Word: masaccios
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...figures and their twisting, flamelike pose, known as the figura serpentinata. Thirty years ago, the fashion among (mainly Marxist) art historians was to attribute this artificiality to social anxiety among the artists: how different was the overrefined melancholy of Pontormo from the solid materiality of earlier Renaissance artists like Masaccio! Actually there's no basis for this, and one can enjoy the wonderful (if at times rather stressed out) elegance of Florentine mannerism without feeling that the artists' world was somehow falling apart...
...figures and their twisting, flamelike pose, known as the figura serpentinata. Thirty years ago, the fashion among (mainly Marxist) art historians was to attribute this artificiality to social anxiety among the artists: how different was the overrefined melancholy of Pontormo from the solid materiality of earlier Renaissance artists like Masaccio! Actually there's no basis for this, and one can enjoy the wonderful (if at times rather stressed out) elegance of Florentine mannerism without feeling that the artists' world was somehow falling apart...
RUNNER-UP: Five Hundred Self-Portraits (Phaidon; $29.95) Artists form their vision of the world by looking at themselves. These mirror images scan 4,000 years of art history from ancient Egypt to right now, from Masaccio to Ron Mueck...
...Umberto Baldini and Ornella Casazza (Abrams; $125). Now, after years of dedicated labor, the frescoes in the Florentine chapel look as they did in the Renaissance. The biblical figures painted by Masaccio, Masolino and Filippino Lippi glow anew in this testament to religious faith, artistic genius and scientific restoration...
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666) was known from childhood and, since his death, to art history as Guercino -- "the Squinter." Thus he joins Masaccio ("Tom the Lump") and Sodoma among the notable Italian painters who survive in pejorative nicknames. One flinches to think what this practice might have done to the self-esteem of artists in the late 20th century had it gone...