne. He also made an equestrian statue of Louis XIV (1683–92) for the Place Vendôme in Paris, but this was destroyed during the French Revolution. Girardon died on the same day as Louis XIV.

 
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(1767–1824).
French painter and illustrator, usually known as Girodet-Trioson, a name he adopted in honour of a benefactor, Dr Trioson . He studied with J.-L.
David
and won the
Prix de Rome
in 1789, returning to Paris in 1795. In style and technique he followed David, but for his choice of themes and his emotional treatment he was acclaimed by the young
Romantics
. He was particularly interested in unusual colour effects and in the problems of concentrated light and shade, as in
The Sleep of Endymion
(1792) and
The Entombment of Atala
(1808), both in the Louvre. Girodet often favoured literary themes, but he also won renown for his paintings glorifying Napoleon (
The Revolt of Cairo
, Versailles Mus., 1810) and was a fine portraitist. One of his best-known portraits,
Mademoiselle Lange as Diana
(Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1799), caused a scandal because of its satirical sexual allusions. His book illustrations included work for editions of Jean Racine and Virgil. In 1812 he inherited a fortune and thereafter devoted himself to writing unreadably boring poems on aesthetics.

 
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(1775–1802).
English landscape painter in watercolours. His earlier works were tinted drawings in the 18th-cent. topographical tradition, but before the end of his short life he had developed a technique that revolutionized watercolour painting. He used strong colour in broad
washes
, influenced to some extent by J. R.
Cozens
, but going beyond him in the grandeur with which he created effects of space, the power with which he suggested mood, and the boldness of his compositions. His work stands at the beginning of the classic English tradition of watercolour painting, freed from its dependence on line drawing, and
Turner
acknowledged his friend's greatness with the words ‘If Tom Girtin had lived, I should have starved.’ Girtin made tours in various parts of Britain, and spent six months in Paris in 1801–2, making a series of etchings of the city that were published in 1803. In 1802 he exhibited an enormous panorama of London, painted in oils—the
Eidometropolis
—but this is no longer extant. He died of tuberculosis.

 
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gisant
.

French term used from the 15th cent. onwards for a lying or recumbent effigy on a funerary monument. The
gisant
typically represented a person in death (sometimes decomposition) and the
gisant
position was contrasted with the
orant
, which represented the person as if alive in a kneeling or praying position. In Renaissance monuments
gisants
often formed part of the lower register, where the deceased person was represented as a corpse, while on the upper part he was represented
orant
as if alive.

 
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(active first half of 12th cent.).
French
Romanesque
sculptor. He was one of the great geniuses of medieval art, but his name has survived only because he carved his signature—
Gislebertus hoc fecit
—beneath the feet of the central figure of Christ in the tympanum of the west doorway of Autun Cathedral in Burgundy. The unusually prominent position of his signature suggests that his greatness was appreciated in his own time. The tympanum represents the Last Judgement; it is a huge work (over 6 m. wide at the base) and a masterpiece of expressionistic carving, conveying with awesome power both the horror of the damned and the serenity of the elect. Most of the rest of the sculptural decoration of the cathedral can be confidently attributed to Gislebertus. It includes a carving of Eve, one of the few surviving fragments of the north doorway (now in the Musée Rolin, Autun), a large-scale reclining nude without parallel in medieval art, and the decoration of 60 or so capitals. These display his great fecundity of imagination and range of feeling. It is highly probable that Gislebertus was trained in the workshop that was responsible for the decoration of the abbey of Cluny, the most influential of all Romanesque monasteries, and that he worked at the nearby cathedral at Vézelay before going to Autun. He was already a mature artist when he started at Autun, where he worked
c.
1125–35, and his style changed little while he was there. His influence was felt in the sculpture of various Burgundian churches, and many of his ideas had a long-term effect on the development of French
Gothic
sculpture.

 
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