Word: quattrocento
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...humanist with diverse interests. He also happened to be the most accomplished military strategist in 15th century Europe, and he used his immense profits as a freelance killing machine to turn Urbino, his hometown in the Marche region on Italy's eastern coast, into the Greenwich Village of the Quattrocento, a place where architects, soldiers, intellectuals and painters could commune under the umbrella of his largesse...
...much of a rigid technique turning out predictable results (which one learns to expect from official sculptors) as of an extreme responsiveness and delicacy, an adoring pursuit of the nuance, which coexists with his fondness for declamation. He had no embarrassment, of course, in quoting his quattrocento idols: that was the natural use of a heritage. He took from Pisanello, Laurana, Cellini and Desiderio da Settignano; the pose of Farragut is Donatello's St. George without a shield. Still, any academic hack can redo a prototype; Saint-Gaudens' peculiar gift was to shadow these massive and well-known shapes with...
...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 Martini. And that quizzical tilt to the head that you see in his 1919 portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne? It descends from...
...mass of his writings into coherent treatises. His engineering and hydraulic projects either failed or were not started. Very few of his machines would have worked either, and, of course, the famous ornithopters, helicopters and gliders that made him, in the eyes of an earlier generation, a sort of quattrocento Orville Wright never moved an inch into the air. Probably not even the crank-propelled tanks that he hoped would creep like lethal cone snails across the battlefields of northern Italy would have harmed anyone, even assuming that their sweating and straining occupants could have got their wheels...
...however, an assumption that guided the way women were painted in quattrocento Italy. Actually, one feels that this show comes about 35 years late. It should have been done back in the '60s, when the National Gallery bought Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci from Liechtenstein. Leonardo was in his early '20s when he painted this daughter of a rich Florentine banker, circa 1474-78. On the front of the panel you see the familiar face--that pale, egg-smooth, cold teenage mask--a girl soberly dressed in brown, the blue lacing of her bodice neatly echoing the blues...