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Valentin de Boulogne (c. 1591 - 1632), sometimes referred to as Le Valentin, was a French painter.
Vallotton Felix (1865—1925). Swiss painter, woodcut artist and writer who became a naturalized French subject in 1900. He went to Paris in 1882 and joined the Nabis but later adopted a more detailed and objective style reminiscent of the German and Swiss schools. His use of the woodcut was influential in reviving that medium.Valmier Georges (French, 1885-1937)
Valori Plastici (It. Plastic Values). The name of a magazine founded in Rome in 1918 by Broglio, *Carra, *Severini and De *Chinco. It advocated a return to classicism and the revival of traditional academic methods of art teaching and gave its name to a Neoclassical tendency in the Italian art of the time.
Van Der Zee James (1886- 1983). American photographer
Van de Velde Henri (born April 3, 1863, Antwerp, Belg. - died Oct. 25, 1957, Zürich, Switz.) In full Henry Clemens Van De Velde Belgian architect and teacher who ranks with his compatriot Victor Horta as an originator of the Art Nouveau style, characterized by longsinuous lines derived from naturalisticforms. By designing furniture and interiors for the Paris art galleries of Samuel Bing in 1896, van de Velde was responsible for bringing the Art Nouveau style to Paris. Buthe was interested not so much in the style as in the philosophy of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in England. Van de Velde's most vital contributions to modern design were made as a teacher in Germany, where his name became known through the exhibition of furnished interiors at Dresden in 1897. In 1902 he went to Weimar as artistic adviser to the grand duke of Saxe-Weimar. There he reorganized the Kunstgewerbeschule (arts-and-crafts school) and the academy of fine art and thus laid the foundations for Walter Gropius' amalgamation of the two bodies into the Bauhaus in1919. Like the progressive German designers at the time, van de Velde was connected with the Deutscher Werkbund, and he designed the theatre for the Werkbund Exposition in Cologne in 1914. Despite official appointments in Belgium, van de Velde after 1918 made no further contributions to architecture or design.A valuable extract from his Memoirs (1891–1901) was published in the Architectural Review, 112:143–148 (September 1952).
Van Gogh Vincent. *Gogh Vincent Van
Vanvitelli Luigi (May 12, 1700, Naples – March 1, 1773, Caserta) was an Italian engineer and architect. The most prominent eighteenth-century architect of Italy, he practiced a sober classicizing academic Late Baroque style that made an easy transition to Neoclassicism. Vanvitelli was born at Naples, the son of a Dutch painter of land and cityscpapes (veduta), Caspar van Wittel, who also goes by the name Vanvitelli. He was trained in Rome by the architect Nicola Salvi, with whom he worked on construction of the Trevi Fountain. Following his notable successes in the competitions for the facade of the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano (1732) and the facade of Palazzo Poli behind the Trevi Fountain, Pope Clement XII sent him to the Marche to buildsome papal projects. At Ancona in 1732, he devised the vast Lazzaretto, a pentagonal building covering more than 20,000 square meters, built to protect the military defensive authorities from the risk of contagious diseases potentially reaching the town with the ships. Later it was used also as a military hospital or as barracks. In Rome, Vanvitelli stabilized the dome of St. Peter's Basilica when it developed cracks and found time to paint frescos in a chapel at Sant Cecilia in Trastevere. Beginning in 1742 Vanvitelli designed (along with Nicola Salvi) the Chapel of St. John the Baptist for King John V of Portugal. It was built in Rome, disassembed in 1747, and shipped to Lisbon, where it was reassembled in the Church of St. Roch (Igreja de Săo Roque). It was completed in 1750, although the mosaics in it were not finished until 1752. Built of many precious marbles and other costly stones, as well as gilt bronze, it was held to be the most expensive chapel in Europe up to that time. Vanvitelli's technical and engineering capabilities, together with his sense of scenographic drama led Charles VII of Naples to commission the great Palace of Caserta, intended as a fresh start for administering the ungovernable Kingdom of Naples. Vanvitelli worked on the project for the rest of his life, for Charles and for his successor Ferdinand IV. In Naples he designed the city's Palazzo Reale (1753) and some aristocratic palaces, and churches. His engineering talents were exercised as well: for Caserta he devised the great aqueduct system that brought water to run the cascades and fountains. He built a bridge over the Calore Irpino in Benevento. Luigi Vanvitelli died at Caserta in 1773.Varallo Tanzio da (b Riale d’Alagna, 1575–80; d 1632–3). Italian painter. He is best known for his dramatic oil paintings executed in a unique style of Caravaggesque realism modified by the elegance of Lombard Late Mannerism. He also adopted elements of a robust and unsophisticated realism from Piedmontese art, as is evident in his frescoes for the sacromonte at Varallo. His drawings are in the highly refined and meticulously finished technique associated with Renaissance draughtsmanship.
