Word: giotto
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Picasso's pre-cubist phase where he concentrated on destroying a priori space is evident here, as it was in the Matisses. A Priori space is the conventional three-dimensional, perspectively accurate depiction of depth that originated with Giotto and Pierro Della Francesca in the Renaissance...
...catalog's nagging about the "mainstream" seems all the more pointless because Bearden possessed a deep aesthetic education: he was immersed in the self-sufficient culture of Western painting from Giotto right through to his own time, as well as in African art. It may be that curator Sharon F. Patton thought she was paying him some kind of compliment in writing that "like Pollock, de Kooning . . . and Rothko, Bearden, too, rejected the modernist tradition," but this is nonsense: none of those artists, Bearden least of all, did any such thing...
...editing that amounts to severe mutilation. But 20th century Italy, like Germany and Britain, is somewhat more compressible. Italian modernism can be summarized because its achievement was small next to the School of Paris', and smaller yet beside the glories of Italy's own past. From the emergence of Giotto in the 13th century to the death of Bernini in the 17th, Italian painters and sculptors ruled the European roost, setting the standards of achievement by which Western culture judged itself. By the 19th century this primacy was lost, and throughout the modernist era Italy produced no equivalents to Picasso...
...Botticelli. Even today, Sano di Pietro and the Master of the Osservanza are not exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence was the locus classicus of Renaissance thought...
...Perspective in 15th century Siena was something an artist could use as a scaffolding, modify or abandon altogether; Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni, active from 1423 to 1450) did this all the time. He studied earlier Sienese artists, mainly Pietro Lorenzetti, for spatial clues as carefully as Masaccio looked at Giotto, and inevitably, came up with a lighter, slightly flatter and, as it were, more spindly and papery space -- which he still imbued with a magical lightness and precision...