Word: putti
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...heavenly throng, many of them unfamiliar except to scholars, are a powerful sight in themselves. But their impact is strengthened by the evocative narration, spoken by Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell, and by the imaginative sequence of the pictures. Sometimes the figures almost seem to move, and the putti to dance...
...sumptuous interiors on display evoke the spacious days when every European princeling was building his own little Versailles and architects like Nash, Vanbrugh, Inigo Jones and Wyatt were adapting Italian magnificence for English country gentlemen. The modern eye can only goggle in awe at heroic staircases, ceilings bulging with putti, acres of marble floors reflecting miles of gilded plaster. Magnificence had become largely a semi-public affair, as in Queen Victoria's railway carriage (sapphire satin and tasseled draperies with a white quilted ceiling) and not merely ostentatious, as in the dining room at London's Ritz Hotel...
...Rome's American Academy, Lavin revealed five new sculptures that he attributed to Bernini: a small boy with dragon, two marble putti in the Barberini chapel in the Church of Sant' Andrea della Valle, plus two portrait busts from Confraternita della Pietá (a 17th century charity hospital demolished in 1937), long forgotten in the cellar of an adjacent church. Each is stamped with the baroque characteristic of the human presence hyperpersonified, with anatomy in strain, gestures exaggerated, details made into drama...
Nothing to Chance. For all his discipline, Poussin was in no sense a stony prude or a bloodless geometrist. He reveled in depicting bacchanalia where swarthy satyrs lurched after alabaster-skinned nymphs, and chubby putti chugged wine as if it were rosy Pablum -all composed as carefully as a ballet. In his Rape of the Sabine Women (see opposite page), swords and outflung arms set up triangles that play a counterpoint against the squarish architecture. Nothing is left to chance, not even the suggestive but studied pas de deux of the Sabine maidens and their Roman abductors...
Junkyard bargains, from limestone putti to dented iron deer, have long been available for those with offbeat tastes. But as architectural monuments are bulldozed into extinction across the land, a new group of collectors is springing up - architectural buffs who first picket to preserve the best of the old, then, if the wreckers move in, haunt the ruins in hopes of rescuing a cornice, a caryatid, a cartouche, an ornamented corbel, or some Tiffany glass...