The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (456 page)

A movement founded by Lucio
Fontana
in Milan in 1947 in which he grandiosely intended to synthesize colour, sound, space, movement, and time into a new type of art. The main ideas of the movement were anticipated in his
Manifesto Blanco
(White Manifesto) published in Buenos Aires in 1946. In it he spoke of a new ‘spatial’ art in keeping with the spirit of the post-war age. On the negative side it repudiated the illusory or ‘virtual’ space of traditional easel painting; on the positive side it was to unite art and science to project colour and form into real space by the use of up-to-date techniques such as neon lighting and television. Five more manifestos followed; they were more specific in their negative than their positive aspects, and carried the concept of Spazialismo little further than the statement that its essence consisted in ‘plastic emotions and emotions of colour projected upon space’. In 1947 Fontana created a ‘Black Spatial Environment’, a room painted black, which was considered to have foreshadowed
environment art
. His holed and slashed canvases (beginning in 1949 and 1959 respectively) are also considered to embody Spatialism. An example of the slashed type (the slash made with a razer blade) is
Spatial Concept Waiting
(Tate, London, 1960).

 
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(1891–1959).
English painter, one of the most original figures in 20th-cent. British art. He was born in Cookham in Berkshire and lived for most of his life in the village, which played a large part in the imagery of his paintings. His education was fairly elementary, but he grew up in a family in which literature, music, and religion were dominant concerns and his imaginative life was extremely rich. He said he wanted ‘to take the inmost of one's wishes, the most varied religious feelings … and to make it an ordinary fact of the street’, and he is best known for his pictures in which he set biblical events in his own village; his visionary attitude has been compared to that of William
Blake
. Spencer was a prize-winning student at the
Slade
School (1908–12) and served in the army from 1915 to 1918, first at the Beaufort War Hospital in Bristol, then in Macedonia. He was appointed an
Official War Artist
in 1918, but his experiences during the war found their most memorable expression a decade later when he painted a series of murals for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire (1927–32), built to commemorate a soldier who had died from an illness contracted in Macedonia. The arrangement of the murals consciously recalls
Giotto's
Arena Chapel in Padua, but Spencer painted in oil, not fresco, and he concentrated not on great events, but on the life of the common soldier, which he depicted with deep human feeling. There is no violence, and Spencer said that the idea for one of the scenes—
The Dug-Out
—occurred to him ‘in thinking how marvellous it would be if one morning, when we came out of our dugouts, we found that somehow everything was peace and the war was no more’. By this time Spencer was a celebrated figure, his greatest public success having been
The Resurrection: Cookham
(Tate , London, 1924–6), which when exhibited in 1927 was hailed by the critic of
The Times
as ‘the most important picture painted by any English artist in the present century’. He continued: ‘What makes it so astonishing is the combination in it of careful detail with modern freedom of form. It is as if a
Pre-Raphaelite
had shaken hands with a
Cubist
.’
.Spencer was again an Official War Artist during the Second World War, when he painted a series of large canvases showing shipbuilding on the Clyde (Imperial War Mus.) that memorably capture the heroic teamwork that went into the war effort. His career culminated in a knighthood in the year of his death, but his life was not a smooth success story, and in the 1930s he somewhat alienated his public with the expressive distortions and erotic content of his work. In 1935 he resigned as an Associate of the
Royal Academy
when two of his pictures, considered caricature-like and poorly drawn, were rejected for the annual summer exhibition, but he rejoined the Academy in 1950. In 1937 he divorced his first wife, Hilda Carline , and married Patricia Preece , but Hilda continued to play a large part in his life, and he painted pictures in memory of her and even wrote letters to her after her death. Some of his nude paintings of Patricia vividly express not only the sexual tensions of his life, but also his belief in the sanctity of human love; the best known is the double nude portrait of himself and Patricia known as
The Leg of Mutton Nude
(Tate , 1937). In his later years Spencer acquired a reputation as a landscapist as well as a figure painter. He also occasionally did portraits. There is a gallery devoted to Spencer at Cookham, containing not only paintings, but also memorabilia such as the pram that the eccentric figure used for pushing his painting equipment around the village. His younger brother
Gilbert Spencer
(1892–1979) was also a painter of imaginative subjects and landscapes, working in a style close to that of Stanley.

 
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(Latin: spina, a thorn). Ancient bronze statue of a seated boy extracting a thorn from his left foot (Capitoline Museum, Rome). It is recorded in Rome as early as the 12th cent. and during the
Renaissance
it was one of the most influential and copied of ancient sculptures. Its fame endured and it was one of the ancient works taken by Napoleon to Paris, where it remained from 1798 to 1815. Various stories grew up from the Renaissance onwards to explain the subject, the most popular being that the statue commemorates a shepherd boy called Martius who delivered an important message to the Roman Senate and only when his task was accomplished stopped to remove a thorn from his foot. It is now generally thought that the
Spinario
is a Roman pastiche of about the 1st cent. BC, combining a
Hellenistic
body with a head of earlier date (the way in which the hair falls indicates that the head was meant to be in an upright position rather than looking down as it is now).

 
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(active 1373–1410/11).
Italian painter. He came from Arezzo (hence the name Aretino) and probably trained in Florence, perhaps under Agnolo
Gaddi
. He was the most prolific muralist of his time and undertook large fresco cycles all over Tuscany. His last series was the cycle devoted to the Sienese pope Alexander III in Siena Town Hall (1408–10). He also painted altarpieces. Spinello borrowed ideas freely from other painters, notably
Giotto
, but his style was sturdy and vigorous. Several fresco fragments by Spinello are in the National Gallery, London. His son
Parri Spinelli
(d. 1452) was his assistant.

 
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