The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (288 page)

(1634–93).
Dutch painter. He was born in Dordrecht and in about 1648 became a pupil of
Rembrandt
in Amsterdam, staying there until 1654 when he returned to his native town. In his early years he concentrated on
genre
pictures, rather sentimental in approach, but distinguished by deep glowing colours he had learnt from his master. Old women sleeping, praying, or reading the Bible were subjects he particularly favoured. In the 1660s, however, Maes began to turn more to portraiture, and after a visit to Antwerp around the middle of the decade his style changed dramatically. He abandoned the reddish tone of his earlier manner for a wider, lighter, and cooler range (greys and blacks in the shadows instead of brownish tones), and the fashionable portraits he now specialized in were closer to van
Dyck
than to Rembrandt. In 1673 he moved permanently to Amsterdam and had great success with this kind of picture. Maes was a fairly prolific painter and is well represented in, for example, the National Gallery, London, and the museum at Dordrecht.

 
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Maestà
.

Term (Italian for ‘majesty’) used to describe a representation of the Virgin and Child in which the Virgin is enthroned as Queen of Heaven, surrounded by a court of saints and angels.

 
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Mafai , Mario
.

See
SCIPIONE
.

 
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(
c.
1600–60).
Italian painter, born at Vicenza and active mainly in the Veneto. He had a refreshingly individualistic style, carrying on the great painterly tradition of
Tintoretto
and
Bassano
, reinforced by the example of
Liss
,
Feti
, and
Strozzi
, to which he added his own note of mysterious and sometimes bizarre fantasy. He painted religious and mythological scenes and also allegorical portraits of local officials.

 
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Magic(al) Realism
.

Term coined by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe the aspect of
Neue Sachlichkeit
characterized by sharp-focus detail. In the book in which he originated the term—
Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus, Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerie
(Leipzig, 1925)—Roh also included a rather mixed bag of non-German painters as ‘Magic Realists’, among them
Miró
and
Picasso
. Subsequently critics have used the term to cover various types of painting in which objects are depicted with photographic naturalism but which, because of paradoxical elements or strange juxtapositions, convey a feeling of unreality, infusing the ordinary with a sense of mystery. The paintings of
Magritte
are a prime example. In the English-speaking world the term gained currency with an exhibition entitled ‘American Realists and Magic Realists’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943. The director of the museum, Alfred H.
Barr
, wrote that the term was ‘sometimes applied to the work of painters who by means of an exact realistic technique try to make plausible and convincing their improbable, dreamlike or fantastic visions’.

 
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(1667–1749).
Italian painter. He was born and died in Genoa, but spent most of his working life in Milan. At the beginning of his career he was a portraitist, but virtually nothing is known of this aspect of his career. Later he turned to the type of work for which he is now known—highly individual melodramatic scenes set in storm-tossed landscapes, ruins, convents, and gloomy monasteries, peopled with small, elongated figures of monks, nuns, gypsies, mercenaries, witches, beggars, and inquisitors. His brushwork is nervous and flickering and his lighting effects macabre. He was very prolific and his work is rarely dated or datable. Marco
Ricci
and Francesco
Guardi
were among the artists influenced by him.