Vargas Alberto (9 February 1896–30 December 1982) was a noted painter of pin-up girls and erotica. Born in Arequipa, Peru, Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chávez came to the United States in 1916 after studying art in Europe prior to World War I. He was the son of famous peruvian photographer Carlos Vargas. His early career included work as an artist for the Ziegfeld Follies and for many Hollywood studios. Vargas' most famous piece of film work was that for the 1933 film The Sin of Nora Moran, which shows a near-naked Zita Johann in a pose of desperation. The poster is frequently named one of the greatest movie posters ever made. He became famous in the 1940s as the creator of iconic World War II era pin-ups for Esquire magazine known as "Varga Girls." The nose art of many World War II aircraft was adapted from these Esquire pin-ups. A legal dispute with Esquire over the use of the name "Varga" resulted in a judgment against Vargas and he struggled financially until the 1960s when Playboy magazine began to use his work as "Vargas Girls." His career flourished and he had major exhibitions of his work all over the world. The death of his wife Anna Mae in 1974 left him devastated and he stopped painting. The publication of his autobiography in 1978 renewed interest in his work and brought him partially out of his self-imposed retirement to do a few works, such as album covers for Bernadette Peters and the Cars. He died of a stroke on December 30, 1982, at the age of 86. Many of Vargas's works from his period with Esquire are now held by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, which was given those works in 1980 along with a large body of other art from the magazine. His work was typically a combination of watercolor and airbrush. His mastery of the airbrush is acknowledged by the fact that the highest achievement in the community of airbrush artistry is the Vargas Award, awarded annually by Airbrush Action Magazine. His images would often portray elegantly dressed, semi-nude to nude women of idealized proportions. Vargas's artistic trait would be slender fingers and toes, with nails often painted red. Vargas is widely regarded as one of the finest artists in his genre. He also served as a judge for the Miss Universe beauty contest in 1956-58. Notable women painted by Vargas include Olive Thomas, Billie Burke, Nita Naldi, Marilyn Miller, Paulette Goddard and Ruth Etting.
Varnish. Resinous transparent substance applied by painters to their works in order to preserve them — as distinct from glazing.
Varo Remedios (1908—63). Spanish painter involved in *Surrealist circles who settled permanently in Mexico in 1942, closely associated with *Carrington. The two artists shared an interest m legends, fairy-tales and alchemy with the artistic and biological creativity of woman at the centre of their work. V. focused on alchemy as a positive process of transformation — a search for spiritual enlightenment through materiality — but Alchemy or the Useless Science (1958), in which she employed *decalcomania, begs its futility. Her work is more often characterized by a meticulous application of paint, achieving through formal precision a fluid and dream-like result. Solar Music (1955) and Harmony (1956), though different in character, show a concern for a spiritually redemptive order, which she was to develop further in works such as Bow Again and Ascension to Mount Analogue (both i960).
Vasarely Victor (1908-97). Hungarian painter. He was tutored by Moholy-Nagy, and through him was introduced to the work of Kandinsky, Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mondrian. Since 1930 he has lived in Pans. He was profoundly influenced by the functionalism of the *Bauhaus. His *Op(tical) abstractions, painted often in contrasting colours, are composed of clean-cut geometric forms.
Vasari Giorgio (1511-74). Italian *Mannerist painter and architect of the Uftizi Gal., important as an art historian. His Le vite de' piu eccellenti architctti, pittori, et scultori Italiani, a coll. of nearly 200 biographies dedicated to Cosimo de' Medici was first publ. in 1550 and carefully revised and .enlarged in 1568. V.'s appreciation of Venetian art is coloured by his great love for all things Florentine and his worship of Michelangelo blinds him to the ability of others. But in spite of some inaccuracies V.'s book is an all-important source of information relating to the history of Renaissance art. The 1st complete English trs. appeared in 1850.
Vasari Giorgio "Lives of the Artists" (selections)
Vasnetsov Viktor (b Lop’yal, Vyatka province [now Kirov region], 15 May 1848; d Moscow, 23 July 1926). Painter, designer and graphic artist. He played a leading role in the evolution of Russian art from 19th-century realism towards Art Nouveau with a national historical slant. The son of a priest, he studied at a theological seminary in Vyatka (1862–7); then, developing a passion for drawing, he entered the drawing school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, St Petersburg, and studied under Ivan Kramskoy in 1867–8. He perfected his skills at the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, in 1869–75 and joined the WANDERERS in 1878.
