Word: mastering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...since 1904 has there been a proper survey of Sienese Renaissance painting outside Siena. Not even the enthusiasms of Bernard Berenson and his heir Pope-Hennessy could give a Sienese artist like Sassetta the popularity of a Florentine like 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...
...love of the real Tuscan landscape does shine through. The Osservanza Master's The Resurrection, in which Christ flies out of the sepulcher in a blaze of gold glory, watched by the prostrated Roman soldiers, is rendered magical by the red flush of early dawn that appears along the black profile of the hills. In a panel of another broken-up altarpiece, Saint Anthony rejects the temptations of a pile of gold the Devil put in his path. The gold, however, was for some reason scraped off and repainted as earth, so that the saint appears to be overreacting...
Cranach did it, Van Eyck did it, even Hans Pleydenwurff did it. But nobody drew the birds, bees and flowers better than Albrecht Durer, the German master who died in 1528, leaving a legacy of nature illustrations that have been admired (and copied by forgers) for centuries. Albrecht Durer and the Animal and Plant Studies of the Renaissance by Fritz Koreny (New York Graphic Society; 278 pages; $75), compares such renowned works of botanical and zoological observation as Hare and The Large Piece of Turf with their imitations. The result is a scholarly view of authentication problems in 16th century...
Because they could be inexpensively reproduced, Japanese wood-block prints, or ukiyo-e, made art available to the masses. Hiroshige: Birds and Flowers (George Braziller; 192 pages; $75) presents 91 surviving color prints from a 19th century master of the form. Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858) was enormously successful with subjects more commonly portrayed in wood blocks: landscapes and scenes of urban night life. The prints of birds and flowers collected here harked back to an older Chinese tradition and became popular as well. The formula -- literally an arrangement of birds and plants -- only sounds narrow. Hiroshige's inspired variations...
Rampersad, whose recently published biography of Langston Hughes received national acclaim, is "a master scholar and is world class by any standards," according to Baker. But Baker cautions against placing Rampersad, who received his Ph.D at Harvard, in the same category with the literary theorists. "He doesn't really see the same urgency and incumbency to theorize," Baker says...