The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (493 page)

 
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WANDERERS
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Institutions housing the enormous collections of antiquities and works of art accumulated by the papacy since the beginning of the 15th cent. As the leaders of the Christian Church the popes were continually showered with gifts; as political rulers they were, paradoxically, chief guardians of the remains of pagan Rome until Italy was unified in 1870. The Vatican collections are now among the largest and most important in the world, housed in a complex of buildings in the papal palace and elsewhere in the Vatican. There are several separate museums and the visitor to them is also admitted to the exhibition rooms of the Vatican Library and to various suites of
Renaissance
painting, of which the most important are the Sistine Chapel, decorated by
Michelangelo
and others, and the Stanze, decorated by
Raphael
and others. The museums had their origin with Julius II (pontificate 1503–13), who placed some of the most famous works of
classical
sculpture in the Cortile del Belvedere (Belvedere Court), accessible to artists, connoisseurs, and scholars. However, it was not until 1734 that a museum proper was set up by Clement XII. Now, as then, the Vatican Museums are most famous for their classical statues, including the
Apollo Belvedere
, the
Belvedere Torso
, and the
Laocoön
, but they also contain great riches in, for example, Egyptian art, jewellery, and vestments. The Pinacoteca (picture gallery) has an impressive if somewhat haphazard collection, devoted mainly to Italian painting of the 13th cent. to the 17th cent. There is also a collection of modern religious art, most of it merely of curiosity value.

 
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(1912–77).
British painter. In the 1940s, with his friend John
Minton
, he was one of the leading exponents of
Neo-Romanticism
. His later work, in which he concentrated on his favourite theme of the male nude in a landscape setting, became grander and more simplified, moving towards abstraction (
Leaping Figure
, Tate, London, 1951). Vaughan also designed textiles and book-jackets. In 1966 he published
Journal and Drawings
, extracts from a diary he had begun in 1939 (a new edition appeared in 1989). It gives a remarkably frank (and often amusing) account of his homosexual and masturbatory activities and of the struggle with cancer that led to his suicide.

 
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(
c.
1412–80).
One of the outstanding Sienese artists of the 15th cent., a painter, sculptor, architect, and military engineer. He was probably trained by
Sassetta
, but he also came under the influence of Florentine art and his large-scale paintings have a monumentality rare in Siena in the
quattrocento
. As a sculptor he worked in wood and marble and late in his career in bronze, this change in medium reflecting the influence of
Donatello
, who was in Siena 1457–9.
The Risen Christ
(Sta Maria della Scala, Siena, 1476) has something of Donatello's sinewy expressiveness. Donatello's influence may also account for the strength and plasticity of Vecchietta's later paintings, such as the
St Catherine
in the Town Hall, Siena, and the
Assumption
in Pienza Cathedral, both dating from 1461/2. Another side to Vecchietta's talent is seen in his delightful
illuminations
in a manuscript of Dante's
Divine Comedy
(BL, London,
c.
1440).

 
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TITIAN
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