Word: quattrocento
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...none whose paintings disclose a more strictly developed taste. They are suffused with references to Balthus' two main sources, Courbet (whose stolid, gawky children are the great-grandmothers of Balthus' adolescents) and the early Italian Renaissance The profiles of his girls have the slightly awkward purity of quattrocento medallion portraits. Nude in Profile, 1977, displays her pubescent body with the columnar grace of a figure by Piero della Francesca; light flows around the shallow curve of the wall and invests her outline with a hushed archaic permanence; many coats and scumblings of paint have given her flesh...
...candlestick-cum-reliquary depicting the flight into Egypt, borrowed from a church in Gaeta, is an exquisite example of how late medieval French styles penetrated into Italian taste at the end of the 14th century. Bernardino da Foligno's late quattrocento bust of St. Balduino has a grave nobility and an intensity of modeling that, one supposes, the saint's living features could not have had. (The actual head of St. Balduino, like a stone in a peach, lies encased within the sculpture...
...outrage. Raphael and Piero? Ever since Piero della Francesca was "resurrected" in the late 19th century, he has been to many people the epitome of 15th century thought: the great artificer of volume and silvery space, the very essence of the relationship between mathematics and nature in which the quattrocento's self-image was rooted. No Renaissance painter has spoken more eloquently to the 20th century than Piero, with his vision of a sublimely abstract order dwelling in a thicket of concrete and manifest forms-figures, architecture, drapery; and because there were so few known paintings by him (apart...
...glistening language that keeps the plays fresh; it is their powerful moral undertow. The characters may be caparisoned in quattrocento raiment, but they speak to eternal situations. When Othello says, "I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have," he escapes temporal boundaries and becomes the chorus of the ghetto. Similarly, Shylock cries, "... Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" The tone of the merchant's queries seems lifted not from ancient Venice but from some current Security Council dispute...
...Hollywood produced hundreds of popular entertainments that audiences and critics considered standard fare. Now that the major studios have shrunk slowly in the West, the antique movies have been revalued upward. According to many film scholars and au-teurists, old Hollywood seems to have been an amalgam of quattrocento Florence and Periclean Greece...