Word: palazzos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fatuous to utter bromides about art's being the Common Property of Mankind. Americans now begin to view the outflow of their own art with bemused alarm -- just as Italians and Englishmen, at the turn of the century, watched the Titians, Sassettas and Turners, pried loose from palazzo and stately home by the teamwork of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, disappearing into American museums. "The Japanese are awash in money," says New York's leading dealer in old-master drawings, David Tunick. "And when something really good goes to Japan, you feel it has vanished into an abyss...
...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 look at the enormous Giulio Romano show that has been the city's main event this fall (it closes on Nov. 12) will have the best chance any public has had since the artist died in 1546 to judge him for themselves...
...with Giulio, design and invention were inseparable, and their combination is worn so lightly that one may not realize how difficult were the problems he set for himself. How do you create long processional friezes of figures based on a Roman triumph, as in the Stucco Room at Palazzo Te, without monotonously repeating poses and gestures? How do you cram an imagined temple with such an excessive throng of spectators that the Circumcision of Christ looks more like a PEN dinner thrown by Gayfryd Steinberg, and yet keep the action coherent? Virtuosity was in Giulio's nature...
...great expression of their relationship was Palazzo Te itself, which Giulio designed from the ground up as a pleasure pavilion for Federico. This rectangular, single-story building, with its courtyards, pools, screen colonnade and enfilade of frescoed rooms, was Giulio's masterpiece. Its architecture would inspire many future designers, among them Inigo Jones and Sir John Vanbrugh. But its frescoes, which have been thoroughly and sympathetically cleaned in recent years, would be no less influential...
...course the most popular thing in Palazzo Te, now as then, is the Room of the Giants, where Giulio (whose taste for apocalyptic catastrophe may have been sparked by talking to Leonardo in Rome) painted Ovid's story of the gods' revenge on the rebellious earth giants. These bearded, stumbling palookas in their peasants' breeches, crushed by the fall of rocks and masonry, are done with literally colossal gusto. The whole windowless chamber seems ready, for a moment, to totter and fall on your head. No room in Italy gives you a clearer sense of the mannerist delight in bizarre...