Vatican Rome. Works ot art in the Vatican Palace, in addition to the works by Raphael, artists of the Venetian school and of the 17th-c. Roman school contained in the picture gallery founded by Pius VII, include the paintings by Michelangelo and other artists in the Sistine Chapel, the paintings by Raphael and his assistants and pupils in the Stanze and Loggie, the paintings by Pmtuncchio in the Borgia Apartments and the Raphael tapestries. The chapel ot Nicholas V contains frescoes by Fra Angelico.
Vecchietta Lorenzo di Pietro called II (1412— 80). Sienese painter and sculptor probably trained as a painter by *Sassetta; his masterpiece is Assumption of the Virgin. His sculptural work, which shows Florentine influence, includes the statue Risen Christ and the bronze ciboniim on the high altar of Siena cathedral.
Vecenaj Ivan (b 1920). Naive Art.
Vedder Elihu (1836-1923). U.S. painter of imaginative subjects famous for his series of over 50 ills to Edward Fitzgerald's Ruhdiydl of Omar Khayyam.
Veit Philipp (b Berlin, 13 Feb 1793; d Mainz, 18 Dec 1877). German painter. The stepson, from 1804, of Friedrich von Schlegel, he studied (1808–11) at the Akademie in Dresden under Friedrich Matthäi (1777–1845) and Caspar David Friedrich. He showed talent in drawing but, on moving to Vienna in 1811, had difficulties with painting in oil, and turned to watercolour. Through Schlegel, Veit came to know many of the leading Romantics in Vienna, such as the poet and novelist Joseph von Eichendorff. In 1813–14 Veit took part in the campaign against Napoleon and returned briefly to Berlin. In 1815 he completed a votive picture, the Virgin with Christ and St John, for the church of St James in Heiligenstadt, Vienna, inspired by the work of Pietro Perugino and Raphael. In 1815 Veit left for Italy where he stayed until 1830. In Rome he joined the circle around Friedrich Overbeck and Peter Cornelius, becoming a leading Nazarene. With these artists he took part in providing fresco decorations (1816–17) for the Casa Bartholdy (now the Bibliotheca Hertziana): Veit painted the scene of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife and a decorative lunette allegory, the Seven Years of Plenty (both now Berlin, Staatl. Mussen, N.G.). In 1818 Veit was commissioned to paint the fresco of the Triumph of Religion in the Museo Chiaramonti in the Vatican, one of a series of murals recording the services of Pope Pius VII to science and art. Veit also took part in the decoration of the Casino Massimo in Rome (1818–24), painting the ceiling of the Dante Room with the Heavens of the Blessed and the Empyrean. In these frescoes and in his Maria Immaculata in Trinitŕ dei Monti (1829–30) Veit proved himself the finest colourist of the Nazarene artists. While in Rome, Veit also painted some excellent portraits, notably a Self-portrait (c. 1816; Mainz, Landesmus.). He also produced a fine series of pencil drawings of his fellow German artists in Rome (e.g. Mainz, Landesmus.).
Velazquez Diego Rodriguez de Silva (1599— 1660). Spanish painter, pupil of Francisco de Herrera and Don Francisco Pacheco. In 1617 he graduated from Pacheco's workshop-academy as a master painter and married his daughter in 1618. 4 years later V. left his native Seville for Madrid; his hope of admission to the royal court
was disappointed, but the following year his portrait of his friend the courtier Juan de Fonseca was seen by the king, and this secured V. the commission to paint the king's own portrait. V. became Philip IV's close companion at the Alcazar Palace and remained in his service until his death. Rubens visited the court in 1628 and on his advice V. obtained the king's consent to travel. He left for Italy in 1629 and studied the Italian masters. 20 years passed before he was able to visit Italy again, when he not only studied but also bought paintings by Tintoretto, Veronese and Titian lor the Royal College. In 1650 he painted the portrait of Pope Innocent X in Rome. In 1659 he was ennobled as a Knight of the Order of Santiago.
V.'s greatest achievement is seen not in his splendid representations ot Spanish court life but in the profound feeling for humanity which underlies all his work. In the midst of the glitter and artificiality of his daily lite he was keenly concerned with human tragedy and suffering: the deformed, the dwarfs and the poor were of as much interest as a pope, king or courtier. As an artist he preferred Titian to Raphael. The art of V., like that of Titian, was concerned with movement, the movement of light over objects, dissolving static forms into a summary statement of a visual impression. The paintings of V. show a development in their means — but the end, painting life as it appeared to him, remained constant. His earliest paintings such as The Water Carrier of Seville (c 1618) show a deep concern for everyday reality, uncompromising in subject matter and unpretentious in presentation. The jar m the foreground is just as important as the figures. Material existence is shown here as essence, the trivial becomes eternal.
