Word: vatican
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...exhibition's presence here has evoked anguished protest in Italy. Some of this is political (for in the wake of the Sindona and Calvi banking scandals, people are unsurprisingly skeptical of Vatican motives); but much of it comes from art historians of impeccable credentials, like the former mayor of Rome Giulio Carlo Argan, who holds that works like the Belvedere Torso, Caravaggio's Deposition and Leonardo's St. Jerome-all included in the exhibition-should not be exposed to the risks of travel, particularly for a show that has no scholarly purpose. But the Vatican does what...
...spiritual growth and aspirations to artistic greatness ... to give our visitors joy in the appreciation of the creative spirit in man's nature that transcends his worldly ambitions." The bottom line of this fund-raising show is a little more concrete: the Met had to give the Vatican $580,000 for restoration work and 10% of catalogue sales, plus a cut on the replicas and souvenirs; the museum, in turn, gets 10% of the catalogue and all of the admission revenues from a hoped-for audience of 7,000 people a day, or 750,000 during...
...courtyard for connoisseurs, the Belvedere, stocked with a collection of antique statuary. Above its entrance was engraved a Vergilian tag, "Procul este, profani, "which freely translates as "Closed to non-experts." Turnstile tallies were not a concern of Renaissance Popes. In the past 1,500 years or so, the Vatican has amassed vast amounts of art in a way that has oscillated between the ravenous and the haphazard. There is a vague popular belief-which this show is careful not to disturb-that the Popes were always keen patrons of the best art of their time. It is quite untrue...
...Clement VIII; and some newly cleaned terra cotta studies by Bernini, along with his bronze portrait bust of his main patron, Urban VIII (1623-44), the man who did more than any other Pope to reshape the appearance of Rome (and who had all the nightingales in the Vatican gardens killed because their warbling disturbed his sleep...
...18th century the Popes began to lose their enthusiasm for live art, and the men who transformed painting in the 19th century-Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Cezanne-excited not a flicker of interest in the Vatican. In the 20th century papal patronage guttered out, except for a few ornamental mediocrities like Giacomo Manzii's door for St. Peter's. Modern Popes disliked modern art because they associated it with liberalism. Eventually the problem vanished: John Paul II would learn to use television as his predecessors had used fresco...