Word: painter
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Little is known of the life and development of Giotto di Bondone, born around 1267 to peasants in the bucolic valleys outside Florence. Legend says the country boy tending his flocks was discovered by the painter Cimabue, who saw him draw a fine sheep upon a rock. A more likely tale has him haunting Cimabue's Florentine bottega until the painter made him an apprentice. There Giotto absorbed his mentor's strength of drawing and sense of drama, but nature was his true teacher. He divined how to depict, with brush and pigment, the human body according to the prescription...
Velazquez couldn't have cared less about leaving a record of his own personality in his work. Confession (except to a priest) wasn't part of his culture. His objectivity formed itself around an almost punitively observed decorum. He must have felt he was a great painter, but his life's struggle was to establish himself as a great gentleman. No court was more hedged with exact signs and symbols of degree than that of the Spanish monarchy. Velazquez spent much of his adult life lobbying, campaigning, espaliering the family tree and sucking up to the noblesse in order...
...Fraga portrait of Philip IV, named for the town where it was painted, in a temporary studio, when the King was leading his armies against the rebellious Catalans in 1640. Velazquez finished it on the march, as it were; though known at court as a pintor flematico, a phlegmatic painter, he whipped it off in a few days. The head of the King, with its long and beautifully blended brushstrokes, looks very considered; less so his magnificent red outfit, which is pure Impressionism 200 years early--the broken touches of the silver brocade and their black shadings...
...thing is the long delay in Velazquez's influence. He hardly touched the next generation of Iberian artists, and the first unquestionably great Spanish painter to fall under his spell was Goya, more than 100 years after Velazquez's death. The reason was social. Most of his work was done for the King and the court, and was thus invisible to young artists. And practically none of it went abroad. Not until the museum age, when what had been private became public, did Velazquez become the intellectual property of mediocrity and genius alike. Numerically, this is a little show...
...Saturday Evening Post spread out across one gallery of the show--and notice that more than a few of them really are a little precious--you have to admit to Rockwell's ingenuity. What the original canvases for those covers make plain is that he was a painter of great if anachronistic gifts. He carried into the 20th century the ancient pleasures of visual storytelling and fine-grained description. These happen to be the same enjoyments that art has largely turned over to photography, movies and television, none of which can offer back the visual world with anything like...