The royal portraits needed to be treated differently. Form is here partly monumental, partly psychologically conditioned, as in the King Philip IV. The psychological interest increases, as in the later portrait. The famous Las Manillas (1656) — which inspired a series of reworkings of its themes by *Picasso — contains a number of figures, puppet-like and including the artist at his easel, ladies' maids and a dwarf, and reveals the atmosphere of life at the court as seen by a detached and critical man. Forms are suggested with the minimum amount of brushwork and controlled with a superb economy of means. During his life V. continued to be intrigued by the depth of the human mind and in his paintings of dwarfs and court jesters he created a series of tragic and revealing documents, meditations on fate painted in sombre colours. The Pope Innocent X portrait (1650) is one of V.'s greatest.
Two landscapes, views of the Villa Medici, Rome, date from about the same time. V. here foreshadows Impressionism in his glimpse of the fleeting atmosphere of day and dusk. The Surrender of Breda (c. 1634) turns the 'historical' into a composition with light, where the human drama becomes an element of nature. The Rokeby Venus (1658), painted with superb restraint, is the only surviving nude by V.; at the time the subject was virtually forbidden in Spam. V.'s fame suffered an eclipse after his death, but during the 2nd half of the 19th с he was hailed as the 'greatest painter'. In 20th-c. art his work has been of particular relevance for his mastery over formal problems of colour and relationship.Velde Esaias van de (c. 1590—1630). Dutch landscape and genre painter who contributed to the development of Realism in Dutch landscape painting. He was influenced by Buytewech and worked in Haarlem and The Hague. His most notable paintings are small landscapes with figures. J. van Goyen was his pupil.
Velde Jan III van de (c. 1620 - 1662)
Veneciano Arostino (b Venice, c. 1490; d ?Rome, after 1536.) Italian engraver and draughtsman. His monogram (‘A.V.’) and in five instances his full name appear on 141 prints. Of these 85 are dated from 1514 to 1536. He began his career in Venice. His earliest dated prints (1514) are copies after Giulio Campagnola (The Astrologer; B. 411) and Durer (Last Supper; B. 25). A print dated 1515 after Baccio Bandinelli (Cleopatra; B. 193) and another dated 1516 after Andrea del Sarto (the Dead Christ Supported by Three Angels; B. 40) indicate his presence in Florence in these years.
Veneziano Domenico. *Domenico Veneziano
Venetsianov Alexei (b Moscow, 18 Feb 1780; d Safonkovo, 16 Dec 1847). Russian painter, printmaker and teacher. The son of a reasonably well-to-do merchant, he studied in a private boarding-school in Moscow. He worked as a draughtsman in Moscow and then as a land surveyor in St Petersburg, where he probably studied with the portraitist Vladimir Borovikovsky in the first decade of the 19th century. However, he received no formal training. In 1808 he made several etchings for the Zhurnal karikatur, a satirical publication he hoped to bring out regularly; but they were banned by the censor and destroyed. In the first two decades of the 19th century Venetsianov was active primarily as a portrait painter, often working in pastel. His early portraits can be sentimental and romantic, but later ones are marked by simplicity and authenticity and succeed in conveying both the character of the model and nature of his or her usual surroundings.
Venice, school of. School of Italian painting which flourished in the 16th and 18th cs. In the 16th с it developed under the influences of the school of Padua and Antonello da Messina, who introduced the oil-painting technique of the Van Eycks. Rich and painterly use of colour characterized Venetian painting. Early masters were the Bellini and Vivarini families, followed by Giorgione and Titian, then Tintoretto and Veronese. In the 18th с the decorative art of Tiepolo and the views of Canaletto and Guardi revived Venetian painting.
Venosa Robert. American artist living in Boulder, Colorado, USA, who studied with what are termed the New Masters. He has been associated with a number of well known artistic and musical persons. His artworks reside in collections over the world.
Ventrone Luciano (Italian, 1942)
Verbruggen Hendrick Frans (b Antwerp, bapt 30 April 1654; d Antwerp, bur 6 March 1724). Sculptor, architect and book illustrator, son of Peeter Verbrugghen. He began his career under the book illuminator Jan Ruyselinck but became a master sculptor in 1682, the year he married Susanna Verhulst. He became Dean of the Guild of St Luke in 1689. Most of his work was done for churches. In 1684 he created two limewood side altars (h. 5 m) for the chapel of Our Lady of Good Will at Duffel. Here he introduced into the Netherlands a new motif, derived from the work of Bernini and consisting of an oval painting supported by two flying angels. His communion rails (l. 20 m; 1695) for St Walburgis, Bruges, are a highpoint of Flemish Baroque sculpture; the virtuoso handling of the marble makes them look as if modelled from wax. His tactile sense is best shown in the figure of St Augustine (h. 7 m; 1697), placed under the pulpit of St Augustine’s, Antwerp, in which the grain of the wood is used to suggest the wrinkles of the saint’s face and the texture of his clothes. In the highly original oak pulpit he made for the Jesuits of Leuven (1696–9; Brussels Cathedral), a narrative scene is included under the body of the pulpit, which is united in a curvilinear movement with the supporting beams and the sound-board. In 1713 Henricus-Franciscus went bankrupt, but he continued his work on the marble high altar (1713–19) of St Bavo, Ghent.
