Word: grecos
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...first time it was the top mobster bosses -- who ran a vast illicit empire financed largely by heroin sales to the U.S. -- who received the longest terms. Among 19 men who received life sentences was Michele Greco, 63, nicknamed "the Pope" for his high position in the Mafia. Greco was found responsible for scores of murders, including the 1982 assassination of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. Only three months before his death, Italian authorities had sent the crime-busting military man to Palermo to lead the battle against the Mafia...
...Metropolitan Museum of Art last week got its new season off to a magnificent start with the doctrinaire mystic of the Spanish Baroque, Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-1664). After Velasquez, El Greco and Ribera, Zurbaran was the best painter the so-called Golden Age of Spanish painting produced, but his work has never been seen in depth in America. Now, in one of those big transatlantic double acts the Met does so well, in cahoots with the Musee du Louvre in Paris, we have a show of 71 paintings organized by Jeannine Baticle of the Louvre. From this panoramic exposure...
What we read in Zurbaran as influences of El Greco's "spirituality" struck Pacheco as mannered and distracting. He did not mention his ex-pupil in his book. But Pacheco was a dry, insipid painter, and Zurbaran's slightly awkward fierceness must have been disturbing to a man whose chief pride lay in being the father-in-law of Velasquez. Zurbaran would not master the sense of secular decorum, the discreet and far-reaching rhetorical power of Velasquez's much greater art. He did not try to, since he was mainly painting for monks, not connoisseurs. He and Velasquez studied...
...predating French equivalents like the Madeleine in Paris by two decades. In a way, its radicality has been veiled by its success. Before long, America would be full of town halls, capitols and churches that looked like Roman temples, just as its map would be dotted with names from Greco-Roman antiquity: Ithaca, Rome, Athens, Sparta, Troy. But the Virginia state capitol was quite new and at the same time old; the strength of its political symbolism was meant to lie in its appeal to a precolonial past, that of the fresh Roman Republic, untainted as yet by Caesarism...
...created by these painters and their followers. Their relations with this place, or more properly their invention of it, gave modernism its one practical utopia of the senses, a bourgeois Eden whose roots wound back through a coastal peasant culture (still unhurt by tourism in the 1920s) to the Greco-Roman past. Instead of the pie in the sky offered by constructivism, they contemplated the langoustes on the table, bringing their sensuous embodiment to an extraordinary pitch of imaginative precision in which mere fantasy had no role...