The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (497 page)

Family of French painters, three members of which attained distinction.
Claude-Joseph Vernet
(1714–89) was one of the leading French landscape painters of his period. From 1733 to 1753 he worked in Rome, where he was influenced by the light and atmosphere of
Claude
and also by the more wild and dramatic art of Salvator
Rosa
. With Hubert
Robert
, he became a leading exponent of a type of idealized and somewhat sentimental landscape that had a great vogue at this time. Vernet was particularly celebrated for his paintings of the sea-shore and ports, and on returning to Paris in 1753 he was commissioned by Louis XV to paint a series of the sea-ports of France. The sixteen which he did are in the Louvre.
Antoine-Charles-Horace
, known as ‘Carle’ (1758–1836), son of the foregoing, painted large battle pictures for Napoleon (
The Battle of Marengo; Morning of Austerlitz
; both at Versailles), and after the restoration of the monarchy he became official painter to Louis XVIII, for whom he did racing and hunting scenes.
Émile-Jean-Horace Vernet
(1789–1863), known as Horace Vernet , son of the foregoing, was one of the most prolific of French military painters, specializing in scenes of the Napoleonic era. A portrait of Napoleon and four battlepieces by him are in the National Gallery, London. He also did animal and Oriental subjects. From 1828 to 1835 he was Director of the French Academy in Rome.

 
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(1528–88).
Italian painter, born at Verona (from which his nickname derives), but active in Venice from about 1553 and considered a member of the Venetian school. With
Tintoretto
he became the dominant figure in Venetian painting in the generation after
Titian
and he had many major commissions, both religious and secular. He soon established a distinctive style and thereafter developed relatively little. Few of his paintings are dated or can be reliably dated, so his chronology is difficult to construct. Similarly, because he had such a highly organized studio and his output was so large, there can be problems in distinguishing the work of his own hand. Nevertheless, his status and achievement are clear. He was one of the greatest of all decorative artists, delighting in painting enormous pageant-like scenes that bear witness to the material splendour of Venice in its Golden Age. Marble columns and costumes of velvet and satin abound in his work, and he used a sumptuous but delicate palette in which pale blue, orange, silvery white, and lemon yellow predominate. In his religious works his penchant was for feast scenes from the Bible rather than incidents from Christ's Passion. His love of richness and ornament got him into trouble with the Inquisition in a famous incident when he was taken to task for crowding a painting of the
Last Supper
with such irrelevant and irreverent figures as ‘a buffoon with a parrot on his wrist…a servant whose nose was bleeding…dwarfs and similar vulgarities’. Veronese staunchly defended his right to artistic license: ‘I received the commission to decorate the picture as I saw fit. It is large and, it seemed to me, it could hold many figures.’ He was instructed to make changes, but the matter was resolved by changing the title of the picture to
The Feast in the House of Levi
(Accademia, Venice, 1573).
Veronese's secular works include the delightfully light-hearted frescos (including
illusionistic
architecture and enchanting landscapes) decorating the Villa Barbaro at Maser, near Treviso (
c.
1561), a series of four canvases,
Allegory of Love
(NG, London,
c.
1575), for the emperor Rudolf II in Prague, and the resplendent
Triumph of Venice
(
c.
1585) on the ceiling of the Hall of the Great Council in the Doges' Palace, Venice. He also painted portraits. His studio was carried on after his death by his brother Benedetto and sons Carletto and Gabriele. He had no significant pupils, but his influence on Venetian painting was important, particularly in the 18th cent., when he was an inspiration to the masters of the second great flowering of decorative painting in the city, above all
Tiepolo
.

 
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(
c.
1639–1707).
Italian decorative painter who settled in England in about 1671 after working in France and enjoyed an enormously successful and wellremunerated career. He was much employed by the Crown—at Whitehall Palace, Windsor Castle, and Hampton Court—and also worked at great houses such as Burghley and Chatsworth. His success was based on his self-assertiveness and the lack of native talent in his field rather than on his skills as an artist, for his work is at best mediocre (and often dismal) judged by European standards.
Laguerre
, his onetime assistant, was a better painter but had less worldly success.

 
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(
c.
1435–88)
. Florentine sculptor, painter, and metalworker, one of the outstanding Italian artists of his period. His nickname—Verrocchio means ‘true eye’—refers not to his sharpness of vision, but to the fact that as a youth he had been the protégé of an ecclesiastic of that name. He is said to have studied in
Donatello's
workshop, but his main training was as a goldsmith, and delicacy of craftsmanship is one of the salient features of his work. Only one work in precious metal by him survives, however—a silver
relief
of the
Beheading of John the Baptist
(1477–80), done for the Baptistery in Florence and now in the Cathedral Museum. His major activity was as a sculptor, principally in bronze, but also in marble and
terracotta
, and his two most famous works rank with the statues of Donatello that inspired them among the great masterpieces of Italian sculpture, whilst also showing the great differences in approach between the two artists. Verrocchio's
David
(Bargello, Florence,
c.
1475) is more refined, but less broodingly intense than Donatello's
David
in the same museum, and Verrocchio's masterpiece, the equestrian statue of the
condottiere
Bartolommeo Colleoni in Venice (begun 1481, completed after Verrocchio's death), has a magnificent sense of movement and swagger, but less of the heroic dignity of Donatello's
Gattamelata
statue in Padua. It is much harder to assess Verrocchio's stature as a painter as very few works exist that can be convincingly assigned to his own hand. Nevertheless numerous paintings came from his workshop, which was the largest in Florence at this time, and he trained distinguished painters, most notably
Leonardo da Vinci
, who assisted his master with the
Baptism of Christ
(Uffizi, Florence,
c.
1470), one of the few paintings indisputably by Verrocchio . Leonardo took his superb craftsmanship from Verrocchio and also shared his fascination with two contrasting types—the tough old warrior (as in the
Colleoni
monument) and the epicene youth (as in the
David
). Leonardo's enormous fame has tended to cast a shadow over Verrocchio, but he is generally regarded as the greatest Italian sculptor between Donatello and
Michelangelo
.

 
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