The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (415 page)

(1495–1540).
Florentine painter and decorative artist.
Vasari
says that he ‘would not bind himself to any master’ (a story that fits in with his individuality of temperament), but in his youth he learned most from
Andrea del Sarto
, and together with Andrea's pupil
Pontormo
(Rosso's friend and close contemporary) he was one of the leading figures in the early development of
Mannerism
. His work was highly sophisticated and varied in mood, ranging from the refined elegance of the
Marriage of the Virgin
(S. Lorenzo, Florence, 1523) to the violent energy of
Moses and the Daughters of Jethro
(Uffizi, Florence,
c.
1523) and to the disquieting intensity of the
Deposition
(Galleria Pittorica, Volterra, 1521). In 1523 Rosso left Florence for Rome, where he worked until the sack of 1527, and he then worked briefly in several Italian towns until 1530 when he was invited to France by Francis I. With
Primaticcio
he was the most important artist to work on the decoration of the royal palace at Fontainebleau and one of the creators of the distinctive style of French Mannerism associated with the School of
Fontainebleau
. Rosso's principal work there is the Gallery of Francis I. Many engravings were made from his designs and his influence on French art was great. Vasari, whose biography of Rosso also includes an entertaining story about his pet baboon, says that he killed himself in remorse after falsely accusing a friend of stealing money from him, but this may well be apocryphal.

 
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(1858–1928).
Italian sculptor. In his early career he was a painter, and was virtually self-taught as a sculptor—he was dismissed from the Brera Academy in Milan in 1883 after only a few months' training when he appealed for drawing to be taught from the live model rather than casts of statues. He went to Paris in 1884, where he worked in the studio of
Dalou
and knew
Rodin
, and from 1889 he spent most of his career there. It is indeed with French rather than with Italian art that his work has affinity, for in reaction from the Italian
Renaissance
tradition of three-dimensional solidity, Rosso applied to sculpture the
Impressionist
aesthetic by which atmospheric effects and transitory conditions of light break up the permanent identity of the object. He was essentially a modeller rather than a carver and he made subtle use of his preferred medium of wax to express his view that matter was malleable by atmosphere: ‘We are mere consequences of the objects which surround us.’ He also anticipated later trends by his occasional incorporation of real objects in a sculptural work. His subjects included portraits and single figures and groups in contemporary settings (
The Bookmaker
, MOMA, New York, 1894;
Conversation in a Garden
, Gal. Nazionale d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome, 1893).
At the turn of the century Rosso enjoyed an international reputation second only to that of Rodin. Then after a period of neglect he was ‘rediscovered’ by the
Futurists
, who took over and developed many of his ideas. In his 1912 manifesto of Futurist sculpture
Boccioni
called him ‘the only great modern sculptor who has attempted to open up a larger field to sculpture, rendering plastically the influences of an ambiance and the atmospheric ties which bind it to the subject’. Today he is regarded as a sculptor of remarkable originality (not even Rodin challenged so decisively the traditional preoccupations of his art) and one of the precursors of the modern movement because of the emphasis he gave to the direct representation of visual experience and his realization that the ordinary and commonplace could have sculptural expressiveness. His output was fairly small; replicas of several of his works, together with a collection of his drawings, are in the Museo Medardo Rosso at Barzio in Italy.

 
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Roszak , Theodore
.

See
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
.

 
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Rothenberg , Susan
,

See
NEW IMAGE PAINTING
.

 
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(1872–1945).
British painter, graphic artist, writer, and teacher. He studied for a year at the
Slade
School (1888–9) under Alphonse
Legros
and afterwards at the
Académie
Julian in Paris. There he became a close friend of
Whistler
and was encouraged by
Degas
and
Pissarro
. His best works are generally considered to be his early Whistlerian paintings such as
The Doll's House
(Tate, London, 1899), which shows Augustus
John
and Rothenstein's wife as characters in a tense scene from Ibsen's play
A Doll's House
. From about 1898, however, he specialized in portraits of the celebrated and those who later became celebrated. In the latter part of his career he was much more renowned as a teacher than a painter. His outlook was conservative (he regarded pure abstraction as ‘a cardinal heresy’) and as Principal of the
Royal College of Art
, 1920–35, he exercised an influence second only to that of
Tonks
at the Slade School in earlier decades. His son,
Sir John Rothenstein
(1901–92), had a distinguished career as an art historian (he was Director of the
Tate Gallery
, 1938–64, and wrote numerous books); another son,
Michael Rothenstein
(1908–93), was a painter, printmaker, and writer on art.

 
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