Word: painterly
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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...
...Although Giulio Pippi de'Giannuzzi was born in Rome, took the city's name, worked in Raphael's studio and, as a very young man, must have known both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, it was in Mantua that he found his voice as an artist. As architect and painter to Federico II Gonzaga, he became Mantua's virtual artistic dictator in his 20s and remained so until he died at the early age of 47. There, projects poured from him in an undiverted stream: not only frescoes and panel paintings and the innumerable sketches that preceded them, but also...
...Giulio his Roman career. Raphael was dead, and his former assistants were now maneuvering on their own for the big commissions. But with Luther raging against Vatican corruption and a reformist chill blowing through the papal court, Pope Clement VII was not going to make a pornographer his official painter. At this point Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael's friend and author of The Courtier, fixed Giulio up with his job in Mantua...
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...