Word: painterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Giulio Romano was so well known in his time that he is the only painter mentioned in any of Shakespeare's plays. Famous, and rather vulgar. If Raphael was the epitome of grace among artists of the High Renaissance and Michelangelo the paragon of sublimity, then Giulio was all licentious facility. So ran the judgment of our Victorian forebears, who could not quite forgive Raphael's best pupil for his indelicacy. An air of brilliant second- rateness still clings to his name. Those who can thrust their way through the crowds in Palazzo Te in Mantua and manage a long...
Thomas McGuane has lost his way since the days of The Bushwhacked Piano and does not find it in his new novel, whose aimlessness raises thoughts of old ranch buildings fallen to ruin. His hero, Joe Starling, is a brilliant painter who no longer paints (hello there, Papa H.). Becalmed, then stirred by the faintest of internal winds, he returns from the staleness of the East Coast to Montana, where he has inherited a cattle spread. Here the author novelizes industriously, with small effect. Events occur; characters are brought to life, then enter, speak and exit; but Joe remains...
William Cornelius Van Horne, painter, poker player, collector of Japanese porcelain, was probably the man most responsible for the most beautiful train ride in the western hemisphere. It was 1881 when he took over construction of the trans-Canadian railway, a project that consumed several fortunes, 4 1/2 years of agonizing labor and an untold number of lives. "Since we can't export the scenery," he once said, expressing a frontiersman's thirsty love of the land, "we'll have to import the tourists...
Velazquez's life was even, and little is known about its details. It looks quite seamless compared with the struggles of Spain's other archetypal painter, Goya -- a steadily mounting curve of recognition and respect, unmarred by scandal or alienation (although he did father one bastard in Rome). Born in Seville in 1599, the son of a minor Hidalgo family, half- Portuguese, possibly with a trace of Jewish ancestry, Velazquez would always be preoccupied with his social position. (He went to great lengths to qualify as a knight of the Order of Santiago, whose members would not accept him until...
Velazquez's maturity is a sublime, intensive lesson in pictorial coding, and this, as much as anything else, has been the source of its fascination to other painters. In rendering appearances, every artist has a code of some sort -- a way in which the licks and smears of colored mud on cloth manage, seemingly without intervention from the viewer, to recompose themselves as hard shiny metal, warm flesh, wind-ruffled grass or the sweaty sheen of a horse's flank, all in the blink of an eye. But no artist seems as explicit about this legerdemain as Velazquez...