The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (14 page)

 
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Ancients
.

Group of English
Romantic
artists active for about a decade in the 1820s and 1830s. The leading member of the group was Samuel
Palmer
; others included Edward
Calvert
and George
Richmond
. The name derives from their passion for the medieval world, but they concentrated on pastoral subjects, sharing the mystical outlook of their inspiration, William
Blake
.

 
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Anderson , Laurie
.

See
PERFORMANCE ART
.

 
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(1935– ).
American sculptor, a leading exponent of
Minimal art
. He produces his works by stacking identical readymade commercial units such as bricks, cement blocks, etc. (occasionally ‘natural products’ like logs or bales of hay) in simple geometrical arrangements. His most characteristic products abjure height and are arranged as horizontal configurations on the ground—‘more like roads than buildings’, in his own words. In Britain Andre is best known for the sensational publicity accompanying ‘the Tate bricks’ incident in 1976. His
Equivalent VIII
(1966) (consisting of 120 bricks arranged two deep in a rectangle) was vandalized and there was an outcry about the alleged waste of public money on its purchase by the Tate Gallery. In 1985 Andre was charged with murdering his wife (who died after falling from a window); he was acquitted at his trial.

 
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(active
c.
1343–77).
Florentine painter, remembered mainly for his frescos in the Spanish Chapel of Sta Maria Novella, Florence. This is a church of the Dominican Order, and the frescos, illustrating the Triumph of the Faith and the Dominican doctrine, in both their severity and their meticulous detail, accorded with the expository style of the Dominican preaching friars. Andrea is last recorded in 1377 working on frescos of the
Life of St Raynerius
in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

 
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(
c.
1421–57).
One of the most powerful Florentine painters in the generation after
Masaccio
. In 1440 he is said to have painted frescos at the Palazzo del Podestà depicting rebels against Cosimo de'
Medici
who were sentenced to be hanged by the heels, earning him the sobriquet Andreino degli Impiccati (of the hanged men). These have been destroyed, and Andrea's earliest known surviving works are frescos in the church of Sta Zaccaria in Venice (1442). By 1444 he was back in Florence, designing a stained-glass window for the cathedral, and soon after he began his greatest work, a series of frescos on Christ's Passion for the monastery of Sta Apollonia (now a Castagno museum), dominated by one of the most celebrated of all portrayals of
The Last Supper
. In their emotional vigour and sinewy realism these paintings have been regarded as the pictorial equivalent of the sculpture of
Donatello
, but they also have something of Masaccio's monumentality. Andrea's other noteworthy works in Florence include the
St Julian
(S S. Annunziata , 1454–5), a frescoed equestrian portrait in the cathedral—
Niccolò da Tolentino
—a pendant to
Uccello's
earlier Sir John Hawkwood , and an extraordinarily intense pair of altar frescos for SS. Annunziata (
c.
1455).
Vasari
started the rumour that Castagno murdered his friend
Domenico Veneziano
, and it was not until the 19th cent. that it was discovered that Castagno had died early of the plague and that Domenico in fact had outlived him. The story, however, makes it easy to believe that the intensity of his work reflected a fierce temperament.