Word: bernini
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...Italy, like Germany and Britain, is somewhat more compressible. Italian modernism can be summarized because its achievement was small next to the School of Paris', and smaller yet beside the glories of Italy's own past. From the emergence of Giotto in the 13th century to the death of Bernini in the 17th, Italian painters and sculptors ruled the European roost, setting the standards of achievement by which Western culture judged itself. By the 19th century this primacy was lost, and throughout the modernist era Italy produced no equivalents to Picasso, Matisse or Mondrian, and, of course, nothing even faintly...
...Germanicus (whose exhausted head on the pillow vividly predicts the style of Gericault nearly 200 years later) but also his little son, whose blue cloak matches the general's; the women suffer, but the boy learns, remembers and will act. The more Germanicus unfolds, the more one realizes why Bernini, on his visit to Louis XIV in Paris, declared Poussin to be the only French artist who really mattered: un grande favoleggiatore, "a great storyteller...
...many art and architectural treasures, including those of Michelangelo and Bernini, the Vatican does not list their book value, considering them to be held in trust for all humanity. In short, the church must look to the generosity of the faithful rather than the sale of the Pieta or Raphael's frescoes, if it is to balance its budget...
Stoss produced nothing, it seems, in the last ten years of his life. Yet this unrespectable old man was capable of dazzling technical feats which, far from being mere Last-Supper-carved-on-a-peachstone declamation, were filled with grave and intense emotion. As with Bernini a century later, we do Stoss a big injustice if we suppose his intimidating virtuosity was in some way hollow. "A miracle in wood," wrote the 16th century Italian art chronicler Giorgio Vasari on seeing one of Stoss's carvings that had found its way to Florence. It was done "with such subtlety...
...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...