Word: pontormo
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...Drang of his life, you would fully expect Modigliani to draw like Egon Schiele, tormented figures tied into knots by their own perplexities. Instead he deployed the most serene line in the whole School of Paris, a line that stretches back four centuries to the elongated figures of Pontormo and Parmigianino. Modigliani came to Paris not only as a Jew but also as an Italian, steeped in the art of the quattrocento and the High Renaissance and their Mannerist aftermath. You find the sources of his poised, limpid line in the elegant whiplashing of Botticelli and the Madonnas of Simone...
Even the eccentricities of Mannerism, the 16th century style that we generally group him within, can't fully account for him. His figures may be elongated in the Mannerist style, but the swanning courtiers in Pontormo or Parmigianino, most of them as slender as greyhounds, are nothing like El Greco's rough-cut saints, famished men with skin the color of split timber and stiff robes draped around them like crumpled fenders. And while the Mannerist palette, all that coy bump and grind of pink and yellow, is calculated sometimes to startle, the explosive oddity of El Greco is something...
...hallmarks were the extreme grace and elongation of the figures and their twisting, flamelike pose, known as the figura serpentinata. Thirty years ago, the fashion among (mainly Marxist) art historians was to attribute this artificiality to social anxiety among the artists: how different was the overrefined melancholy of Pontormo from the solid materiality of earlier Renaissance artists like Masaccio! Actually there's no basis for this, and one can enjoy the wonderful (if at times rather stressed out) elegance of Florentine mannerism without feeling that the artists' world was somehow falling apart...
...hallmarks were the extreme grace and elongation of the figures and their twisting, flamelike pose, known as the figura serpentinata. Thirty years ago, the fashion among (mainly Marxist) art historians was to attribute this artificiality to social anxiety among the artists: how different was the overrefined melancholy of Pontormo from the solid materiality of earlier Renaissance artists like Masaccio! Actually there's no basis for this, and one can enjoy the wonderful (if at times rather stressed out) elegance of Florentine mannerism without feeling that the artists' world was somehow falling apart...
...collection moves with ease between fine works by major masters--Rembrandt, Pontormo, Rubens, Mantegna, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Turner--and illuminatingly good ones by less famous figures, such as Franz Xavier Winterhalter's coolly sumptuous portrait of a 19th century princess on the terrace of her villa in the Crimea, or a small, haunting study of a young girl by the Belgian Symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff. It is already a deeply serious and discriminating collection and may turn into a great...