The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (33 page)

(1624–96).
Florentine painter, art historian, antiquarian, and philologian. His
Notizie de' professori del disegno
(1681–1728), lives of artists from
Cimabue
to his own time, is valuable for the information it gives about 16th-cent. Florentine artists as well as about his own contemporaries. He was an innovator as an art historian in making use of every kind of document. Apart from the
Notizie
, his most important work is his biography of
Bernini
(1682), the primary source for the artist's life. He also wrote a history of engraving (1686), which contains one of the earliest accounts of
Rembrandt's
life.

 
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(
c.
1426–99).
Florentine painter, mosaicist, and worker in stained glass. His training is unknown, but his graceful and refined style shows the influence of
Domenico
Veneziano and Fra
Angelico
. His finest works include a damaged but still enchanting fresco of the
Nativity
(1460–2) in the forecourt of the SS. Annunziata, Florence, a
Madonna and Child
(
c.
1460) in the Louvre, Paris, and an
Annunciation
(
c.
1460) in the Uffizi, Florence. They show his remarkable sensitivity to light and landscape and his engaging blend of naïvety and sophistication. In his
History of Italian Renaissance Art
(1970), Frederick Hartt writes that Baldovinetti was ‘the finest painter in Florence’ in the 1460s, and considers him ‘a very gifted master who somehow never quite seemed to fulfil his great initial promise’.

 
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(1484/5–1545).
German painter and graphic artist. He probably trained with
Dürer
in Nuremberg, but his brilliant colour, expressive use of distortion, and taste for the gruesome bring him closer in spirit to his other great German contemporary,
Grünewald
. His output was varied and extensive, including religious works, allegories and mythologies, portraits, designs for stained glass and tapestries, and a large body of graphic work, particularly book illustrations. He was active mainly in Strasburg, but from 1512 to 1517 he lived in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, where he worked on his masterpiece, the high altar for Freiburg Cathedral, the centre panel of which is a radiant
Coronation of the Virgin.
His most characteristic paintings, however, are fairly small in scale—erotic allegories such as
Death and the Maiden
, a subject he treated several times. Eroticism is often strongly present in his engravings, the best known of which is
The Bewitched Stable Boy
(1544), which has been interpreted as an allegory of lust.

 
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(1575?–1632).
Flemish
Mannerist
painter, active mainly in his native Antwerp. He was in Italy in the 1590s. His speciality was mythological scenes painted in the highly finished manner of Jan
Brueghel
, one of the numerous artists with whom he collaborated. Van Balen was a popular teacher, his most important pupil being Van
Dyck
. He also had three painter sons.

 
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(1871–1958).
Italian painter and sculptor, active mainly in Rome, one of the leading
Futurist
artists. From a visit to Paris in 1900–1 Balla brought back to Italy a feeling for
divisionism
and for colour and light, which he passed on to his pupils
Boccioni
and
Severini
. His early works included landscapes and portraits, but after the turn of the century he became increasingly interested in portraying aspects of modern industrialized life. In 1910 he joined the Futurists and soon became preoccupied with their characteristic aim of portraying movement. Unlike the other Futurists, however, Balla was not interested in machines and violence and his paintings tend towards the lyrical and the witty. The most famous is the delightful
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash
(Albright-Knox Art Gal., Buffalo, 1912), in which the multiple impressions of the dog's legs and tail convey movement in a manner that later became a cartoon convention. By 1913 he was painting semi-abstract pictures originating in observations of reality (
Abstract Speed—the Car Has Passed
, Tate, London, 1913). After the First World War, Balla stayed true to the ideals of Futurism after his colleagues had abandoned them, but he turned to a more conventional style in the 1930s. By the end of his long life he was much admired as the last survivor of a brilliant phase of modern Italian art.

 
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