Word: luini
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...painters designed scenery for the Nativity dramas, and afterwards labored in their silent studios to preserve the immediacy of the plays in paint. One who succeeded was an obscure master named Bernardino Luini, living in Milan. For such artists as Luini, the birth of Christ was not merely a historical event to be celebrated in its proper season, but .an ever-present reality-as immediate as the birth of one's own son-and so he saw nothing strange in taking it from its temporal context and creating a contemporary Italian Bethlehem. The result was sometimes as stilted-looking...
Almost nothing is known of Luini beyond the fact that he painted a great deal, and died in 1532. He may once have studied with Leonardo da Vinci, for though his drawing is less acute than Leonardo's, it has the same sinuous elegance-like a strand of hair afloat on the wind. But unlike Leonardo, he never painted a monster or a mask of rage or caught a tempest in his brush. Luini was limited and narrow, but like a narrow window standing open...
...peaceful radiance in the window of Luini's art dazzled Critic John Ruskin,*who called him "ten times greater than Leonardo." Luini, he wrote, "paints what he has been taught to design wisely and has passion to realize gloriously." In that sentence, Ruskin neatly underlined the double dependence of religious...
...Neither Luini nor Baldovinetti was aware of the fact, but while they painted, the astronomer Copernicus was calmly pulling the earth out from under their studios. Even in the Renaissance, a scattering of prophets such as Savonarola kept repeating that man is mere dust; but never before Copernicus did anyone suspect what out-of-the-way dust man was. When Copernicus squeezed the world into a ball and set it spinning through the blackness of outer space, he did much to destroy the importance of man in art as well as in the universe...
Giovanni Bellini achieved more than one such masterpiece, creations not only of his own genius but also of the age and place in which he lived. While Baldovinetti labored in Florence, and Luini in Milan, Bellini breathed the glittering, clear splendor of Venice, which lay like a wide galleon of marble and mosaic moored to the Adriatic shore. Bellini's father, brother and brother-in-law (Mantegna) were all famed painters, who brilliantly adapted and modified in varying degrees the jewel-hard Byzantine art which trade with the East had brought to Venice. Giovanni Bellini did more; he created...