The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (391 page)

 
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Pynas , Jan
(1583/4–1631) and
Jacob

(
c.
1585–1650?).
Dutch painters, brothers. They worked in Rome in the first decade of the 17th cent. and brought back a style of small-scale history painting in the manner of
Elsheimer
. This in turn may have had some influence on
Rembrandt
, who is said to have studied briefly with Jacob.

 
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quadratura
.

A type of
illusionistic
decoration in which architectural elements are painted on walls and/or ceilings in such a way that they appear to be an extension of the real architecture of a room into an imaginary space. It was common in Roman art, was revived by
Mantegna
in the 15th cent., and reached its peaks of elaboration in
Baroque
Italy. The greatest of all exponents of
quadratura
was probably
Pozzo
, in whose celebrated ceiling in S. Ignazio, Rome, architecture and figures surge towards the heavens with breathtaking bravura. Unlike Pozzo, many artists relied on specialists called
quadraturisti
to paint the architectural settings for their figures (see
GUERCINO
and
TIEPOLO
, for example).

 
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(Italian: ‘carried picture’). Term applied to a ceiling picture that is painted without
illusionistic
foreshortening, as if it were to be viewed at normal eye level.
Mengs'
Parnassus
(1761) in the Villa Albani, Rome, is a famous example—a kind of
Neoclassical
manifesto against
Baroque
illusionism.

 
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Quarton , Enguerrand
.

See
CHARONTON
.

 
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quattrocento
.

Term (literally ‘four hundred’) applied to the 15th cent. (the 1400s) in Italian art. It can be used as a noun (‘painting of the quattrocento’) or as an adjective (‘quattrocento sculpture’). Terms used in the same way for other centuries are: dugento (or duecento) for the 13th cent.; trecento for the 14th cent.; cinquecento for the 16th cent.; seicento for the 17th cent.; settecento for the 18th cent.; ottocento for the 19th cent.; and novecento for the 20th cent.

 
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