Vergos. Family of Spanish painters of the 15th с who worked in Barcelona.
Vermeer Jan, of Delft (Joannes van der Meer) (1632—75). Dutch painter mainly active as an art dealer; a member and eventual president of the Painters' Guild at Delft. It is thought that he did not sell one of his own paintings; there survive few contemporary references to his work and he seems to have died in poverty; over half the paintings attributed to him were noted at the time in his house and studio. A contemporary of the painter *Fabritius, a pupil of *Rembrandt, it is likely that he came under both his and *Garavaggio's influence. After the death of Fabritius, V.'s own style began to develop: classical, timeless and monumental — reality in its everyday aspect observed by a passionate and detached intelligence. Domestic life is raised to the level of poetry. V. is acknowledged in our time as one of the great masters and his influence on the 'tonal' painter has been enormous.
V.'s striving towards the fullest possible representation of reality was achieved through mechanical and pictorial means: the *camera obscura, mirrors, smooth and thin paint whose texture does not destroy the illusion of the counterfeit, sculpturesque modelling, the tonal and geometric organization of pictorial space, all these were used ruthlessly to emphasize the visual process. This is now recognized as V.'s unique achievement. A tentative chronology, the result of 50 years' scholarship, permits the following outline of V.'s development.
The Girl Asleep at a Table (c. 1656) shows a growing realization of creative problems and points towards possible solutions. The conventional genre subject is treated quite differently from the average stage-like representation by his contemporaries. As in a landscape, the eye is compelled to travel over a number of clearly defined forms of the foreground, such as a table and chair, before it can reach the figure of the middle distance and see into the room at the far end of the interior. This visual intent is reinforced by cutting into the visual field of the foreground and projecting beyond the picture frame part of the table and the chair, so that the space of the painting is extended into the real space of the spectator. The Maidservant Pouring Milk (r. 1658) carries the intensification of the visual a stage further. Objects are seen as eternal forms placed in an ideal space; a silvery light plays over objects and figures with the same cool detachment. The Love Letter (c. 1670) is the most profound example of V.'s visual philosophy. Other famous paintings by V. are View of Delft and The Head of a Young Girl, The Artist's Studio and Christ in the House of Martha and Alary.Vernet Emile-Jean-Horace (b Paris, 30 June 1789; d Paris, 17 Jan 1863). Painter, son of Carle Vernet. He was born in his father’s lodgings at the Palais du Louvre, where his grandfather Joseph Vernet also lived; his maternal grandfather was Jean-Michel Moreau. To these antecedents and influences are ascribed the supreme ease of his public career, his almost incredible facility and his fecundity. His early training in his father’s studio was supplemented by formal academic training with François-André Vincent until 1810, when he competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome. He first exhibited at the Salon in 1812. In 1814 Vernet received the Légion d’honneur for the part he played in the defence of Paris, which he commemorated in the Clichy Gate: The Defence of Paris, 30 March 1814 (1820; Paris, Louvre;), a spirited painting that represented a manifesto of Liberal opposition to Restoration oppression.
see also: Vernet Horace
Vernet Claude-Joseph (b Avignon, 14 Aug 1714; d Paris, 4 Dec 1789). Painter. Vernet probably received his first lessons in painting from his father, Antoine, who then encouraged him to move to the studio of Philippe Sauvan (1697–1792), the leading master in Avignon. Sauvan supplied altarpieces to local churches and decorative works and mythologies for grand houses in the area. After this apprenticeship Vernet worked in Aix-en-Provence with the decorative painter Jacques Viali ( fl 1681– 1745), who also painted landscapes and marine pictures. In 1731 Vernet independently produced a suite of decorative overdoors for the hotel of the Marquise de Simiane at Aix-en-Provence; at least two of these survive (in situ) and are Vernet’s earliest datable landscapes. These are early indications of his favoured type of subject, and Vernet would have studied works attributed to such 17th-century masters as Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Dughet and Salvator Rosa in private collections at Aix and Avignon. Three years later Joseph de Seytres, Marquis de Caumont, who had previously recommended Vernet to the Marquise de Simiane, offered to sponsor a trip to Italy. This was partly for Vernet to complete his artistic education but also to provide his sponsor with drawings of antiquities.
