Word: urbino
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Master Tommaso, if you don't like this sketch tell Urbino [Michelangelo's servant] in time for me to make another by tomorrow evening, as I promised; and if you do like it and want me to finish it, send it back to me." Michelangelo also had his visions of idealized womanly beauty. The Morgan has a sketch of one such vision, perhaps (as some romantics would have it) a portrait of the only wom an he ever loved. She was Vittoria Colonna, the Marchesa di Pescara, a woman 17 years younger than he, and their "love" seems...
...double agent, Nicholas plots two of Borgia's famous villainies: the murder of Cesare's captains and the capture of Urbino, a fortress city, by brazenly doublecrossing an ally. But loyalty in this arena is more dangerous than treason, and Nicholas' devotion to a former lover proves his undoing-and almost his death. As usual, Holland, who writes refreshingly taut prose, dispenses with the ponderous plots and pageantry of the genre: her people matter much more than their costumes. By substituting mental thrust and parry for the metal kind, she proves that there can be more...
...20th century than Piero, with his vision of a sublimely abstract order dwelling in a thicket of concrete and manifest forms-figures, architecture, drapery; and because there were so few known paintings by him (apart from the great fresco cycle in Arezzo), the night's work in Urbino seemed less of a theft than a lobotomy. "The theft of the Raphael and the Piero della Francesca masterpieces is a loss beyond measurement," said Italy's leading art historian and critic Giulio Carlo Argan. "It's as though all the existing copies of Dante's Divine Comedy...
...other hand, if a crank or an ignoramus took the Urbino paintings, they may have been jettisoned or destroyed by now, in panic. Siviero is inclined to discount the concrete-bunker theory-the mad millionaire gloating over stolen masterpieces in solitude. The collector, he believes, "wants to be able to enjoy the possession and to show it off." That leaves the extortion hypothesis: the work of art taken either to get a ransom or some political favor. In fact, however, the few ransom demands that have been made have turned out to be phony. Even if they were real, they...
...these things-some trivial, some precious in their testimony to lost hierarchies of consciousness-will have gone through the big auction houses or been sold by "respectable" private dealers in Europe or the U.S. That is what the art market comes down to: a brutish mugging that never stops. Urbino has turned every public work of art into a paranoid object...