Word: mellone
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Capstone of Paul Mellon's years of patronage: an eight-figure gift...
...which together cover 604,000 sq. ft.) will be somewhat larger than the older building (522,500 sq. ft.). The new structure may be the most expensive public building to have been erected in America. Most of the $95 million that went into it came from one man, Paul Mellon−and the foundation he controls. The funds to construct the main block of the National Gallery were furnished 40 years ago by his father Andrew Mellon...
...East Building is not Paul Mellon's only colossal gift to the world of art. Between 1966 and 1968, he laid out $18 million to build, equip and maintain the Yale Center for British Art. He also paid for everything in it: 1,200 paintings, 10,000 drawings, 16,000 rare books and 10,000 reference books, 18,000 prints, and a study archive of 90,000 photographs. Their value is not publicly known, but it stands well over $100 million, since Mellon's bequest to Yale forms the most systematic collection of British art, mainly 18th...
...first problem in describing Paul Mellon's role as patron is to draw comparisons. "Medicean" is the 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...
...Mellon did not return to English art in a systematic way until the late 1950s, and in fact no more than a fraction of the prodigious collection of the Yale center had been assembled before 1959. In that year Mellon met his chief aesthetic guide and mentor−his English Bernard Berenson, as it were−the late art historian Basil Taylor. Taylor, a great scholar of English art, possessed a sense of ethical delicacy almost inconceivable in the art world today (and certainly never shared by Berenson): he advised Mellon unofficially, for free, accepting only his expenses, lest...