Word: bernini
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...Bernini of the swells was Richard Morris Hunt (1827-95), the most influential American architect of the 19th century. The poor have always wondered how the rich live. But more to the point in America, the rich have always wondered too. Wealth on the scale of the 1880s in the U.S. was still uncharted territory. Its signs could get crossed. So the plutocrat needed an architect to create a seamless etiquette of shared ostentation, with variants, and that was what Hunt did with Newport...
There wasn't a mode he couldn't handle, from the sacred to the sentimental, from the epic to the pastoral, from the mythic to the slyly humorous. As with Bernini or Titian, one stands in awe of his sheer fecundity. And he could be very witty--in a discreet way. His early Apelles Painting Campaspe, c. 1726-27, shows a familiar story from Pliny: the Greek artist Apelles made a portrait of Campaspe, the mistress of Alexander the Great, which so pleased Alexander that when it was finished, he kept the painting and gave Campaspe herself to the artist...
...Daumier do this? By fixing his pincer gaze on the theatrics of the law. In the drawing known variously as For the Defense and The Lyric Advocate, the lawyer's court robes puff out in baroque splendor -- one thinks, perhaps not irrelevantly, of Bernini's bust of Louis XIV -- on the hot air of his rhetoric, as he gestures at the man in the dock, a Jean Valjean whose simian face betrays not the slightest comprehension of what is being said on his behalf. Emphasized by the dark mass of the lawyer's sleeve, the short distance between...
...When Bernini was to do a sculpture of Charles and would not come to England, it was Van Dyck who supplied the "natural" image of the King -- three faces, looking left, right and straight ahead -- from which the Roman artist was to work. Van Dyck's portraits of Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria fixed them for posterity with a completion that few later artists could rival. They have the subtlest quality of propaganda: they make you forget that they are propaganda. If we think of Charles as the cultivated king par excellence, it is largely thanks to Van Dyck. There...
Jones was the greatest royal architect England ever produced. During his quarter-century of service as Surveyor of the King's Works (from 1615 under James I and from 1625 to 1641 under Charles I), he acquired a Bernini-like authority. Through the example of his most famous buildings, such as the Queen's House in Greenwich and the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall -- which, with its ceiling paintings by Rubens, is one of the grandest collaborations of talent in the 17th century -- Jones guided English architecture out of its Elizabethan mannerism. He led it into an Italian grandeur and amplitude...