The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (381 page)

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(1913–94).
English art historian. He was Director of the
Victoria and Albert Museum
, 1967–73, Director of the
British Museum
, 1974–6, and from 1977 to 1987 was Consultative Chairman, Department of European Paintings,
Metropolitan Museum
, New York, and Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. His many publications made him perhaps the doyen in the field of Italian Renaissance art among English writers. They include the magisterial
An Introduction to Italian Sculpture
in three parts (all of which have subsequently appeared in revised editions),
Italian Gothic Sculpture
(1955),
Italian Renaissance Sculpture
(1958), and
Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture
(1963), an edition of
Cellini's
Autobiography
(1949), and monographs on
Giovanni di Paolo
(1937),
Sassetta
(1939),
Uccello
(1950, revised 1972), Fra
Angelico
(1952, revised 1974),
Raphael
(1970), Luca della
Robbia
(1980), and Cellini (1985). In 1986 he received the Galileo Galilei Prize, awarded annually for contributions to Italian culture.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

poppy oil
.

Oil extracted from poppy seeds, one of the most popular of the
drying oils
used as a
medium
for
oil painting
. It is less viscous than
linseed
and
walnut oil
and does not easily turn rancid. It is, however, slow drying. This turned out to be an advantage rather than a disadvantage when the method of
alla prima
painting came into vogue about the middle of the 19th cent. and for a time during the second half of that century poppy oil was much used by commercial colourmen.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(
c.
1584–1632).
Flemish painter and etcher of marine subjects, active in Holland. He was regarded as the greatest marine painter of his day and his work marks the transition from the busy and brightly coloured sea scapes of the early 17th cent., with their emphasis upon the representation of ships, to monochromatic paintings which are essentially studies of sea, sky, and atmospheric effects. His favourite theme was a modest fishing-boat making its way through a choppy sea near the shore.
Rembrandt
and Jan van de
Cappelle
collected his works. His son
Julius
(
c.
1609–45) was also a marine painter.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search

(
c.
1483?–1539).
Italian painter, named after the town of his birth, Pordenone in the Friuli, and active in various parts of northern Italy. After working in a provincial style at the very start of his career (his master is unknown and
Vasari
says he was self-taught), by the beginning of the second decade of the 16th cent. he had come close to the contemporary Venetian (specifically
Giorgionesque
) manner of painting. In the second half of the decade, however, he was in central Italy, and his style changed under the impact particularly of
Michelangelo
, acquiring great weight and solidity. Pordenone was influenced also by
Mantegna's
illusionism and by German prints, and the style he forged from these diverse influences was highly distinctive and original. He always retained something of provincial uncouthness—at times vulgarity—but he was, in Vasari's words, ‘very rich in invention… bold and resolute’, and he excelled at dramatic spatial effects. These qualities are seen at their most forceful in his fresco of the
Crucifixion
(1520–1) in Cremona Cathedral; the densely packed, bizarrely expressive figures are seen as if on a stage through a painted proscenium arch and they lunge violently out into the spectator's space. From 1527 Pordenone was based in Venice and for a while he was a serious rival to
Titian
. His major works in Venice have been destroyed, however. Pordenone died in Ferrara, where he had gone to design tapestries for Ercole II d'
Este
.

 
Back
  -  
 
New Search