Word: medici
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...infinite blue gauze of heaven, the squirming cascades of rosy, tormented flesh in hell, the marmoreal dead Christs and grandly virile Apostles-were meant to be seen by a plebeian eye. They hung on palace walls, firmly reminding the autocrats of Catholic Europe-Habsburg and Gonzaga, Stuart and Medici-that absolute power is absolutely delightful. Rubens was one of the greatest political artists who ever lived, but he had nothing to do with our modern idea of the engage painter: he was no Courbet, but utterly a man of the right. There is no trace of speculative thought...
...Ocean Parks, the monumental series of paintings Diebenkorn began in 1967 and named after the Los Angeles suburb where he now lives, have attracted their share of hyperbole. One New York critic likened them to both Rubens' Marie de Medici cycle in the Louvre and Mantegna's frescoes in the Ducal Palace in Mantua - which may be the silliest indulgence since Truman Capote last compared himself to Marcel Proust. However, they are certainly among the most beautiful declamations in the language of the brush to have been uttered anywhere in the past 20 years...
...fight goes may have grave repercussions later on for Carter and his programs: the memories of Senators and Congressmen run long, and they can nurse their grudges as bitterly as the Medici. With the possible exception of motherhood, there is nothing more sacred to many members of Congress than the physical evidences of the power that Carter is trying to limit: gigantic dams, huge reservoirs, aqueducts that run for hundreds of miles, all proof-cast in concrete-of the legislators' concern for the folks back home. What is more, there is no sure way of measuring the true value...
...other hand, Monday looks good for lectures and so on, if you're interested in Medici tombs or Micronesia. If not, stop reading...
Moreover, there is the problem that Jefferson had actually seen few of the major works in the show. There on view is the Uffizi's Medici Venus, because Jefferson longed to install a copy of her at Monticello. Not having been to Florence, he had never seen the original, which he knew through engravings and plasters. It is pleasant to see the Towneley Vase, that once renowned Attic mar ble of the 1st century A.D. on which Keats based several lines of Ode to a Grecian Urn. But Jefferson never saw it, and (as the catalogue admits) would probably...