Veronese. The name used by Paolo Caliari (c. 1528—88). One of the greatest painters of the i6th-c. Venetian school, named after his birthplace, Verona, then within the Venetian cultural and political orbit. Although the son of a stone-breaker and trained by minor Mannerist painters, V. shows an extraordinary assurance of style from the beginning, from which he hardly developed or varied. His first frescoes in the Doge's Palace (r. 1553) and the St Mark's Library, Venice, won him acclaim in Venice and the respect or *Titian. After Titian's semiretirement V. shared with *Tintoretto the most important commissions, and his chief patrons were the religious foundations in Venice. In 1573, however, V. was in serious trouble with the Inquisition for his manner of representing traditional religious scenes in the spirit of high-festival, e.g. Marriage at Саnа, Feast in the House of Levi. Although he was censured, his reputation did not suffer permanently. Like Tintoretto's, V.'s art was enormously influential throughout the 17th and even 18th c, especially with the artists of Spain and Flanders and with Tiepolo and other painters of large-scale decorative schemes. V.'s style shows his delight in elegance, opulence and the splendour of surfaces. This is saved from appearing simply mundane or too facile by high technical skill and a superb colour sense. It would be impossible to list more than a fraction of the paintings of this prolific and consistently fine artist, but nowhere is his colour sense better ill. than in the painting of the golden hair of St Barbara cascading down a dress of gold and black thread in Holy Family with St Barbara. V.'s very personal conception of aristocratic grandeur appears in The Family of Darius before Alexander. Other fine works are: Feast in the House of Simon, 'Fhe Finding of Moses and Rebecca at the Well. That V. could, on occasion, bring a note of tragedy into his painting is shown in the figures on their high crosses against the dark storm-torn sky in the Crucifixion.
Verrio Antonio (c. 1639-1707). Neapolitan decorative painter who settled in Britain in 1671 and was appointed court painter in 1684. In spite of his mediocrity he achieved great success because of the comparative novelty of his late *Baroque style in Britain. He worked at Windsor Castle, Hampton Court and elsewhere.
Verrocchio Andrea del (c. 1435-88). Florentine goldsmith, sculptor and painter. Very little is known of V.'s life, none of his works as a goldsmith have survived and few sculptures can be definitely attributed to him. He worked in Florence at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici. V. is regarded as the most influential Florentine painter of the 2nd half of the 15th с The achievement of V. and his relationship with his young apprentice Leonardo da Vinci have been debated; his profound influence on Leonardo, Lorenzo da Credi and others of the Florentine school is indisputable.
In the bronze statue David (c. 1476) V.'s style is clearly expressive of the new trends in Florentine art. In the quest for naturalism, the mastery of the figure is extended into an understanding of the psychological; the youthful, victorious David is seen as an adolescent full of conceit and self-confidence. This striving after psychological truth expressed by plastic means is carried further in the group on the outside of Or San Michele, Florence (1476—83) representing The Unbelief of St Thomas. The Colleoni monument in Venice, begun in 1479 and only completed after his death, is perhaps his best-known work. Compared with Donatello's earlier Cattamelata, it shows the individuality of V.'s achievement at its height. The condottiere and his horse have become the embodiment of will-power, a purposeful and ruthless machine. Of V.'s painting only the much-disputed The Baptism of Christ remains. On the suggestion of Vasari, the head of one of the kneeling angels is attributed to the young Leonardo da Vinci.
Vettriano Jack (17 November 1951, Fife, Scotland, UK), is a Scottish painter.
Video art. Television and video-recording technology used m works of art (e.g. *Paik).
Vien Joseph-Marie (1716—1809). French painter working at Rome for a period and influenced by the *Neoclassicism of the later 18th с. Не achieved a great contemporary reputation both as artist and teacher. J.-L. *David was a pupil.
Vignette. Term originally applied to the decorative borders of medieval mss, later to the small decorative motifs appearing at the ends of the chapters of 18th- and 19th-c. books.
Vijayanagar. Ancient S. Indian city and capital of a vigorous Hindu kingdom (c. 1336—1565). It built enormous temple cities with technically brilliant but highly stylized and often ferocious sculptures. The chief cities were V. itself, sacked by Muslim armies (1565) - Shrirangam and Vellore.Villaamil Jenaro Perez (1807-1854) was born in Ferrol, Galicia. He was a remarkable painter and prime example of the Galician Romantic Movement. In his work, particularly in his landscapes, he shows an unmistakable taste for the English painters of the same period. Most of his paintings are exhibited at Museo del Prado in Madrid, the city where he died.
