Danish
1804-1880
Constantin Hansen Galleries
Danish painter. In 1816 he entered the Kongelige Akademi for de Sk?nne Kunster, Copenhagen, intending to study architecture; however he later became attracted to painting and worked under C. W. Eckersberg from 1828 to 1833. Around the middle of the 1820s he started developing an individual style of portraiture, which had matured by 1830. He often used his sisters and friends as models; using simple costumes, poses and compositions, he managed to endow his pictures with the intimacy and warmth that mark the Danish Golden Age. The Artist's Sisters Signe and Henriette Reading a Book (1826; Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst) is a fine example of his combination of natural observation with Neo-classical idealization. Under Eckersberg, who encouraged both, he strengthened his natural flair for painting serene architectural views of Copenhagen. Related Paintings of Constantin Hansen :. | The Artist-s Sisters | Oehlenschlaeger and Tegner | Kronborg Castle | A Group of Danish Artists in Rome | A company of Danish artists in Rome | Related Artists:
Luca PenniFlorence 1500/04-Paris 1557
BREGNO, AndreaItalian Early Renaissance Sculptor and Architect, 1418-1503
Andrea Bregno was invited to move from Venice to Rome when the Venetian Paul II was elected Pope. During the pontificate of the Della Rovere Pope Sixtus IV he received many commissions and headed a large workshop, producing many wall tombs of cardinals and other figures of the papal curia with varying degrees of personal responsibility. He was famous among his contemporaries, and was compared to the Greek sculptor Polykleitos in the epitaph of his tomb in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, mentioned Bregno in the 1480s, in his biography of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino. Bregno often worked with Mino da Fiesole in Rome, and his refined Lombard manner was rendered more classical by the contact and by the example of Roman sculptures that were increasingly coming to light, of which Andrea Bregno was an early collector: a certain "Prospettivo Milanese", writing in 1499-1500 refers to a torso in the collection of a "Maestro Andrea" that seems to have been the Belvedere Torso.
He moved in humanist circles and was an esteemed friend of the humanist in Sixtus' circle, Bartolomeo Platina, the librarian of the Vatican Library. Bregno played a significant role in the standardization of an authentically classicizing style of epigraphy, in the inscriptions that accompany his tombs. In the Sistine Chapel he collaborated with Mino da Fiesole and Giovanni Dalmata to produce the little cantoria or choristers' gallery set into the wall, with its own coffered ceiling and carved marble balusters, and the marble screen.
MALLET, Jean-BaptisteFrench Painter, 1759-1835,French painter. A pupil of Simon Julien in Toulon, he was then taught by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon in Paris. He exhibited at every Salon between 1793 and 1827, obtaining a second class medal in 1812 and a first class medal in 1817. He executed very few portraits (Chenier, Carcassonne, Mus. B.-A., is an exception), preferring to paint nymphs bathing and graceful classical nudes such as the Graces Playing with Cupid (Arras, Abbaye St Vaast, Mus. B.-A.). He established his reputation with gouache genre scenes of fashionable and often libertine subjects, always elegant and refined, in the style of Louis-Philibert Debucourt and Louis-Leopold Boilly, and remarkable for the delicacy and brilliance of their brushwork: for example At the Laundry Maid's and the Painful Letter (both Paris, Mus. Cognacq-Jay). They reveal a knowledge of 17th-century Dutch painting in the treatment of details (transparent crystal, reflections on silk or satin) as well as the choice of themes: Military Gallant (Paris, Mus. Cognacq-Jay). Mallet's meticulously precise paintings are one of the best records of fashionable French furnishings and interiors at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th.