Word: cellinis
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...Koetsu, the Japanese artist, is scarcely known in the U.S., but in Japan he is a national treasure several times over - about as famous there as Benvenuto Cellini is in the West. This is because he was one of the supreme masters of calligraphy, an art that matters only to specialists on the American side of the Pacific but is wholly central to Japanese and Chinese aesthetics. It's understandable, therefore, that the present show of Koetsu's work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, though respectably attended, has not been packing in the crowds. This is a boon...
...Great Hon'ami Koetsu--how many people in the West have heard of him? Not too many, but in the early 17th century this man was to Japanese culture roughly what Leonardo da Vinci or Benvenuto Cellini had been to Italy a century before: a wonderfully versatile master of many media, renowned equally as painter, calligrapher, potter, lacquer artist and, thanks to his close relationship with the great shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, the virtual "art director" of Buddhist Japan. No artist, Eastern or Western, was ever more authoritative within his own culture; and Koetsu's work was also identified with...
...privileged position in their renowned architectural monograph. It is a monument to the splendor of the American Gilded Age and is an irreplaceable example of an historic episode in art and architectural taste. It can no more be created today than one could create a Botticelli tondo or a Cellini bronze: its makers have died and, with them, a precious moment in history. It is the high calling of great institutions--universities, cathedrals and museums--to preserve, protect and defend such architectural legacies--these exemplars of human genius--from the ravages and vagaries of man and time...
...huge drinking cup in the form of an armed three-masted carrack, nearly 3 ft. high, done in silver gilt, complete down to the last cannon and sheave, its decks and rigging swarming with 74 tiny sailors and passengers. In detail if not, perhaps, in sculptural grace, it out-Cellinis Cellini...
With his lively autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) ensured his lasting fame. Yet that book has convinced many that the Renaissance man was more inspired as a boaster and self-promoter than as an artist. In Cellini (Abbeville; 324 pages; $85), Sir John Pope-Hennessy corrects this impression. Although much of Cellini's early work in precious metals vanished, enough sculpture survives (and is photographed here in careful detail) to convince anyone of its creator's genius. From the exquisite gold and enamel of The Saltcellar of Francis I to the muscular bronze of Perseus, the impression grows: Cellini...