GENTILE DA FABRIANO (c. 1370-c. 1450), Italian painter, was born at Fabriano about 1370. He is said to have been a pupil of Allegretto di Nuzio, and has been supposed to have received most of his early instruction from Fra Angelico, to whose manner his bears in some respects a close similarity. About 1411 he went to Venice, where by order of the doge and senate he was engaged to adorn the great hall of the ducal palace with frescoes from the life of Barbarossa. He executed this work so entirely to the satisfaction of his employers that they granted him a pension for life, and accorded him the privilege of wearing the habit of a Venetian noble. About 1422 he went to Florence, where in 1423 he painted an “Adoration of the Magi” for the church of Santa Trinita, which is preserved in the Florence Accademia; this painting is considered his best work now extant. To the same period belongs a “Madonna and Child,” which is now in the Berlin Museum. He had by this time attained a wide reputation, and was engaged to paint pictures for various churches, more particularly Siena, Perugia, Gubbio and Fabriano. About 1426 he was called to Rome by Martin V. to adorn the church of St John Lateran with frescoes from the life of John the Baptist. He also executed a portrait of the pope attended by ten cardinals, and in the church of St Francesco Romano a painting of the “Virgin and Child attended by St Benedict and St Joseph,” which was much esteemed by Michelangelo, but is no longer in existence. Gentile da Fabriano died about 1450. Michelangelo said of him that his works resembled his name, meaning noble or refined. They are full of a quiet and serene joyousness, and he has a naïve and innocent delight in splendour and in gold ornaments, with which, however, his pictures are not overloaded.
GENTILESCHI, ARTEMISIA and ORAZIO DE’, Italian painters.
Orazio (c. 1565-1646) is generally named Orazio Lomi de’ Gentileschi; it appears that De’ Gentileschi was his correct surname, Lomi being the surname which his mother had borne during her first marriage. He was born at Pisa, and studied under his half-brother Aurelio Lomi, whom in course of time he surpassed. He afterwards went to Rome, and was associated with the landscape-painter Agostino Tasi, executing the figures for the landscape backgrounds of this artist in the Palazzo Rospigliosi, and it is said in the great hall of the Quirinal Palace, although by some authorities the figures in the last-named building are ascribed to Lanfranco. His best works are “Saints Cecilia and Valerian,” in the Palazzo Borghese, Rome; “David after the death of Goliath,” in the Palazzo Doria, Genoa; and some works in the royal palace, Turin, noticeable for vivid and uncommon colouring. At an advanced age Gentileschi went to England at the invitation of Charles I., and he was employed in the palace at Greenwich. Vandyck included him in his portraits of a hundred illustrious men. His works generally are strong in shadow and positive in colour. He died in England in 1646.
Artemisia (1590-1642), Orazio’s daughter, studied first under Guido, acquired much renown for portrait-painting, and considerably excelled her father’s fame. She was a beautiful and elegant woman; her likeness, limned by her own hand, is to be seen in Hampton Court. Her most celebrated composition is “Judith and Holofernes,” in the Uffizi Gallery; certainly a work of singular energy, and giving ample proof of executive faculty, but repulsive and unwomanly in its physical horror. She accompanied her father to England, but did not remain there long; the best picture which she produced for Charles I. was “David with the head of Goliath.” Artemisia refused an offer of marriage from Agostino Tasi, and bestowed her hand on Pier Antonio Schiattesi, continuing, however, to use her own surname. She settled in Naples, whither she returned after her English sojourn; she lived there in no little splendour, and there she died in 1642. She had a daughter and perhaps other children.
GENTILI, ALBERICO (1552-1608), Italian jurist, who has great claims to be considered the founder of the science of international law, second son of Matteo Gentili, a physician of noble family and scientific eminence, was born on the 14th of January 1552 at Sanginesio, a small town of the march of Ancona which looks down from the slopes of the Apennines upon the distant Adriatic. After taking the degree of doctor of civil law at the university of Perugia, and holding a judicial office at Ascoli, he returned to his native city, and was entrusted with the task of recasting its statutes, but, sharing the Protestant opinions of his father, shared also, together with a brother, Scipio, afterwards a famous professor at Altdorf, his flight to Carniola, where in 1579 Matteo was appointed physician to the duchy. The Inquisition condemned the fugitives as contumacious, and they soon received orders to quit the dominions of Austria.
