Word: medici
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last week Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Mortimer Caplin indicated that he was tiring of the Medici role. Henceforth, he declared, his field agents would insist that all appraisals on donated works of art would have to conform to realistic market value. Warned Caplin: "The service is not required to accept appraisals merely because they were prepared by 'expert appraisers...
...still not too sure of the marriage." Small wonder. The marriage in question was Kress's gift to the National Gallery of 416 paintings and 35 sculptures from his own beloved collection-the beginning of the biggest art giveaway program since the Palatine Electress Anna Maria Ludovica, a Medici, gave her family's vast collection to the state of Tuscany...
Hypnotic God. One of Donatello's greatest successors was Antonio del Pollajuolo, whom Lorenzo de Medici called "the principal master" of Florence. His writhing Hercules and Antaeus, the only surviving statuette, positively known to be his, almost cries out in agony. Wild Man on Horseback, by Bertoldo di Giovanni, a pupil of Donatello, rides with savage majesty upon a steed of extraordinary elegance. Though less renowned, Alessandro Vittoria left in his 19½-in.-high Neptune a figure of hypnotic power. There is no doubt that this small god could quell a storm with his anger...
Webster found evil more dramatically attractive than good, and his sympathetic characters are hard to play. But Beatrice Paipert (Vittoria's mother) and Bruce Heck (Francisco de Medici) speed those scenes when neither Weston nor Haskell are on stage, expressing their lines and feelings with such specificity that one doesn't long for the protagonists' re-entrance. Tom Griffin draws Marcello's decency well, another bright contrast to the diabolical setting...
...scene was 17th century Italy, and Composer Pietro Cesti (1623-69), otherwise known as Father Antonio, contributed to its splendor in flamboyant fashion. Renowned for his unfriarly frolics (a partiality toward wine and the wives of his benefactors), he was unfrocked* and dismissed from the court of the Medici in Florence for "reprehensible conduct." In more sober moods he reputedly wrote 100 operas, many of them tradition-breaking efforts that helped determine the shape of opera to come. Last week the first, and one of the best, of Cesti's works, his three-act Orontea, was back in Milan...