The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (294 page)

(1908–91).
Italian sculptor. At the age of 11, he was apprenticed to a wood-carver, then to a gilder and stucco-worker, but he was virtually self-taught as an artist. His early work was influenced by Egyptian and Etruscan art, but then he turned to a more
Impressionistic
style owing much to the example of
Rodin
and Medardo
Rosso
. In the 1940s he simplified his style, so that although the surface of his work is often animated, the feeling it produces is one of classic calm. Manzù worked much on religious subjects (including numerous figures of cardinals), and is celebrated above all for the set of bronze doors he made for St Peter's in Rome after winning an international competition in 1950 (they were not completed until 1964). In 1958 he also completed a set of doors for Salzburg Cathedral and in 1968 one for the church of St Laurence in Rotterdam. His work shows the possibility of producing sculpture that fits within a traditional religious context and yet is in a modern and personal idiom. Manzù also worked as an etcher, lithographer, and painter.

 
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maquette
.

A small preliminary model, often in clay or wax, for a work of sculpture. The word implies something in the nature of a rough sketch, not so fully worked out as a
bozzetto
.

 
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(1625–1713).
Italian painter, the leading painter in Rome in the latter part of the 17th cent. As the pupil of Andrea
Sacchi
he continued the tradition of the classical
Grand Manner
, based on
Raphael
, and he gained an international reputation particularly for his paintings of the Madonna and Child, which are reworkings of types established during the High
Renaissance
. The rhetorical splendour of his work is thoroughly in the
Baroque
idiom, however, and the numerous altarpieces he painted for Roman churches (many still
in situ
) give whole-hearted expression to the dogmas of the Counter-Reformation. Maratta was also an accomplished fresco painter, and the finest portraitist of the day in Rome. He had a large studio and his posthumous reputation suffered when the inferior works of his many pupils and imitators were confused with his own paintings.

 
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marble
.

Word loosely applied to any hard limestone that can be sawn into thin slabs and will take a good polish so that it is suitable for decorative work; more strictly, it refers to metamorphosed limestones whose structure has been recrystallized by heat or pressure. Marbles are widely disseminated and occur in a great variety of colours and patterns, but certain types have been particularly prized by sculptors. The most famous of Greek white marbles in the ancient world was the close-grained Pentelic, which was quarried at Mount Pentelicon in Attica. The
Elgin Marbles
are carved in Pentelic. Widely used also were the somewhat coarser-grained translucent white marbles from the Aegean islands of Paros and Naxos. Parian marble was used for the celebrated Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The pure white Carrara marble, quarried at Massa, Carrara, and Pietra Santa in Tuscany from the 3rd cent. BC, is the most famous of all sculptors' stones. It was used for the
Apollo Belvedere
, and was much favoured in the
Renaissance
, particularly by
Michelangelo
, who often visited the quarries to select material for his work.
Neoclassical
sculptors also favoured Carrara marble because of its ability to take a smooth, sleek surface, but it can look rather ‘dead’ compared with some of the finest Greek marbles.

 
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(1880–1916).
German painter. The son of a Munich painter, he began working in an academic naturalistic style, but visits to Paris in 1903 and 1908 brought him into contact with
Impressionism
and
Post-Impressionism
, and responding particularly to van
Gogh
he advanced towards a more
Expressionist
style. In 1910 he entered into a close friendship with
Macke
, who introduced him to the Expressionist use of colour. Through Macke he joined the
Neue Künstlervereinigung
at Munich and found in
Kandinsky
and
Jawlensky
men of congenial artistic views. With them he founded the
Blaue Reiter
group in 1911. Marc was of a deeply religious disposition (in 1906 he visited Mt. Athos in Greece with its famous monasteries) and was troubled by a profound spiritual malaise; through painting he sought to uncover mystical inner forces that animate nature. His ideas were expressed most intensely in paintings of animals, for he believed that they were both more beautiful and more spiritual than man. Using non-naturalistic symbolic colour and simplified, rhythmic shapes, he tried to paint animals not as we see them, but as they feel their own existence (
Blue Horses
, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1911). In 1912 Marc met
Delaunay
in Paris and was influenced by the
Orphist
experiments in the abstract use of colour. The culminating work of this period was
Animal Destinies
(Kunstmuseum, Basle, 1913), which uses panic-stricken animals to symbolize a world on the edge of destruction; on the back of the picture he wrote: ‘Und alles sein ist flammend leid’ (And all being is flaming suffering). By 1914, under the influence partly of
Cubism
and
Futurism
, his paintings had become still more abstract, losing almost entirely any representational content, as in
Fighting Forms
(Neue Pinakothek, Munich, 1914), an image of convulsive fury. These last paintings are considered among the culminating works of German Expressionism. Marc was killed in action in the First World War.