Word: titian
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...more an abstract artist than Picasso. No abstract painter can claim descent from their work without acknowledging that fact. The worldly motif, especially the human body, and in particular the female body, was as basic to Matisse's art as it had been to Delacroix's or Titian's. His paintings vividly communicate a tension between what he called "the sign" and the reality it pointed...
None of this was completely new in painting -- you have only to think of Titian, Rembrandt's father figure and model, and of Caravaggio, whose dirty- feet realism had such an impact on the Dutch master when young. But Rembrandt put the elements of dramatic narrative, character description and history painting together in a way that had not been attempted before, and has scarcely been rivaled since...
...this or the later Kenwood Self-Portrait (circa 1665), with its sketchy construction (arcs in the background, a near Cubist flurry of angular brush marks to indicate palette and brushes), as being a long way from the Italian Renaissance, but in fact they are grounded in it and in Titian's late manner...
...Dutch painting is more like a Titian than Rembrandt's Moses Breaking the Tablets (1659), the furious patriarch with a shining face, rearing up from the brown murk to smash the tables of the law. The style of Rembrandt's maturity was so totally his own, even in the way it used the past, that it seems inimitable. But in fact it was widely and constantly imitated, especially by his own assistants, and there begins the problem of attribution with which the Rembrandt Research Project, a team of leading connoisseurs and Rembrandt specialists from Europe and the U.S., has been...
...puritan sects, one masquerading as conservative, the other posing as revolutionary but using academic complaint as a way of evading engagement in the real world. Sect A borrows the techniques of Republican attack politics to show that if Sect B has its way, the study of Milton and Titian will be replaced by indoctrination programs in the works of obscure Third World authors and West Coast Chicano subway muralists, and the pillars of learning will forthwith collapse. Meanwhile, Sect B is so stuck in the complaint mode that it can't mount a satisfactory defense, since it has burned most...