The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (323 page)

(d.
c.
1586).
Spanish painter. He worked for most of his life in Badajoz, a town on the Portuguese border, and his style—formed away from the influence of the court or great religious and artistic centres such as Seville—is highly distinctive. His pictures are usually fairly small and he concentrated on devotional images such as the
Mater Dolorosa or Ecce Homo
painted with intense spirituality. The piety of his work has earned him the nickname ‘El Divino’. His style owes something to Netherlandish art, but his misty modelling seems to derive more from
Leonardo da Vinci
.

 
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(1890–1964).
Italian painter and etcher. He was born in Bologna and lived there all his life. Apart from a brief association with
Futurism
, and his adhesion to
de Chirico's
idea of
Metaphysical painting
for a few years from 1918, he stood aloof from the intellectual turmoil and aesthetic experiments of the 20th cent. After early landscapes he painted almost exclusively still lifes, eschewing literary and symbolic content, and using subtle combinations of colour within a narrow range of tones. His style has something in common with
Purism
, but is more subtle and intimate, breathing an air of serenity and cultivated sensibility; the greatest influence on his work was
Cézanne
, whom he revered. After the Second World War Morandi won an international reputation, and his work won great respect among younger Italian artists for its pure devotion to aesthetic values and its poetic quality.

 
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(1826–98).
French painter, one of the leading
Symbolist
artists. He was a pupil of
Chassériau
and was influenced by his master's exotic
Romanticism
, but Moreau went far beyond him in his feeling for the bizarre and developed a style that is highly distinctive in subject and technique. His preference was for mystically intense images evoking long-dead civilizations and mythologies, treated with an extraordinary sensuousness, his paint encrusted and jewel-like. Although he had some success at the
Salon
, he had no need to court this as he had private means, and much of his life was spent in seclusion. In 1892 he became a professor at the École des
Beaux-Arts
and proved an inspired teacher, bringing out his pupils' individual talents rather than trying to impose ideas on them. His pupils included
Marquet
and
Matisse
, but his favourite was
Rouault
, who became the first curator of the Moreau Museum in Paris (the artist's house), which Moreau left to the nation on his death. The bulk of his work is preserved there.

 
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(1571–1638).
Dutch painter and architect, active in Utrecht, where he helped found the St Lucas guild in 1611. He is best known for his portraits, which are similar to those made by his teacher
Mierevelt
, but less severe. His portraits of shepherds and blonde shepherdesses with a deep
décolletage
were popular during his lifetime. He designed the Catherine Gate (destroyed) and possibly the façade of the Meat Market in Utrecht.

 
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(1816–91).
Italian critic. He trained as a physician, but from 1873 he began to write on Italian art. As a student at Munich he had acquired such a command of German that he preferred to write in that language, and at first he published his work as supposed translations from the Russian of Ivan Lermolieff (an anagram of his surname with a Russian termination). Morelli concentrated mainly on the problems of attribution and claimed to have reduced this to scientific principles. He maintained that an artist's method of dealing with subordinate details, such as the treatment of fingernails or ears (here his anatomical training was useful), is tantamount to a signature and that by systematic study of such details attribution can be put beyond doubt. This method, still sometimes referred to as ‘Morellian criticism’, was influential on connoisseurs such as
Berenson
, but it has proved much less productive of scientific certainly than Morelli hoped; it is now felt that we recognize the work of individual artists more by general effect than by details, and that the details rather than the general effect are what an imitator will be able to reproduce most convincingly. Morelli himself made some brilliant attributions, but also some noteworthy blunders. He was a patriot and a politician as well as a writer (he declined the directorship of the
Uffizi
because he did not want to be distracted from his political duties), and he secured the passing of an act forbidding the sale of works of art from religious or public institutions. His own collection of pictures was left to the Pinacoteca of his adopted city of Bergamo.

 
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