Word: putty
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Putti," she said, using my family nickname, "Are you feeling all right? You sound tired. Are you sleeping enough? What did you eat today? Are you taking Vitamin...
...familiar. There are the figures from antiquity (Achilles, Dido, Alexander, Scipio), the heroes and heroines out of Renaissance literature (Rinaldo and Armida from Tasso's epic Gerusalemme liberata), the biblical patriarchs and Madonnas and martyrs, the allegorical figures of Virtue or Envy or the Four Continents, the flocks of putti as dense as pigeons in the piazza. All these had swarmed across every painted surface in Venice for generations before Tiepolo. But he reinvented them in terms of a spiraling, light-filled exuberance that was unparalleled in its time. No cliche or received idea, once Tiepolo was through with...
Which is not to say he hadn't learned from Europe. His paintings of children sometimes reach for a rough kind of classical energy. The frieze-line of kids running parallel to the picture plane in Snap the Whip, 1872, brings to mind the dancing putti on Donatello's Cantoria in Florence. He had a knack for inserting distant echoes of the classical into the forms of common life, and doing it so subtly that you're scarcely aware of them at first. Homer went to London in 1881 and then settled in the village of Cullercoats on the coast...
...choice of Adolphus Busch Hall as the venue for the play is a significant and felicitous one. The hall itself supports the director's take on the story. Busch Hall's cavernous stone interior contains the entrance to a cathedral and a lofty balcony from which two putti gaze impishly on the audience below. The cathedral door appears to have been taken from a church in Europe and brought whole to the United States, like the Parthenon friezes taken to England by Lord Elgin. This fact supports the play's and the story's vision of imperialistic thievery, where...
...illusory third dimension to flat, featureless walls and ceilings. Known as trompe l'oeil (fool the eye), the style reached its prime in the Renaissance and during the Baroque period, when painters embellished churches and palaces with imaginary soaring columns, weighty domes and clouded skies inhabited by plump putti...