Word: etruscans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Steaming Courtesans. Now 65 years old, Marini likes to call himself an Etruscan, after those sturdy people who flourished in his native Tuscany before the grandeur of Rome. His figures wear an antique patina. His bronzes are left pitted by their plaster casts or are particolored from carefully ladled-on corrosive dyes; his wooden statuary is daubed with earthy tints, oil paints clinging to the surfaces as in flaking frescoes. Even his lush-thighed Pomonas, named for the ancient Italian goddess of fruit trees, seem like the petrified victims of the last days of Pompeii. But as currently displayed...
...archaeologists that the ancient Greeks knew little about the graceful art of arch building and practiced it less. Greek architects apparently preferred to cover the space between their classic columns with great stone beams called traves; discoveries indicated that the arch came into its own as a triumph of Etruscan and Roman engineering. Now Mario Napoli, superintendent of Excavations for Antiquities in Salerno, has dug up a chiseled arch that he feels sure is genuine Greek...
...overpass on the road between the two parts of town. After months of careful analysis, Napoli only recently became convinced that it was Greek, and that the settlers who built it must have learned arch making in their former home in Asia Minor. The arch could not have been Etruscan: those artisans never got to the city. It was not Roman: they arrived long after the city was built. Moreover, Greek lettering on a marker at the base invokes the blessing and protection of the Greek god Zeus...
...time. Architect Robert Adam was recapturing the glories of Greece and Rome in his neoclassic columns and pediments. Wedgwood, too, plunked for the neoclassic against rococo excesses, writing in 1769: "Elegant simplicity-I shall more than ever make that idea a leading principle." He glazed red figures similar to Etruscan pots onto the matte surfaces of his ironlike black basalt ware. Then he invented what is Wedgwood's most famous ceramic, jasper ware, whose white classical relief on blue body still accounts for a quarter of the firm's output...
...Caress the Curple. The man who has presided over the Met for nearly a decade works tucked away in a tapestry-lined office on a floor between ancient Etruscan pottery, above, and Greco-Roman statuary, below. Son of a Cleveland interior designer, Rorimer has been at home at the Met ever since his 1927 graduation from Harvard. A fervent medievalist and devotee of the decorative arts, he named his children Louis and Anne after the late 15th century French monarchs, Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, whose marriage was celebrated by the weaving of the Unicorn tapestries, which Rorimer acquired...