Word: seicento
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...Guercino was one of those 17th century Italian artists who sank under the weight of an earlier age's revival. Critics and collectors at the end of the 19th century were so obsessed with the study and acquisition of Renaissance art that they had little time for the seicento; for them, Italian genius lay in "primitive" gold-ground altarpieces and 15th and 16th century frescoes. Consequently, Guercino, like a number of his contemporaries -- Guido Reni and the Carraccis, for instance, or even Caravaggio -- was slighted. The first Guercino exhibition was not held until three centuries after his death...
...traces, from slides projected on the canvas. And he traces very badly, which lends his quotations from Old Master paintings -- thick on the ground in this show -- an irresistibly comic air. If you are going to "appropriate" an image from Durer or Gericault or Tiepolo or even some routine seicento tapestry, and do it by hand, nobody expects you to draw as well as your sources; but it helps if you can at least draw well enough to make the source clear, and Salle can hardly even do that...
...long since faded, mimicking his reputation. "Sir Sploshua," as others called him for his generous and Rubenesque handling of wet paint surfaces, had an imp of fakery lodged in his breast. He was determined to produce, for his clientele of the great, the tone and mellowed appearance of European seicento art. To this end he would whip up weird mayonnaises of wax, turps, asphaltum, eggs, resin and oil. "Varnished three times with different varnishes, and egged twice, oiled twice, and waxed twice, and sized--perhaps in 24 hours!" exclaimed a fellow artist, Benjamin Haydon...
...including a guard at Castel Sant'Angelo and a waiter whose face he cut open in a squabble about artichokes. He was sued for libel in Rome and mutilated in a tavern brawl in Naples. He was saturnine, coarse and queer. He thrashed about in the etiquette of early seicento cultivation like a shark in a net. So where is the mini-series? When will some art-collecting shlockmeister of Beverly Hills produce The Shadows and the Sodomy, the 1980s' answer to The Agony and the Ecstasy...
...late mannerism, turned out by the frescoed acre by artists like Caravaggio's early master Giuseppe Cesari, alias the Cavaliere d'Arpino. Limp, garrulous, overconceptualized and feverishly second hand, Roman art in 1590 was in some ways like New York art four centuries later. Against its pedantry--the seicento equivalent, perhaps, of our "postmodern" cult of irony--Caravaggio's work proposed a return to the concrete, the tangible, the vernacular and the sincere. For all the theater and guignol in his work, Caravaggio had far more in common with the great solidifiers of the Renaissance, from Masaccio to Michelangelo, than...