Word: frescoe
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Instead one thinks of an institutionalized, not to say industrialized, sweetness: the Chagall of the blue, boneless angels, the muralist of Lincoln Center and the fresco painter of the Paris Opera, the stained-glass artist who flooded interiors from the U.N. headquarters in New York City to Reims Cathedral in France to the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem with the soothing light of benign sentiment. His quasi-religious imagery, modular and diffuse at the same time, would serve (with adjustments: drop the flying cow, put in a menorah) to commemorate nearly anything, from the Holocaust to the self...
Robert Hughes provides the most informative account to date of the Sistine Chapel-cleaning controversy ((ART, April 27)). Regrettably, the before and after photographs accompanying the article are misleading. If the conserved fresco really looked like TIME's illustration, the critics would be right. However, the cleaned fresco is not flat and washed out but fully modeled and richly colored...
Illustrations of the conserved frescoes published to date show only details taken from the scaffolding under artificial light. But the cleaning is ultimately to be judged from the floor of the Sistine Chapel, as originally viewed by Michelangelo's contemporaries, with the full stretch of the ceiling bathed in natural light from the upper windows. So viewed, the frescoes are clear, strong and wonderfully harmonious -- fully in keeping with the central Italian fresco tradition...
...Orsay is theatrical only at one point, where it should be: the key exhibits of its architectural section, at the far end of the nave, are two astounding models of the Paris Opera by Richard Peduzzi. One is a transverse section -- the ultimate doll's house, with every balustrade, fresco, gilded caryatid and square of marble inlay faithfully reproduced -- and the other is a site model under a glass floor, so that one walks in air across the entire quartier, like a balloonist...
...Alvaro Obregon swept into office as President, Rivera found he had an enthusiast in the Minister of Education, Jose Vasconcelos, who invited him back to Mexico to take part in a huge program of public painting. In Mexico and Russia, unlike most of the early 20th century world, a fresco could still be counted on for political impact. Mexico had a huge illiterate population, used to learning doctrine by looking at images. Painting had little or no competition from other media. It could be as direct a form of social speech as it had once been in the city-states...