The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (90 page)

(1924– ).
British sculptor, one of the most influential figures in post-war British art. After training as an engineer at Cambridge University and serving in the navy in the Second World War, he studied sculpture in London, then from 1951 to 1953 worked as part-time assistant to Henry
Moore
. His early works were figures modelled in clay, but a radical change of direction came after he visited the USA and met David
Smith
in 1959. In the following year he began making abstract metal sculpture, using standard industrial parts such as steel plates and lengths of aluminium tubing together with pieces of scrap, which he welded and bolted together and then generally painted a single rich colour. The colour helped to unify the various shapes and textures and often set the mood for the piece, as with the bright and optimistic red of
Early One Morning
(Tate Gallery, London, 1962). This, like many of Caro's sculptures, is large in scale and open and extended in composition; it rests directly on the ground, and Caro has been one of the leading figures in challenging the ‘pedestal’ tradition. Caro taught part-time at St Martin's School of Art in London 1953–79, and he had a major influence on several of the young sculptors who trained under him, initiating a new school of British abstract sculpture (see
NEW GENERATION
). In the 1970s his work became much more massive and rougher in texture, sometimes incorporating huge chunks of metal. In the 1980s he returned to more traditional materials and techniques and began making figurative (or semi-abstract) works in bronze, including (in the early 1990s) a series inspired by the Trojan War. His reputation is high in the USA as well as Britain, but he is not without detractors; the critic Peter Fuller described the work with which he became famous as ‘nothing if not of its time: it reflected the superficial, synthetic, urban, commercial American values which dominated the 1960s’.

 
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Carolingian art
.

The art and architecture of the reign of Charlemagne (800–814), the first Holy Roman Emperor, and of his successors until about 900. Charlemagne's reign was noteworthy for reforms in many fields; his guiding principle was a renewal of the values of the Roman Empire, and this was felt in the arts no less than in administrative, judicial, and religious matters. His capital was at Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), which became the centre of a cultural revival following a bleak period for the arts in the Franco-German lands that formed the heart of his vast empire. Charlemagne recognized the value of the arts for the education of his subjects and was himself the principal initiator of the cultural revival. Little survives of Carolingian mural paintings or mosaics, but several manuscripts contemporary with Charlemagne are known, showing a classical, naturalistic figure style, but also at times a vivid expressiveness. There was no large-scale sculpture, but Carolingian ivory sculpture and metal-work (on book covers, for example) often reached a high level. Carolingian art had great influence on
Ottonian
and
Romanesque
art.

 
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(1838–1917).
French painter. His early works were influenced by
Courbet
, but from about 1870 he concentrated on portraiture, becoming a great fashionable success with his slick style.
Sargent
was the most important of his many pupils. In 1905 he was appointed Director of the French School in Rome.

 
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(
c.
1520–
c.
1600).
French
Mannerist
painter. He is one of the few French painters of his time with a distinctive artistic personality, and his work reflects the refined but unstable atmosphere of the Valois court during the Wars of Religion (1560–98). He worked at
Fontainebleau
under
Primaticcio
in the 1540s and later became court painter to Catherine de Médicis, wife of Henry II of France. His few surviving works include historical and allegorical subjects in the manner of court ceremonies, scenes of magic and prediction, and massacres, as in
Massacres under the Triumvirate
(1566) in the Louvre, his only signed and dated painting. His style is characterized most obviously by extremely elongated, precious-looking figures set in open spaces that seem too large for them. He had a penchant for gaudy colours and bizarre architectural forms. Some of the works attributed to him may be by other hands, however, for French painting of his period is such an obscure area that Caron's name is liable to be attached to anything similar to his known
œuvre
.

 
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(
c.
1450/60?–1525/6).
Venetian painter. His life is poorly documented, and it is not known with whom he trained, but it is generally agreed that the chief influence on his work was Gentile
Bellini
. This is especially apparent in the first of the two great cycles of paintings that are his chief claim to fame—the
Scenes from the Life of St Ursula
, executed in the 1490s and now in the Accademia, Venice. Carpaccio's distinguishing characteristics—his taste for anecdote, and his eye for the crowded detail of the Venetian scene—found their happiest expression in these paintings, one of which, the
Miracle of the Cross
, looks forward to the 18th-cent. compositions of
Canaletto
and
Guardi
. His other cycle,
Scenes from the Lives of St George and St Jerome
, painted for the Scuola (or ‘Society’) of S. Giorgio degli Schiavone, Venice, in 1502–7 (still in the Scuola), combines fantasy with detail minutely observed. After these two major commissions, however, Carpaccio's career declined, his work seeming old-fashioned, and he remained virtually forgotten until
Ruskin
revived his reputation in the 19th cent. He is now rated as second only to Giovanni Bellini as the outstanding Venetian painter of his generation.