Word: bernini
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had. Its opening nights should be long, socially frantic and attended by as many titled lenders and assorted Chinless Wonders as can be flown across the Atlantic. Royalty should be present, enabling museum officials to fall, Bernini-wise, into swooning postures of gratification, one eye on the Princess of Wales and the other fixed on the box office. In short, it might not be unlike "The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting," which opened at the National Gallery...
...Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. "I am often labeled a disciple of Le Corbusier," Meier says. "Sure, I think he was the greatest architect of the century. But then I am also a disciple of Borromini, and I'm affected no less by Bramante and Bernini, whose work I studied in Rome." Indeed, both lines of influence are visible in Meier's work. His buildings reflect Le Corbusier's interplay of geometric forms, and they are as flooded with natural light as the churches of the 17th century Italian baroque masters...
...designed by Raphael, all limpid air, august figures and delicious feats of natural observation; the huge and crushingly elaborate Farnese altar cross and candlesticks, finished in 1582 by Antonio Gentili; a sumptuous set of gold-ground vestments embroidered for Clement VIII; and some newly cleaned terra cotta studies by Bernini, along with his bronze portrait bust of his main patron, Urban VIII (1623-44), the man who did more than any other Pope to reshape the appearance of Rome (and who had all the nightingales in the Vatican gardens killed because their warbling disturbed his sleep...
Seldom has a tyrant been so absolute or cruel that he could not find some major artist, a Rubens or a Titian, a Velasquez or a Bernini, to fawn on him for a suitable fee. It is the nature of carnivores to get power, at which point, having disposed of their enemies, they deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make them look like herbivores. Stalinist socialist realism was merely the end of this process, carried out by hacks. After it, the more intelligent of the Beloved Leaders would want radio and TV, not painting, to be their cosmeticians...
...course, anyone who has seen a clay modello by Bernini or a Della Robbia plaque, a Kändler figure or terra cotta Madonna by Verrocchio, knows that all ready. In that sense the debate is pointless. But the misunderstanding survives, though clay is the oldest form of sculpture: God did not chip Adam from marble, or weld him together...