The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (428 page)

(1486–1570).
Florentine sculptor and architect, active mainly in Venice. He trained under Andrea
Sansovino
, whose name he adopted as a sign of his admiration. In 1505/6 he followed Andrea to Rome, where he moved in the circle of
Bramante
and
Raphael
and worked on the restoration of ancient sculpture. From 1511 to 1517 he was again in Florence, where he shared a studio with
Andrea del Sarto
, and he then returned to Rome until the Sack of 1527, when he moved to Venice. There he was appointed state architect (1529), formed a close friendship with
Titian
and became a dominant figure in the art establishment. Sansovino played a major role in introducing the High
Renaissance
style to Venice in both architecture and sculpture, and his sculptures are often important decorative elements of his buildings. His most celebrated work, one of Venice's most familiar sights, is the glorious Library of San Marco (begun 1537). As a sculptor he is best known for the colossal figures of
Mars
and
Neptune
(commissioned 1554) on the staircase of the Doges' Palace. Sansovino's sculptural style was firmly rooted in his study of antiquity, but it was in no way academic and possessed great vitality. He studied assiduously from the life as well as from the
antique
, and legend has it that the model for his
Bacchus
(Bargello, Florence, 1511–12) went mad through being made to pose for hours on end with his arm raised and one day was found in this position standing naked on top of a chimney. Sansovino's son
Francesco
(1521–86) was a scholar of diversified interests. His
Venetia città nobilissima
(Venice, most noble city), published in 1581, is an important source-book—the first attempt to give a systematic account of a city's artistic heritage.

 
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(d. 1494).
Italian painter, the father of
Raphael
, active mainly in Urbino, where he worked for the court. He was ‘a mediocre painter but an intelligent man’ (
Vasari
) and no doubt gave his illustrious son his introduction to humanist culture. Santi is now remembered less for his paintings than for his verse chronicle in twenty-three books recounting the exploits of the dukes of Urbino, which he dedicated to the young Duke Guidobaldo da
Montefeltro
. This work is interesting to the art historian because it includes incidental comments on the reputations of contemporary artists. Santi's house in Urbino is now a museum—the Casa di Raffaello. It contains a small fresco of the Virgin and Child that some authorities consider to be Santi's portrayal of Raphael and his mother, and others claim as a very early work by Raphael himself.

 
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(1579–1620).
Italian painter. He was born and died in Venice but spent almost all his career in Rome. There he formed his style under the influence of
Caravaggio
and
Elsheimer
, painting small luminous pictures of figures in landscapes as well as much larger altarpieces, including the replacement for Caravaggio's
Death of the Virgin
(Louvre, Paris), which the church of Sta Maria della Scala had rejected in 1606. Saraceni's picture is still
in situ
. He painted several other smaller variants or versions of the picture, so the design was evidently popular. His style was sensitive and poetic, showing a delicate feeling for colour and tone. His liking for turbans, tasselled fringes, and stringy drapery folds, and his richly
impasted
paint may have influenced Dutch artists in Rome such as
Lastman
and
Pynas
, and through them
Rembrandt
. He also possibly had some influence in Lorraine, through his pupil, the French Caravaggesque painter Jean Le Clerc (
c.
1587–1633). Le Clerc was also an engraver; his prints include one of his master's
Death of the Virgin
(after a small version on copper, now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, rather than the large altarpiece in Rome).

 
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(1856–1925).
American painter, chiefly famous as the outstanding society portraitist of his time:
Rodin
called him ‘the van
Dyck
of our times’. He was born in Florence, the son of wealthy parents, and he had an international upbringing and career—indeed, he has been described as ‘an American born in Italy, educated in France, who looks like a German, speaks like an Englishman, and paints like a Spaniard’ (William Starkweather , ‘The Art of John S. Sargent ’,
Mentor
, October 1924). His ‘Spanishness’ refers to his deep admiration for
Velázquez
, for although he was encouraged to paint directly by his teacher
Carolus-Duran
in Paris (1874–6), the virtuoso handling of paint that characterized his style derived more particularly from Old Masters such as Velázquez and
Hals
(he visited Madrid and Haarlem to study their work in 1879–80). In 1884 he became famous when his portrait of Madame Gautreau (Met. Mus., New York) caused a sensation at the Paris
Salon
because of what was felt to be its provocatively erotic character. It was exhibited as
Madame X
, but the sitter, a society beauty of strikingly unconventional looks, was unmistakable, and her mother wrote to Sargent imploring him to withdraw the picture, which she said had made her daughter a laughing-stock. The scandal persuaded Sargent to move to London, and he remained based there for the rest of his life; he continued to travel extensively, however, and often visited America. The lavish elegance of his work brought him unrivalled success, and his portraits of the wealthy and privileged convey with brilliant bravura the glamour and opulence of high society life. Even in his lifetime he was deprecated by critics and artists (who no doubt found it easy to be jealous of his success) for superficiality of characterization, but although psychological penetration was certainly not his strength, he was admirably varied in his response to each sitter's individuality. As with many successful portraitists, Sargent's heart lay elsewhere (he called portraiture ‘a pimp's profession’), and after about 1907 he took few commissions. Despite his sophistication and charm and the entrée to high society that his success gave him, he was a very private person, who never married and led a quiet life. He loved painting landscape watercolours, showing a technique as dashing in this medium as in his oil paintings, and from the 1890s he devoted much of his energies to ambitious allegorical murals in the Public Library and Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (as models for the
Danaides
in one of these he used dancing girls from the chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies). The most unexpected side to his talents is revealed in the enormous
Gassed
(Imperial War Mus., London, 1918), which he painted as an
Official War Artist
. It has remarkable tragic power and is one of the greatest pictures inspired by the First World War. Sargent's reputation plummeted after his death but has soared again since the 1970s.

 
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