Word: medici
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Take a student who has never been to Italy, never really seen, let alone looked at Italian art, never read any Italian literature, hasn't the vaguest notion about the mind-bending complexity of Italian history. Don't tell him who Lorenzo de Medici was, or make him read the Florentine historians, but instead make him read Lopez's theory of the relation between economics and culture in the Renaissance. Then make him read what some scholar said about some other scholar's interpretation of Lopez. Then ask him for his opinion about the Renaissance. This is the scenario...
...cliché for large acts of art patronage. This myth dies hard: started by the ruthless city-boss Lorenzo Il magnifico himself, prolonged by his sons, nourished by poets, flacks and hero-seeking historians from Poliziano to Jakob Burckhardt, it seems ineradicable, like kudzu. In fact, Lorenzo de Medici was not a remarkable art patron; he preferred jewelry, knickknacks, antiques and rare manuscripts to either painting or contemporary sculpture. The idea of disinterested art patronage in the service of some imagined "public good" did not occur to him−any more than it would have occurred to his successors...
...game away quicker than a glass eye that cannot blink. His work belongs in the context of photorealist painting, but it incorporates more illusions than painting can. The great period for waxworks was the 17th to 18th century, when the favorite court artist of the next-to-last Medici, Cosimo III, was a Sicilian named Gaetano Zumbo, whose fiendishly detailed wax tableaux of plague-rotted bodies are still preserved in Florence. Hanson's proles, drunks, junkies and bulgy housewives do not reek of mortality like that, but they have a quotidian sourness about them, and their smell of perplexed...
...city's master builder is J. Irwin Miller, a civic-minded industrialist and former president of the National Council of Churches who is sometimes called "the Medici of the Middle West." In 1939, Miller startled Columbus by choosing the great Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen to design a new building for Columbus' First Christian Church. But it was not until 1957 that Miller really shook up the old town. By then he was board chairman of his family's Cummins Engine Co. and was concerned about the difficulty of attracting talented young executives to Columbus. So he announced...
...circulation. At 69 he has no public face. When André Malraux made him director of the French Academy in Rome-a post Balthus held for 16 years until his retirement a few months ago-Balthus kept fastidiously to himself even as the secular cardinal of Villa Medici. His output is small. He rarely exhibits; Balthus' last New York show...