Word: painterly
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...begins with one extraordinary icon-an odd word for a painting of a cabbage, a quince, a cut melon and a cucumber, but no other will quite do. It is by Juan Sanchez Cotan (1560-1627), a painter from Toledo who is known by only a few works, all of which are remarkable for their careful, precise, yet unpedantic construction. This is one of the finest. No still life was ever so still. The black space behind the framing window looks infinitely deep; two of the objects (the slice of melon and the yellow tip of the cucumber) stick...
...near epic example of the latter is The Dream of the Knight, by the Madrid painter Antonio de Pereda (1611-78). The young Don sleeps, and an angel appears in his dream with a scroll bearing a diagram of death's arrow with the motto, "It pierces eternally, flies quickly and kills." Before the two figures is a tumbled mass of emblems of the world: armor and a wheel-lock gun (military glory), a bishop's miter and a papal tiara (religious authority), a laurel wreath (cultural fame), money, jewels, playing cards, sheet music-and a mirror that reflects only...
...those towering masses of tulips and roses, full of squishy virtuosity; but they lack the architectural grandeur of earlier Spanish works and promptly induce surfeit. After them, the Spanish still-life tradition nose-dived into academism and decor through the 18th century, with the single exception of the Madrid painter Luis Melendez (1716-80), whose massive arrays of boxes, wrinkled cheeses, copper cookware and glittering dorados or sea bream were disparaged as minor art by academic pooh-bahs and never won him the success he deserved. But other than France's Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, there was no finer still...
...climax of the show comes at the right place, its end, with four still lifes by Francisco de Goya. Because Goya was supremely a painter of the human clay in all its aspects, we don't associate him with still life. But his powers of empathy were so vast that he could endow almost anything with a shiver of mortality and the cold touch of otherness; and so it is with these paintings...
...studying prosody is as natural as a painter learning to draw before he learns to paint. That's not to say that they must write in form for the rest of their lives. But they should know it exists before they reject it. As a writer I find it useful to have all the tools that I can before making choices. Similarly, I want my students to know all they can before they choose what to accept or reject...