Word: tuscans
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...collection has been sequestered while the heirs haggled with the legal authorities about its status. Early this year, at long last, the dispute was finally resolved. The result was a bequest to the city of Florence of 15 ceramic plaques from the della Robbia workshop, 38 pieces of Tuscan Renaissance furniture, 43 prime specimens of majolica and Hispano-Moresque faïence ware, twelve sculptures (capped by Bernini's small but superbly fashioned St. Lawrence on the Grill), and 35 paintings that any museum would be proud to own. Late this month they will go on display...
Captured Moments. The most ornate stylist in this group is Italian-born Bruno Lucchesi, whose vibrant Tuscan peasants and East Village hippies are currently on view at Manhattan's Forum Gallery. Like Verkade, Lucchesi has a stop-action photographic eye and delights in off-center, cantilevered poses that seem to defy the laws of gravity. He too specializes in capturing moments of everyday human drama. One work in his current exhibition shows an old woman lying on her deathbed with a grief-stricken young girl stretched out across her legs. "It's a tribute to my mother...
Lucchesi's sculptures are as Italian as Verkade's are Dutch. He works up his figures with a quattrocento Florentine passion for detail, and flings off flying draperies with the airy exuberance of a Bernini. The son of a Tuscan shepherd too poor to send him to art school, he learned his first lessons from the monuments in cemeteries, later managed to study in Florence. There he met and married a Brooklyn girl; and when they came to America in 1957, he began to exhibit in his father-in-law's picture-frame shop in Greenwich Village...
...brothers or their aides inspect as many as 100 crocodile skins before choosing the four that make one handbag. Shoes and other leather goods are made from the hides of Tuscan cattle that are not allowed to leave their stalls at all lest they be scratched. The Guccis' staff of 185 workers, helped by peasants who work for Gucci in their homes around Florence, shape and sew as many as 7,000 pairs of shoes each month, plus pigskin bags made of 130 separate pieces. "There is not much that you can teach a Florentine about merchandising or craftsmanship...
...slum. Surrealistically oozing globules and pustules contrast with saints' pictures and comic-book illustrations. The result is an emphatically modern version of everyday hell, but it is more than merely nightmare for its own sake. The squalor usually serves to set off the loveliness of some ver dant Tuscan mountain landscape, distantly viewed. Of Exterior Wall with Landscape, he observes, "One might say that the window is the fantasy and the wall is reality. Every idyllic vision is out of the window and far away...