Word: michelangelo
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...This is Michelangelo as he was not meant to be seen. One has the illicit thrill of inspecting the mechanism of illusion, of seeing what devices and abbreviations he used to make sure the figures would "read" from restricted angles 65 ft. below. One thinks of him on the ladder, carrying the scheme of exaggeration in his head like a brimful bucket. On the curved surfaces of the ceiling and spandrels, he used cartoons, full-size drawings whose outlines were transferred to the plaster. But the lunettes, or flat semicircular panels, around the top of the Sistine's windows, show...
...well. During the previous night, however, intruders had forced a shutter of one of the chapel windows. Once inside, they cut away the altarpiece with a razor blade and marched out the front door with their prize: an 8-ft. by 7-ft. canvas, the Nativity, painted by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio in 1609. The uninsured masterwork was valued at $3 million...
...Japanese Michelangelo or Van Gogh (or perhaps one should say that the Japanese Van Gogh is Van Gogh). The very idea of the avantgarde, that ruling myth in terms of which a century of artists from Manet to Joseph Beuys is conventionally discussed, is purely Western and has never had more than a surface appeal to the Japanese. The idea of cultural norms based on confrontation and "radical" displays of ego strikes them as embarrassing. The scheme whose parody is now being played to exhaustion among the graffitists and plate breakers of Soho-culture as a series of self-conscious...
Toward the end, Greenaway's cunning conundrum of a plot unravels a bit. But by then he has made his point about the social power of the artist (whether Michelangelo or Mailer) in a society that wants him as an entertainment but not an equal. That Greenaway made this icily sumptuous film on a $500,000 budget, and seduced winning performances from his cast, suggests that, in art if not in life, the entertainer can exact his sweet revenge...
...Malta in 1609-10. He never set up a proper studio with assistants in Naples; he took no pupils, held no salon and had little talent as a courtier. Yet by word of mouth, force of reputation and the example of four or five paintings he executed there, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio completely changed the face of Neapolitan painting at the start of the 17th century. A few months after his second arrival in the city, this paranoid, violent homosexual genius was dead at 37, leaving two generations of painters from Naples to Brussels with a legacy to pick over...