Word: seicento
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
Even in its more refined moments, seicento art in Naples was geared to a love of strong sensation and imminent catastrophe: crowds and Vesuvius in the background, diseases of the body, instabilities of the soul, Thanatos and Eros beating the big bass drum. One recognizes in the Magdalens and Madonnas the women that visitors like John Evelyn wrote of, "generally well-featured, but excessively libidinous." Even still lifes by artists like Paolo Porpora and Giovanni Battista Recco have the swollen intensity of painting infatuated with the surface of the world. However, Recco's picture of objects on a kitchen...