Word: caravaggio
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...much success, as this monster of genius and talent, almost without rules, without theory, without learning or meditation, simply by the power of his genius and the model in front of him which he copied so admirably?" The cause of alarm was an Italian painter named Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio who, in the course of a short, fiery and often pitiable career, changed the face of 17th-century European art. That achievement is the subject of a loan show at the Cleveland Museum, "Caravaggio and his Followers," organized by Art Historian Richard E. Spear...
Knives and Artichokes. No Italian painter less resembled the Renaissance ideal of the gentleman genius than Caravaggio. His luck was as foul as his temper. He was in some ways the first Bohemian artist, and he thrashed about in the dogma-bound and ceremonious society of Counter-Reformation Rome like a beast in a net. In 1604 Caravaggio was haled into court for assaulting a Roman waiter who had brought him a dish of artichokes, six cooked in oil and six in butter. Caravaggio asked which were which. "Taste them," retorted the waiter, "and you will see." Caravaggio jumped...
Against Vacuity. Caravaggio looks curiously modern as an artist, though he died 31 centuries ago. His work became a line of cleavage between the "modernists" and conservatives of Rome. For in the 1590s, when Caravaggio first settled there, Roman art had descended into glassy, learned vacuity. Painters were still traumatized by the memory of Michelangelo, a figure of such bulk that there seemed no way past him; at the same time, the Counter Reformation demanded an elevated, moralized tone from its artists. The result had nothing to offer Caravaggio-who was not, in any case, a particularly educated...
...conversation. Rodin, Caravageio, Proudhon, who the hell are they?" This is like mocking the tail fins on American cars. It would be entirely possible to write a damaging satire of U.S. businessmen in Europe, but they don't have tail fins any more, and their wives serve up Caravaggio's chiaroscuro on Triscuits...
...among other reasons, producing drawings that the authorities considered too erotic.) Tunberg finds that when "people these days say 'Look at the old masters,' they are thinking of a cheap, Tijuana-velvety painting of a bullfighter or a landscape." Such folk may find pictures by even Caravaggio or Michelangelo "too crude and experimental." Tunberg's Neoclassical Drawing Trap was put together as a way of asking, "Do you really know what you are talking about when you praise old masters?" Says Tunberg, who is working on a construction showing a pair of hands making...