Word: piero
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...name Johannes Vermeer now carries a vast aura of desirability and sweetness. It has become one of the most beloved way points of art history, like Rembrandt, Piero della Francesca or Watteau. Nothing, it seems, is going to change that, but it wasn't always so. Vermeer's reputation is almost wholly posthumous. One of the reasons why he is so admired and his pictures are so unattainable a goal for collectors is precisely the cause of his obscurity in the 19th century: the rarity of his work...
Ablow cites artists Fra Angelico and Piero as some of his greatest influences, and one can feel the quiet and stable Italian Renaissance sensibilities at work in his paintings. However, Ablow’s paintings are not all serene harmony and immaculate balance. There is a considerable amount of distortion and tension as well: tabletops swerve away from the horizon, cups tip up against the laws of perspective, and drapes fall in completely unnatural ways. In “Studio Dialogue” a jar is partially-hidden, as its left side has no visible correlation with its asymmetrical right...
...definitive influence on him, however, was the 15th century Italian painter Piero della Francesca, whose cycle of murals Legend of the True Cross Balthus saw on a visit to Italy in 1926. Piero's unique combination of physical intensity and complex, abstract formality seems to have shaped Balthus' deepest pictorial ambitions. But the streak of ambiguous desire he brought to his imagery of the nude was peculiar to Balthus, and it invested his work with a permanent scent of scandal...
...Balthus' talents did not run to avant-garde ambitions. He was entirely a figurative painter--there was no abstract phase to his work--and his reverence for past masters, from Piero and Poussin to Courbet and Manet, was so absolute that his work is a virtually seamless homage to them, not so much in subject matter as in studiously quoted poses and meticulously conscious structures. His power of organization was awesome; his spread of quotation, wide. What caused the individual citations to hang together, though, was his eye for nature. Nowhere is this clearer than in his huge composition...
...then there's the girl with the shuttlecock, that magical little refugee from a Piero della Francesca, all inwardness as she contemplates the sneak serve she is about to make. The painting's visual rhymes are delicious. Each feather of the shuttlecock, for instance, repeats some element of her appearance. White feathers repeat the white of her apron; a blue feather picks up the blue of her ribbon; a pink feather, the color of her cheek. It is as perfectly made as any sonnet. It makes you realize what rewards can flow from Chardin's desire to link the appearance...