The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (13 page)

American Academy of the Fine Arts
.

See
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF DESIGN
.

 
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American Scene painting
.

Term applied to the work of various painters who in the 1920s and 1930s depicted aspects of American life and landscape in a naturalistic, descriptive style. The term does not signify an organized movement, but rather an aspect of a broad tendency for American artists to move away from abstraction and the avant-garde in the period between the two world wars.
Burchfield
and
Hopper
are among the best known exponents of American Scene painting, and the
Regionalists,
who were more self-consciously nationalistic, are also embraced by the term.

 
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(
c.
1682–1752).
Italian
Rococo
decorative painter and portraitist. He was born in Naples, formed his style in Venice, and had an international career, working in Bavaria, England, Flanders, France, and Spain. His English sojourn lasted from 1730 to 1739 (with a break for a visit to Paris in 1736), his finest surviving work from this period being a series of four paintings on the
Story of Jupiter and Io
at Moor Park (now Moor Park Golf Club) in Hertfordshire. He was the last of the Venetian decorators to come to England, in the wake of
Pellegrini
and the
Ricci
, for the demand for large-scale decorative painting was fairly short-lived. Amigoni, however, earned a good living with his portraits and is said to have persuaded
Canaletto
to try his fortune in England.

 
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(1539–91).
Swiss engraver, born in Zurich and active mainly in Nuremberg, Germany, where he is documented from 1561. He was perhaps the most prolific book illustrator of his day and one of his pupils boasted that he produced more drawings in four years than could be carted away in a hay-wagon. His woodcuts and engravings are more important as documents of contemporary life than for their artistic value and his
Panoplia Omnium Artium
(1568) in particular contains a wealth of evidence on contemporary crafts.

 
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(1511–92).
Florentine
Mannerist
architect and sculptor, strongly influenced by
Michelangelo
and by
Sansovino
, on whose Library in Venice he worked. His best-known works in Florence are the Ponte Sta Trinità (1567–70), destroyed during the Second World War, but rebuilt, and his additions to the
Pitti Palace
(1558–70), including the rusticated courtyard. In sculpture his chief work is the rather ponderous fountain (1560–75) in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, with its marble
Neptune
and bronze
Nymphs
. Ammanati beat several sculptors, including
Cellini
and
Giambologna
, in a competition for this commission, but the work was not well received. In old age, influenced by Counter-Reformation piety, he wrote a recantation of his secular works (denouncing nude figures as lustful) and he is said to have destroyed some. He was married to Laura Battiferri, a poet who was the subject of a memorable portrait by
Bronzino
.

 
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anamorphosis
.

A picture (or a part of one) executed in such a way that it gives a distorted image of the object represented until it is seen from a particular angle or by means of a special lens or mirror, when it appears in lifelike aspect. Anamorphosis is first mentioned in the notes of
Leonardo da Vinci
, and perhaps the most famous example of its use is in
Holbein's
The Ambassadors
(NG, London, 1533), which features a distorted skull, probably a symbol of the brevity of life. Generally, however, the purpose of anamorphosis was to mystify or amuse, and it rarely occurs in major works such as this.