Word: papally
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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John Paul's bold and crucial pilgrimage begins Wednesday in relatively placid Costa Rica, the base from which he will make hops to three other nations. One will be Nicaragua, which is ruled by a Marxist-dominated government in which several priests hold high positions despite papal displeasure. John Paul will visit Panama and El Salvador, the first time a modern Pope has traveled to a nation in the throes of an all-out civil war. Then he moves on to Guatemala, where he will meet General Efrain Rios Montt, an eccentric born-again Protestant whose regime is accused...
...show tries to give an overview of papal commissioning and collecting. The papacy is, in fact, the world's oldest continuous art collector, and the history of its museums goes back to 1503, when Julius II set up a courtyard for connoisseurs, the Belvedere, stocked with a collection of antique statuary. Above its entrance was engraved a Vergilian tag, "Procul este, profani, "which freely translates as "Closed to non-experts." Turnstile tallies were not a concern of Renaissance Popes. In the past 1,500 years or so, the Vatican has amassed vast amounts of art in a way that...
...high plateau of papal collecting and patronage came in the 16th and 17th centuries. It lasted from the pontificate of Julius II (1503-13)-who commissioned the frescoes in the Stanze from Raphael and the Sistine frescoes from Michelangelo-through the reign of Clement VIII (1592-1605). In those years the most vivid and impressive aspects of papal taste came to their highest pitch, sometimes nearly bankrupting the papacy with the mania for the Antique, the demand for vast fresco cycles, fountains and pharaonic tombs, and the general love of lapis lazuli and gold...
...18th century the Popes began to lose their enthusiasm for live art, and the men who transformed painting in the 19th century-Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Cezanne-excited not a flicker of interest in the Vatican. In the 20th century papal patronage guttered out, except for a few ornamental mediocrities like Giacomo Manzii's door for St. Peter's. Modern Popes disliked modern art because they associated it with liberalism. Eventually the problem vanished: John Paul II would learn to use television as his predecessors had used fresco...
...although the adjective papal casts an aura over any noun it touches, and is one of the favorite words of cultural coercion in the Midcult lexicon (like masterpiece and treasure), one should use it with reserve. The papacy may be infallible in dogma, but not in taste. And although the exhibition claims to show us in detail just what the changing relations of the Popes to art were, it does not deliver the goods. It contains only routine information and no fresh ideas about the liturgical, propagandist, doctrinal and decorative purposes of Vatican collecting, or the effect of that collecting...