Villegle Jacques de la , born Jacques Mahé de la Villegle (1926, Quimper, Brittany) is a French mixed-media artist famous for his ripped or lacerated posters (a poster in which one has been placed over another or others, and the top poster or posters have been ripped, revealing to a greater or lesser degree the poster or posters underneath) and for being a member of the New Realism art group (1960-1963). His work has primarily focused on the anonymous and on the marginal remains of civilization
Villon Jacques, real name Gaston Duchamp (1875—1963). French painter, half-brother of *Duchamp and R. Duchamp-Villon. In 1911 he became a *Cubist, for a time the leader of a faction including Legcr, Gleyre and Gleizes. In 1919 he began painting abstracts, and his work passed through several phases, all however marked by command of proportion and line.
Vingt, Les (Fr. The Twenty) - also often written 'Les XX'. A group of twenty avant-garde Belgian painters and sculptors which began a series of annual exhibitions in 1883 lasting until its dissolution in 1893. These exhibitions included numerous leading foreign painters and sculptors then at the beginning of international careers, such as *Cezanne, *Gauguin, *Manet, *Seurat, *Toorop, *Toulouse-Lautrec and Van *Gogh. It was influential in spreading the international reputation of Neo-lmpressionism and Post-Impressionism.
Vincent Francois-Andre (b Paris, 30 Dec 1746; d Paris, 3 or 4 Aug 1816). French painter and draughtsman. He was one of the principal innovators in French art of the 1770s and 1780s, in the field of both Neo-classical subjects and themes from national history. Despite the fact that he worked in a variety of styles, his sense of purpose appears to have been coherent at a time of profound change. His stylistic sources lay in the art of Classical antiquity and such masters as Raphael, the great Bolognese painters of the 17th century and Charles Le Brun; yet he also studied reality in a quasi-documentary way. His work, too often confused with that of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David or Louis-Léopold Boilly, is of a high standard, even though the completed paintings do not always uphold the promise of energy of his drawings and oil sketches.
Viollet-le-Duc Eugene born Jan. 27, 1814, Paris, France died Sept. 17, 1879, Lausanne, Switz. French Gothic Revival architect, restorer of French medieval buildings, and writer whose theories of rational architectural design linked the revivalism of the Romantic period to 20th-century Functionalism.
Virius Mirko (1889–1943). Naive Art.
Vischer. Family of German sculptors and metal-founders (fl. mid-15th—mid-16th c). The family workshop in Nuremberg was established by Hermann (d. 1488) and taken over by his son Peter the Flder (d. 1529) and his sons Peter the Younger (1487—1528), Hermann the Younger (1486—1517) and Hans (d. 1550). They were responsible for the tomb of Archbishop Ernst of Saxony (Magdeburg cathedral), the statues of Theodoric and Artus for the tomb of the Emperor Maximilian and the tomb of St Sebald, a fine example of German Renaissance art.
Vitale da Bologna , known as ft. 1334-59). Italian painter, founder of the Bolognese school. His early work, in which there is a strong decorative element, shows Sienese influence; he later adopted a broader, more simplified treatment. His paintings include Madonnas in Bologna Gal. and the Vatican Mus., and a polyptych in S. Salvatore, Bologna.
Viteri Oswaldo (b. Ambato, Ecuador, 1931). Neo-figurative art.
Vkhutemas. 'Higher State Technical-Artistic Studios' set up by the Soviet government in Moscow (1920) and Petrograd and Vitebsk (1921); they ran their own affairs and were
important and more or less open experimental and avant-garde centres of teaching, theoretical development (especially of *Constructivism) and discussion, for *Malevich, *Kandinsky, *Pevsner and *Tatlin. The Moscow V. of 1920 was m fact the re-named former Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture; it received financial support from the semi-autonomous trade unions and not directly from the State. Other institutions which supported experimental art were: Inkhuk (Institute of Painterly Culture) founded in Moscow, 1920, and headed initially by Kandinsky; the Svomas (Free Art Studios) in Petrograd, which replaced for a short while the Academy of Arts (re-established in 1920); the Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) movement. With the formation of AKhRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) in 1922, the tolerance and support of the avant-garde declined. The anti-art call of the Constructivists associated with the journal LEF (Left Front of the Arts) led to the avant-garde turn towards industrial design, с 1922-4.
Vlaminck Maurice (1876-1958). Painter, born in Paris of Flemish parents. He was untrained and claimed never to have been inside the Louvre; the only debt he acknowledged was to Van Gogh, whose expressive use of colour and execution was the foundation of V.'s *Fauvism. With Derain, he was one of the 1st painters to collect African masks (c. 1905) and his Fauve paintings have a more savage intensity than those of his Parisian contemporaries, e.g. Paysage aux Arbres Rouges (1906). He believed that 'instinct is the foundation of art. I try to paint with my heart and my loins.' He was influenced by Cezanne in 1907 and his later works, though often wildly painted, are more subdued in colour.
