The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (492 page)

 
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See
GROUP OF SEVEN
.

 
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(1778–1842).
English landscape painter in watercolour. A protégé of Dr
Monro
and later a member of
Blake's
circle, he represents the transition between tinted topographical drawing and the bolder, more fully developed manner of watercolour painting characteristic of the 19th cent. He was perhaps the most influential teacher of his day; his pupils included
Cox
,
Linnell
, and
Palmer
, and he published several handbooks on technique. His brothers
Cornelius
(1781–1873) and
William
(1785?–1856) were also watercolourists and several descendants carried on the family tradition.

 
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Solution, usually of
resin
in oil or a synthetic equivalent, used in art either as a protective coat over the paint or as a
medium
. Ideally varnish used as a protective coating should be colourless, transparent, without effect on the colours of the paint, and easily removed if it deteriorates. Varnishes have seldom possessed these qualities, and most have deteriorated and darkened with age. The removal of old and impacted varnishes without damage to the underlying paint layers is one of the hardest tasks of the restorer.

 
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(1908– ).
Hungarianborn painter, active in France, the main originator and one of the leading practitioners of
Op art
. He settled in Paris in 1930, and for the next decade worked mainly as a commercial artist, particularly on the designing of posters, showing a keen interest in visual tricks such as
trompe-l'œil
and space illusions. From 1943 he turned to painting and
c.
1947 he adopted the method of geometrical abstraction for which he is best known, exploring methods of creating a hallucinatory impression of movement through visual ambiguity, using for this purpose alternating positive-negative shapes interrupted in such a way as to suggest underlying secondary shapes. His fascination with the idea of movement led him to experiment with
Kinetic art
and he also collaborated with architects in such works as his relief in aluminium for Caracas University (1954), and the French Pavilion at ‘Expo' 67’ in Montreal, hoping to create a kind of urban folk art. He has written a number of manifestos, which, together with his paintings, have been a major influence on younger artists in his field. Vasarely has lived mainly in the south of France since 1961 and there are two museums dedicated to the artist in Provence: the Fondation Vasarely at Aix-en-Provence, which he designed himself, and the Château et Musée Vasarely at Gordes. There is also a Vasarely museum at Pécs, his home town in Hungary. Vasarely's son,
Jean-Pierre
(1934– ), who works under the name Yvaral, is also an Op and Kinetic artist.

 
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(1511–74).
Italian painter, architect, and biographer, born at Arezzo and active mainly in Florence and Rome. In his day he was a leading painter, architect, and artistic impresario, but his activities in these fields have been completely overshadowed by his role as the most important of all artistic biographers. His great book, generally referred to as
Lives of the Artists
, is not only the fundamental source of information on Italian
Renaissance
art, but also a key document in shaping attitudes about the period for centuries afterwards (The book was first published in 1550 as
Le Vite de' più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani
—The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors; in 1568 he published a second, much enlarged edition, in which the painters are mentioned first in the title.) Vasari wrote with a definite philosophy of art and art history. He believed that art is in the first instance imitation of nature and that progress in painting consists of the perfecting of the means of representation. He accepted the belief of Italian humanism that these had been taken to a high level of perfection in
classical
antiquity, that art had passed through a period of decline in the Middle Ages, and that it was revived and set once more on its true path by
Giotto
. The main theme of the
Lives
was to set forth the revival of art in Tuscany by Giotto and
Cimabue
, its steady progress at the hands of such artists as
Ghiberti
,
Brunelleschi
, and
Donatello
, and its culmination with
Leonardo
,
Raphael
, and above all
Michelangelo
, whom Vasari idolized and whose biography was the only one of a living artist to appear in the first edition of his book (the second edition includes accounts of several artists then living, as well as Vasari's own autobiography). The idea of artistic ‘progress’ he promulgated subsequently coloured most writing on the period. Although Vasari's testimony has often been impugned on particular points (see, for example,
Andrea del Castagno
and
Andrea del Sarto
), he gathered together an enormous amount of invaluable information and presented it in a lively style, full of memorable anecdotes. Moreover, his qualitative judgements have generally stood the test of time well. His book became the model for artistic biographers in other countries, such as van
Mander
in the Netherlands,
Palomino
in Spain, and
Sandrart
in Germany.
As a painter, Vasari was one of the most prolific decorators of his period, but he is not now highly regarded, his work representing the most in-bred and affected kind of
Mannerism
. As an architect he has a higher reputation; his most important building is the
Uffizi
in Florence. He designed and decorated his own house in Arezzo, now a Vasari museum. Vasari was also the first important collector of drawings, using them partly as research material for his biographies, for the insight they gave into the creative process.