Word: caravaggio
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...Peter Paul Rubens, one of the five grand masters of 17th century painting-the others, by general consent, being Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velasquez and Poussin-was born 400 years ago this summer, on June 28, 1577. This birthday has raised memorial exhibitions all over Europe. No anniversary of a comparably great figure could launch so many shows, because Rubens was so prolific. A thousand or so paintings, more than 2,000 drawings, sown from Leningrad to Washington: Rubens was the grand inseminator of the Baroque, a monster of controlled fecundity, erudition and discipline. The biggest Rubens show, the text to which...
...surface. Nothing in earlier European art prepares one for that white, drained skin with its subtle undercasts of color. Rubens quoted anyone he wanted to, without the slightest embarrassment, in a spirit of reasoned homage: the great Entombment of Christ, 1613-15, for instance, is taken almost directly from Caravaggio. The modern cult of originality would have meant nothing to Rubens; he would have regarded it as a form of self-emasculation. The point was to add while taking, and that Rubens did superbly. No painter in previous European art was so capable of rendering the fullness of sentient life...
Rubens continued to influence European art, especially in France, for 250 years after his death, supplying prototypes to generations of painters from Van Dyck to Fragonard, from Watteau to Delacroix, and even to Cezanne. But there is no way he can seem a "modern" painter now-as Caravaggio...
...that, one suspects, no man could readily have imagined. The stocky, naked Susanna writhes as if in pain from the oppressive, whispering conclave above her; the picture is about impending rape, a common subject, but unique in being perceived from the woman's eyeline. Heavily influenced by Caravaggio, Gentileschi's paintings were determinedly "unfeminine," full of darkness, gore and gesticulation: witness the candlelit hand and shadowed face of Judith, like a waning moon, in Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes (circa 1625). A few other late-Renaissance women, like Sofonisba Anguissola, got more commissions than...
...written two books -one on Australian art and one on images of paradise and perdition in Western art. He also has written several art documentaries for Australian television and for the BBC, most recently a pair of 75-minute programs on 17th century Painters Caravaggio and Rubens. Hughes' current projects include a book about Australia's early days as an English penal colony, and also a nine-part television series on 20th century art intended to pick up where Kenneth Clark's Civilisation left off. "It's nice when people agree with what...