Word: guardi
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Magical Boats. Perhaps because of the knowing eye of J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery director who helped select the paintings, the show has interesting examples of artists who are almost too catalogued in the common memory. Take Guardi. The mind leaps to Venice's canals, but the show's Guardi is a fantastical landscape of writhing trees and magical boats. Boucher? Rather than playful nymphs and naked amoureuses, there are a phantasmagoric cottage and tower that the brothers Grimm might have imagined. And Ruisdael, that painter of flickering Dutch light, is represented by a picture...
Other spoils of Berenson's Italian conquests include Raphael's Pieta and a portrait of a Roman Count, a Guardi scene of Venice, Botticelli's Madonna and Child, Giotto's Jesus, Fra Angelico's Assumption, etc. Few museums equal the Gardner's extensive collection of Italian masters. But Berenson was not to stop at conquering Italian walls; sensing Mrs. Jack's interest in a bargain, he induced her to buy Durer, Holbein, Rubens, and Rembrandt...
...18th century Italian painting has been one of art history's orphans: the general supposition was that after 1650, Italian art slid into provincial decadence. From this sad landscape, littered with insignificant talents fit only for doctoral theses or bourgeois mantels, a few fine painters emerged: Tiepolo, Canaletto, Guardi, a handful of others. Giovanni-Battista Tiepolo, in fact, seems in retrospect to have been the last Italian artist formed in the heroic mold. A protean figure of bewildering facility and adaptability, he was the link between high historical painting and rococo elegance, able to invest a pen drawing with...
...would have been more interesting to show Canaletto's view of Venice next to Guardi's Venice rather than placing a Tintoretto in between. And why is Vermeer's Young Woman between Claude Lorrain's turbulent Trojan Women and Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women? For chronology or for a calm between two storms? Why not pair the Vermeer with Holbein's portrait of a German merchant? Pairing would at least make the viewer question why the two paintings were paired. Even pointing out both artists' attention to detail, would be better than just letting the viewer admire...
...Venetian genre painter Gregorio Lazzarini, but soon broke away to study on his own the works of the Renaissance's Paolo Vero nese. By the time he was 21, he had become a full-fledged member of the local painters' fraternity, by 23 he had married Cecilia Guardi, sister of the painting Guardis, and by 26 held the highly important post of "curator" of the Doge's art treasures. From then on, his reputation spread from northern Italy to northern Europe, until he became one of the most celebrated artists of the century. By the time...