Vogel Ludwig (b Zurich, 10 July 1788; d Zurich, 20 Aug 1879). Swiss painter. He served an apprenticeship as a pastry-cook, simultaneously training as an artist under Samuel Scheurmann (1770–1844) and Johann Pfenninger (1765–1825) in Aarau (1802–3) and from 1804 with Henry Fuseli and Konrad Gessner in Zurich. In 1807 he set out on a study tour in Switzerland, visiting the Bernese Oberland, the Valais and Ticino: the subsequent exhibition was so successful that he was able to give up baking and devote himself entirely to painting. In 1808 he went to the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, where he studied under Lorenz Schönberger (1768–1847). With his friends Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr he was a founder-member of the Lukasbund, a student group whose formation was precipitated by the temporary closure of the Akademie early in 1809. The group looked back to early German and Italian Renaissance painting in its search for artistic sincerity, and when in 1810 Vogel travelled to Rome with Overbeck and Pforr, he turned his back definitively on academicism. As well as his work within the Lukasbund circle, the main influences on him in Rome were Bertel Thorvaldsen, Joseph Anton Koch and Peter Cornelius. In 1813 he returned to Zurich for good after a second visit to Italy. Occasional painting trips took him to the Black Forest (1820), Paris (1822), Stuttgart (1824) and Munich, where he also took part in exhibitions (1830 and 1832). Most of his pictures treat historical subjects from Swiss history (Battle of Grandson 1476, 1836; Berne, Kstmus.); very popular in his lifetime, they were often reproduced and widely disseminated.
Volterra Daniele da Ricciarelli (1509-66). Italian Mannerist painter, follower of Michelangelo. He is sometimes known as 'the breeches painter' because in obedience to an order from Pope Paul IV he painted draperies to cover the nudity of some of the figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgement. Descent from the Cross is the most famous of his paintings.
Vorss Billy de. Pin -Up Art.
Vorticism. A British art movement which developed in reaction to *Cubism and primarily *Futurism. The name was invented by Ezra Pound m 1913, but in 1912 W. *Lewis had already made what could be described as Vorticist drawings. The group's only exhibition took place in 1915, and included works by *Roberts, *Wadsworth, *Nevinson and *Gaudier-Brzeska. Two numbers of their magazine BLAST appeared in 1914 edited by Lewis. Due to wartime conditions, V. did not survive as a movement although an unsuccessful attempt was made to revive it in 1920 renamed Group X.Vos Paul de (1596—1678). Flemish painter of hunting scenes, animals and still-life subjects, brother of Cornells de V. He collaborated with Rubens and Snyders.
Vostell Wolf (1932— ). German artist, contriver of *Happenings and publ. of a magazine. Decollate (1962). V. has torn, overpainted and singed posters since 1956. *decollage.
Vouet Simon (7590—1649). Leading French *Baroque painter and an arbiter of taste for almost 20 years. The son of an artist, V. settled in Italy (1613), living chiefly in Rome, with periods in Genoa, Venice and Naples. His style shows an individual talent and a profound study of Italian painters, especially Veronese. V. soon enjoyed high favour, including the patronage of Pope Urban VIII. In 1627 he was invited back to France, where he became First Painter, a position challenged only once, in 1640—2, when he was brought into an artificial rivalry with *Poussin. V. taught or collaborated with almost all the painters of the next generation in France, notably *Lebrun, Le Sucur and Mignard. His portraits of the court of Louis XIII and most of his large-scale decorative schemes for Parisian houses and country chateaux have been destroyed. Among surviving pictures are: Wealth, Time Vanquished and Ceres".
Vrubel Mikhail (1856—1910). Russian painter, theatrical designer and craftsman. He suffered from schizophrenia and ended his life in a mental asylum. Before graduating he was commissioned to work on the restoration of Byzantine frescoes in Kiev. This work prompted the artist to begin his important and persistent researches into pictorial analysis; many of his drawings, such as those for Demon (1 890), anticipate Cubist and Futurist work. He was connected with the *Abramtsevo and *Talashkino colonies and the World of Art.
Vuillard Edouard (1868-1940). French painter, V. studied at the Lycee Condorcet, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the Academie Julian where he met the other future *Nabis, including *Bonnard, with whom he shared a studio. Au Lit (1891), evenly painted in flat
areas, shows his current proximity to *Denis's ideas. He usually painted homely interior scenes - The Mantelpiece (1905) - richly coloured but often low-toned and creating a strong surface pattern. Their form and content influenced Sickert and thence the *Camden Town Group in London. V. lived a withdrawn life and seldom exhibited after 1974.