Gerard or Gérard (de) Lairesse was a Dutch Golden Age painter and art theorist. His broad range of skills included music, poetry, and theatre. De Lairesse was influenced by the Perugian Cesare Ripa and French classicist painters such as Charles le Brun, Simon Vouet and authors such as Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. His importance grew in the period following the death of Rembrandt. His treatises on painting and drawing, Grondlegginge Ter Teekenkonst (1701), based on geometry and Groot Schilderboek (1707), were highly influential on 18th-century painters.
Rembrandt's portrait of Gerard de Lairesse at age 25, showing his saddle nose caused by congenital syphilis. Oil on canvas, c. 1665–67. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Apollo and Aurora, 1671, ceiling painting for Herengracht, n° 539, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gerard de Lairesse, Allegory of sciences, Rijksmuseum
Gerard de Lairesse: Allegory of the Five Senses, 1668, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
Cesare Ripa was an Italian iconographer who worked for Cardinal Anton Maria Salviati as a cook and butler.
Portrait of Cesare Ripa in Della novissima iconologia di Cesare Ripa perugino (1624)
Allegory on dignity.
Sentences of the Iconologia illustrating the Bureau du Roi (King's Desk or Louis XV's roll-top secretary) marquetry in the Palace of Versailles
