Word: bernini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...must commend Robert Hughes' Essay. I too have observed the slow cultural suicide of Italy. The destruction of Italian art is a disaster because it is one of the few human creations with universal appeal. Unlike the beer can-disposable, faddish art of today, a Bernini or Leonardo has a unique, timeless quality...
...artist ever possessed a city more ravenously than Giovanni Battista Piranesi did Rome. Generations of builders, from the anonymous creators of the Forum to Michelangelo and Bernini, set down that tawny palimpsest on the Tiber. It was left to a failed 18th century architect, who built one long-ignored church on the Aventine, to give the city its definitive shape: the word Piranesian, as a synonym for phantasmagoric grandeur, has entered the language of art. This month, a splendid exhibition of Piranesi's studies and engravings opened at Columbia University in Manhattan; its centerpiece...
...later (there are no known drawings by Caravaggio). The sense of physical presence in his early work is so strong that a painting like The Ecstasy of Saint Francis, circa 1594, with its swooning saint and plump, comforting angel, is almost a homosexual version of the entranced flesh that Bernini was later to carve in his Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Caravaggio's angels and Bacchuses habitually looked as if they had been picked up in a Trastevere wineshop, which, no doubt, they were. Saint Catherine of Alexandria, circa 1597, is surrounded by the attributes of her martyrdom, the spiked...
...long last, the dispute was finally resolved. The result was a bequest to the city of Florence of 15 ceramic plaques from the della Robbia workshop, 38 pieces of Tuscan Renaissance furniture, 43 prime specimens of majolica and Hispano-Moresque faïence ware, twelve sculptures (capped by Bernini's small but superbly fashioned St. Lawrence on the Grill), and 35 paintings that any museum would be proud to own. Late this month they will go on display at the Pitti Palace in the apartments formerly set aside for the royal family on their ceremonial visits to Florence, thus...
Herded Sheep. They start gathering in St. Peter's Square as the sun comes over the magnificent Bernini colonnade -black suits and neckties, Bermuda shorts and T shirts, miniskirts barely covering buttocks, long-sleeved dresses with mantillas. In long lines before wooden barriers, young couples love each other up, oldsters lean wearily on crutches. A roar of protest in a dozen languages goes up as a middle-aged American with a red face tries an end run. He is spat on as he retreats, his wife near tears...