Word: bernini
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...know history"; and last June, when accepting the American Institute of Architects' gold medal, he gave a kind of official blessing to it: old Bernini patting heads in the studio. "We stand at an enormous watershed," he remarked. "We stand at a place where maybe we haven't stood for 50 years, and that is a shift in sensibility so revolutionary that it is hard to grasp because we are right in the middle of it. It is the watershed between what we have all been brought up with as the Modern, and something new, uncharted, uncertain and absolutely delightful...
...secret conclave within had elected a Pope. But could it be true? Not likely?not on the opening day of the largest, most complex gathering of Cardinal electors in the long pageant of papal elections. Sure enough, with dusk beginning to enfold the splendid statues and pillars of the Bernini colonnade, the smoke turned blacker, then gray. Exasperated, the Vatican Radio announcer said, "There is still uncertainty about the color of the smoke." The crowd in St. Peter's Square swelled from 10,000 to 25,000 and then to 50,000 on the off-chance that history was about...
...beginning of the conclave (Aug. 25). The Cardinals had plenty of time to get together in small groups and large, conferring, trading intelligence, lobbying ever so discreetly. By last Friday, when they assembled at the Altar of the Chair in St. Peter's Basilica, beneath Bernini's stained-glass window portraying the Holy Spirit as a white dove in a solid circle of gold, they had carefully weighed all the papabili (possible Popes). During a Mass celebrated in Latin, the Cardinals invoked divine guidance for the task ahead of them...
...functionless square of glass and black steel that was Mies van der Rohe's chief legacy to Germany. This Prussian pantheon, overlooking the bombed-out paddocks where Hitler's chancellery once stood, is as perfectly suited to a constructivist show as St. Peter's is to Bernini's papal tombs; box and contents are one. The idealism, the formal absolutism and the faith in a new social order, coupled with the abstracted indifference to verifiable human needs that lay at the core of the constructivist enterprise, are all written large on its grid...
...common as seagulls; the rarities are old. A special aura clings to the late works of old men who can sum up a lifetime's deposit of knowledge in a final burst of invention. One thinks of Rembrandt's late self-portraits, of Titian at 90 or Bernini at 75; or, in our century, of Henri Matisse, who died in 1954 at the age of 85. The last two decades of his life were increasingly spent on making works in paper. Ensconced in the south of France, first at Nice and later in the town of Vence...