Word: michelangelos
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...turn him into the leading architectural theorist of his age. The result was Palladio's Four Books of Architecture, which were published in 1570 and spread his influence throughout the West. By then he was already established as an original figure: his buildings, less strained and emotional than Michelangelo's or Vignola's, more atmospheric than Bramante's, met the mood of a culture that tended increasingly to think of antiquity as a golden...
...singular life better than these calamitous daubs. Yet in its way, the Avignon show may perform some service to Picasso's reputation. It is hard to see it and retain as workable the myth that everything he painted was touched with genius, and of importance. Unlike Titian or Michelangelo, Picasso failed in old age. To perceive this is to be freed, to some extent, of the hagiographic icing that still obscures him. But it does not reduce the dimensions of his actual achievement...
...Picasso was the most famous artist in the world; by 1970 he had become the most famous artist that ever lived, in the sense that more people had heard of him than ever heard the name, let alone saw the work, of Michelangelo and Cezanne while they were alive. The effect of this on him can only be guessed at. The engine an artist deploys against the world is necessarily himself, and within it are some delicate mechanisms that must be protected. In the work obsessions of his last years, he was possessively tended by the last of the seven...
...under his barely fledged wing was Leonardo da Vinci, who went to France and died in the royal chateau at Amboise in 1519. But when the King turned to the remodeling of Fontainebleau, his chances of getting another such hero of the High Renaissance were gone. Raphael was dead. Michelangelo rebuffed Francis' overtures. That left younger men, notably Rosso, who had been cut adrift by the sack of Rome in 1527 and now, by a quite oneiric fluke of luck, became impresario of all the royal studios and workshops...
...psychological tension. In the end, he committed suicide in a fit of depression. But Rosso's designs for the Galerie François Premier at Fontainebleau set the court style: the fantastic stucco cartouches, gilding and strapwork; the airless painted space, filled with large twisting bodies based on Michelangelo's figura serpentinata; the strained and tangled poses; the weird color, by turns opulent and acidly dry; the Biblical and classical allegories, recondite to the point of eccentricity. "A courtly art," observed Art Historian André Chastel, "always tends to develop a universe from which nature is absent...