Alberico set out for England, travelling by way of Tübingen and Heidelberg, and everywhere meeting with the reception to which his already high reputation entitled him. He arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1580, with a commendatory letter from the earl of Leicester, at that time chancellor of the university, and was shortly afterwards qualified to teach by being admitted to the same degree which he had taken at Perugia. His lectures on Roman law soon became famous, and the dialogues, disputations and commentaries, which he published henceforth in rapid succession, established his position as an accomplished civilian, of the older and severer type, and secured his appointment in 1587 to the regius professorship of civil law. It was, however, rather by an application of the old learning to the new questions suggested by the modern relations of states that his labours have produced their most lasting result. In 1584 he was consulted by government as to the proper course to be pursued with Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, who had been detected in plotting against Elizabeth. He chose the topic to which his attention had thus been directed as a subject for a disputation when Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney visited the schools at Oxford in the same year; and this was six months later expanded into a book, the De legationibus libri tres. In 1588 Alberico selected the law of war as the subject of the law disputations at the annual “Act” which took place in July; and in the autumn published in London the De Jure Belli commentatio prima. A second and a third Commentatio followed, and the whole matter, with large additions and improvements, appeared at Hanau, in 1598, as the De Jure Belli libri tres. It was doubtless in consequence of the reputation gained by these works that Gentili became henceforth more and more engaged in forensic practice, and resided chiefly in London, leaving his Oxford work to be partly discharged by a deputy. In 1600 he was admitted to be a member of Gray’s Inn, and in 1605 was appointed standing counsel to the king of Spain. He died on the 19th of June 1608, and was buried, by the side of Dr Matteo Gentili, who had followed his son to England, in the churchyard of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate. By his wife, Hester de Peigni, he left two sons, Robert and Matthew, and a daughter, Anna, who married Sir John Colt. His notes of the cases in which he was engaged for the Spaniards were posthumously published in 1613 at Hanau, as Hispanicae advocationis libri duo. This was in accordance with his last wishes; but his direction that the remainder of his MSS. should be burnt was not complied with, since fifteen volumes of them found their way, at the beginning of the 19th century, from Amsterdam to the Bodleian library.
The true history of Gentili and of his principal writings has only been ascertained in recent years, in consequence of a revived appreciation of the services which he rendered to international law. The movement to do him honour originated in 1875 in England, as the result of the inaugural lecture of Prof. T.E. Holland, and was warmly taken up in Italy. In spreading through Europe it encountered two curious cross-currents of opinion,—one the ultra-Catholic, which three centuries before had ordered his name to be erased from all public documents and placed his works in the Index; another the narrowly-Dutch, which is, it seems, needlessly careful of the supremacy of Grotius. These two currents resulted respectively in a bust of Garcia Moreno being placed in the Vatican, and in the unveiling in 1886, with much international oratory, of a fine statue of Grotius at Delft. The English committee, under the honorary presidency of Prince Leopold, in 1877 erected a monument to the memory of Gentili in St Helen’s church, and saw to the publication of a new edition of the De Jure Belli. The Italian committee, of which Prince (afterwards King) Humbert was honorary president, was less successful. It was only in 1908, the tercentenary of the death of Alberico, that the statue of the great heretic was at length unveiled in his native city by the minister of public instruction, in the presence of numerous deputations from Italian cities and universities. Preceding writers had dealt with various international questions, but they dealt with them singly, and with a servile submission to the decisions of the church. It was left to Gentili to grasp as a whole the relations of states one to another, to distinguish international questions from questions with which they are more or less intimately connected, and to attempt their solution by principles entirely independent of the authority of Rome. He uses the reasonings of the civil and even the canon law, but he proclaims as his real guide the Jus Naturae, the highest common sense of mankind, by which historical precedents are to be criticized and, if necessary, set aside.