Word: giotto
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...only did he record all the gos sip, true and untrue; he also took time out to describe the works he most ad mired. Among them were Giotto's 14th century frescoes, presumably on the life of the Virgin, in Florence's Badia church. Particularly singled out by Vasari was the panel showing "Our Lady when she is announced...
...Heart Skipped." Could the polyptych be by Giotto and come from the Badia? Vasari had described such a work on the high altar. Later cleaning proved Procacci's hunch correct; handwriting analysis narrowed the date of the sticker to about 1810. Procacci was then able to reconstruct what had happened: the altarpiece had been removed in 1810 by Napoleon's troops from the Badia; then in 1815, through a clerical mistake, it had been returned instead to Santa Croce. Digging through the old floor plans of the Badia, Procacci made a second discovery. The church had been rebuilt...
Missing Faces. As the masons chipped away, the golden rays of the halo surrounding the head of the announcing angel were slowly revealed. Giotto's frescoes, hidden from sight for over 300 years, had been found. "Our expectations were enormous," he remembers. But the rays heralded a false dawn. Says Procacci: "When we saw that the face of the angel was missing, it broke our hearts." Procacci is convinced that the face of Mary in the Annunciation fresco that Vasari so admired was similarly cut out before the wall was covered in the 17th century...
...portrait of the traveling monk Zemmui, a member of the Tendai Buddhist sect, which ranks as a Japanese Giotto. It is a masterpiece of the 11th century, when the Fujiwara shoguns reigned, encouraging the arts as the Medicis did in Italy. The unknown artist profiles the Indian-born patriarch, a posture seldom used before, and gives him a Japanese face. As a light touch, the great priest's shoes appear below his chair, casually kicked off rather than neatly lined up to conform to Japanese etiquette. The picture is incredibly shallow spatially; the chair legs appear...
...Lucidity. Experienced in luminous Tuscan, this passage magically induces the sense of mystical identity with deity, the supreme religious experience. No more complex effect of poetry has ever been conceived, yet Dante achieves it with simple means. He is always simple, vigorous, lucid. His descriptions are like paintings by Giotto: childlike in their simplicity yet sculptural in their power-when the shades approach him through the gloom of Dis, for instance, they "sharpen their brows" and peer at him "as an old tailor peers at the eye of a needle...