Word: michelangelo
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...idea that he was "the greatest" Italian draftsman of his time (born in 1452, he died at a considerable age in exile in France in 1519) is essentially meaningless, because the late 15th and early 16th centuries were full of astonishing performers on paper. But not even contemporaries like Michelangelo were able to exceed, or regularly rival, him as a master of the kind of expressive and descriptive line that one sees in such drawings of his as the studies for equestrian sculpture or in his astounding anatomical analyses of human bone and muscle structure--though some of them...
...Bush Administration euphemistically calls "regime change" occurred, they did not whine soggily about elitism when some duke or prince put up a statue in praise of himself or his relatives. And that is what the marvelous show now on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, "The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence," is really about...
...amazingly lucky in the pool of talent he could call on. There was Michelangelo himself, growing old (he would die at 89 in 1564) but still active: there are no fewer than 12 works by him in this show. Eccentric as this may sound, the most beautiful of them is the smallest, a tiny wooden carving--whittling, really--of the crucifixion torso, which manages to compress into its less than 1-ft.-high block the tragic pathos of his late, unfinished stone carvings, such as the Rondanini Pieta. (The catalog also compares the carving to late Titian, late Rembrandt...
...addition to Michelangelo, there were lesser but still extraordinary sculptors waiting pliably at Cosimo's beck and call. There was the fabulously eloquent Giambologna. There was Bartolommeo Ammannati, who made the Fountain of Neptune in the Piazza della Signoria, designed the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti and created the exquisite curve of the Sta. Trinita bridge over the Arno. Benvenuto Cellini did for Cosimo the bronze Perseus decapitating Medusa that still stands in the Loggia dei Lanzi, an allegory of the triumph of Virtue over Cosimo's enemies. Medusa's gore, solidified in bronze streams, is one of the most...
...paintings in the show that the visitor will probably be most drawn. Florentine mannerism--"the stylish style," as one art historian called it--reached its apogee under the immediate and inescapable influence of Michelangelo. Its hallmarks were the extreme grace and elongation of the figures and their twisting, flamelike pose, known as the figura serpentinata. Thirty years ago, the fashion among (mainly Marxist) art historians was to attribute this artificiality to social anxiety among the artists: how different was the overrefined melancholy of Pontormo from the solid materiality of earlier Renaissance artists like Masaccio! Actually there's no basis...