The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (51 page)

 
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(
c.
960–1022).
German ecclesiastic and art patron. He was abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Hildesheim in Saxony from 993 until his death, and for the church of St Michael there (begun 1001) he commissioned the famous bronze doors (
c.
1008–15) and a great bronze column (
c.
1018–20) probably intended to support the paschal candle. They are important not only for being among the outstanding European works of their period, but also for marking the revival of the
cire-perdue
technique of casting, which had virtually disappeared since the time of Charlemagne. A contemporary biographer records that Bernward himself practised metalwork and manuscript
illumination
, but no work can be attributed to him. He was canonized in 1192 and is the patron saint of goldsmiths.

 
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Berruguete
.

The name of two Castilian artists, father and son, who are respectively associated with the beginnings of the
Renaissance
and
Mannerist
styles in Spain.
Pedro
(d. 1504) was court painter to Ferdinand and Isabella. He may have been the ‘Pietro Spagnuolo’ employed in 1477 with
Melozzo da Forlì
and
Joos van Wassenhove
on the decoration of the palace library at Urbino. He was working at Toledo from 1483. Ten panels from the Dominican convent at Avila, now in the Prado, demonstrate that his Renaissance style was modified by the Flemish influences then prevailing in Spain.
Alonso
(
c.
1488–1561), sculptor and painter, was the son and probably pupil of Pedro. For some years, between 1504 and 1517, he was in Italy, where he completed Filippino
Lippi's
Coronation of the Virgin
(Louvre, Paris). Berruguete was back in Spain by 1518; in that year he was appointed court painter to Charles V, but his career flourished mainly as a sculptor. He worked in Valladolid and Toledo, his finest works including the
reredos
of the monastery church of S. Benito, Valladolid, dating from 1526 (Valladolid Mus.), and a set of choir stalls with
alabaster
figures above for the choir of Toledo Cathedral (1539–43). The emotional intensity and expressive
contrapposto
characteristic of his style reflected the influence of
Michelangelo
(who refers to Berruguete in his letters) and of the
Laocoön
, which he had studied in Rome. He is generally considered the greatest Spanish sculptor of the 16th cent., his work having something of the spirit of El
Greco
, who succeeded him as the outstanding artist in Toledo.

 
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(
c.
1420–91).
Florentine sculptor. He was a fairly minor talent, but he is remembered for three things. First, he was the pupil and assistant of
Donatello
and teacher of
Michelangelo
, thus forming the link between the greatest Florentine sculptors of the 15th and 16th cents. Secondly, he was described by
Vasari
as the first head of the
academy
of art which Lorenzo the Magnificent is said to have founded in the
Medici
gardens by the Piazza di S. Marco. Thirdly, he developed a new type of sculpture—the small-scale bronze, intended, like the
cabinet picture
, for the private collector. Bertoldo was responsible for the completion of the two pulpits in S. Lorenzo left unfinished by Donatello at his death. His own most noteworthy work is a bronze
relief
of a battle scene in the Bargello, Florence, which inspired Michelangelo's
Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs
(Casa Buonarroti, Florence). Bertoldo was also recognized as one of the leading portrait medallists of his time.

 
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(1921–86).
German sculptor. draughtsman, teacher, and
Performance artist
, regarded as one of the most influential leaders of avant-garde art in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Like Yves
Klein
, he was one of the leading lights in shifting emphasis from what an artist makes to his personality, actions, and opinions, and he succeeded in creating a kind of personal mythology. (As a Luftwaffe pilot he was shot down in the Crimea in 1943 and was looked after by nomadic Tartars who kept him warm with fat and felt—materials that came to figure prominently in his work. The hat that he habitually wore hid the head injuries he received in the crash.) After the war he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, 1946–51, and he became Professor of Sculpture there in 1961. He worked in various media, but is perhaps best known for his performances, of which the most famous was probably
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
(1965). In this he walked around an exhibition in the Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf, his face covered in honey and gold leaf, carrying in his arms a dead hare, to which he gave an explanation of various pictures. He described the performance as ‘A complex tableau about the problems of language, and about the problems of thought, of human consciousness and of the consciousness of animals.’ In 1962 Beuys became a member of
Fluxus
, an international group of artists, opposed to tradition and professionalism in the arts, and he was also active in politics, aligning himself with the West German ecology party, the Greens. His ‘presumptuous political dilettantism’ eventually led to conflict with authority and in 1972 he was dismissed from his professorship. The protests that followed included a strike by his students, and a settlement was eventually reached whereby he kept his title and studio but his teaching contract was ended. He devoted a good deal of his later career to public speaking and debate, and in 1982 he had a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Paris. By the end of his life he was an international celebrity and was regarded by his admirers as a kind of art guru.