The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (363 page)

See
COPLEY
.

 
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(1675–1741).
Venetian painter, the brother-in-law of Rosalba
Carriera
. Pellegrini played a major part in the spread of the Venetian style of large-scale decorative painting in northern Europe, working in Austria, England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. He was the first Venetian artist to visit England, arriving in 1708 in the train of the fourth Earl of Manchester, for whose country seat, Kimbolton Castle, he painted what are generally regarded as his finest works. His airy,
illusionistic
compositions, with their bright flickering colour and purely decorative intention, set a new standard of
Rococo
elegance for English decoration, but he was an extremely prolific painter and by European standards most of his work is routine.
Thornhill
defeated him in competition for the commission to decorate the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, London.

 
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pen
.

Writing and drawing instrument used with ink or a similar coloured fluid. From Early Christian times until the 19th cent. the standard form of pen in Europe was the quill, made from bird feathers, and most of the pen drawings of the Old Masters were done with the quill. Goose, swan, and turkey quills have commonly been used for writing and crow quills provide a very fine point for drawing. The reed pen, made from stems of bamboo-like grasses, was already in use in classical antiquity and is probably older than the quill. The point is much coarser, producing a bold, angular line sometimes slightly blurred at the edges. For drawing it has been used much less than the quill, though
Rembrandt
, for example, was a master of the broad energetic technique appropriate to it. The metal pen dates back at least to Roman times, but steel nibs of the modern type were not made until late in the 18th cent. and began to replace the quill only when they were produced by machine,
c.
1822. No other drawing tool can produce such a variety of texture or reveal so intimately the personal ‘handwriting’ of an artist. The pen is the ideal medium for rapidly noting down the first idea and has been used in this way by masters of drawing as different as
Pisanello
,
Michelangelo
,
Dürer
, and Rembrandt. But apart from its use for the hasty or inspired
sketch
, in which the fire of execution is reflected in the line, the pen has been used with great effect in a careful, calligraphic manner, as in
Botticelli's
illustrations to Dante's
Divine Comedy
.

 
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pencil
.

Writing or drawing instrument consisting of a slender rod of graphite or similar substance encased in a cylinder of wood (or less usually metal or plastic). Although the material is graphite (a form of carbon), the ‘lead’ pencil took its name from the lead point (see
METAL POINT
) which it superseded, and is first heard of in the 1560s. Pencils of predetermined hardness or softness were not produced until 1790, however, when Nicolas-Jacques
Conté
undertook to solve the problem of making pencils when France was cut off from the English supply of graphite (the mines in Borrowdale, Cumbria, which had opened in 1664, being the main source). He found that the graphite could be eked out with clay and fired in a kiln, and that more clay meant a harder pencil. Conté obtained a patent for his process in 1795. It was only then that the pencil became the universal drawing instrument that it is today.
Ingres
, who often used pencil with great delicacy in his portrait drawings, was one of the first to show its potential. Although the
Oxford English Dictionary
records the usage of the phrase ‘a pencil of black lead’ as early as 1612, until the end of the 18th cent. the word ‘pencil’ more commonly meant a brush (particularly a small brush). ‘Pencilling’ could mean ‘colouring’ or ‘brushwork’ as well as ‘drawing’.

 
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(
c.
1500–50).
German painter and engraver of religious and mythological subjects and portraits, active in his native Nuremberg, where he was an assistant of
Dürer
. He travelled in Italy early in his career and again in 1539, when he is recorded in Florence and Rome, and his work is deeply imbued with Italian influence. The sharp outlines and glossy textures of his portraits show, in particular, a kinship with
Bronzino
(
Man Holding a Mirror
, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, 1544). In 1525 Pencz was expelled from Nuremberg with the
Beham
brothers, two other ‘godless artists’, for their radical Protestant views, but the sentence was soon revoked and he returned to the city. In 1550 he was appointed painter to Duke Albrecht of Prussia, but died in the same year.

 
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