Word: rosso
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From 1528 onwards, the King-whose sharp little eyes, scrolled mouth and drooping wedge of a nose survive in many effigies-set up court in a manor at Fontainebleau. To it Francis brought some of the best Italian artists of the day: Rosso Fiorentino, Francesco Primaticcio and Niccolo dell'Abate. Even Benvenuto Cellini spent several years, from 1540 to 1545, in the King's employment, making statues and, as a culmination of his skill as a goldsmith, the famous gold saltcellar (now in Vienna) that he finished in 1543. The Italians' work set a new cultural norm...
...went to France and died in the royal chateau at Amboise in 1519. But when the King turned to the remodeling of Fontainebleau, his chances of getting another such hero of the High Renaissance were gone. Raphael was dead. Michelangelo rebuffed Francis' overtures. That left younger men, notably Rosso, who had been cut adrift by the sack of Rome in 1527 and now, by a quite oneiric fluke of luck, became impresario of all the royal studios and workshops...
...Rosso was a difficult Florentine, melancholic and arrogant; even the religious paintings he did in Italy are full of a quite un-Renaissance sense of foreboding and psychological tension. In the end, he committed suicide in a fit of depression. But Rosso's designs for the Galerie François Premier at Fontainebleau set the court style: the fantastic stucco cartouches, gilding and strapwork; the airless painted space, filled with large twisting bodies based on Michelangelo's figura serpentinata; the strained and tangled poses; the weird color, by turns opulent and acidly dry; the Biblical and classical allegories...