Prendergast in Italy

Matthews, N., & Kennedy, E. (2009). Prendergast in Italy. City: Merrell.

Came across this book whilst working on RFID in the the 709 oversize section. Immediately something clicked; perhaps I'd seen this before? Turns out that a year and a half back I read an article (and posted a blog entry) about Prendergast.

Who Owns Michelangelo’s ‘David’?

Max Rossi/Reuters - Visitors to the Accademia Gallery in Florence stop to get a closer look at Michelangelo’s “David”.

Does Italy, or Florence own the statue?

Domenico Ghirlandaio

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Italian Renaissance painter from Florence. Read about a fresco he painted, Madonna della Misericordia, in the Chapel of the Vespucci, in Ognissanti, in which Amerigo is present, in The mysterious history of Columbus : an exploration of the man, the myth, the legacy , by John Noble Wilford.

 

 Amerigo is second from left.

Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto

An article in the 27 May 2010 issue of the New York Review of Books, entitled Radiant, angry Caravaggio, discusses an exhibit at the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome (February 20 - June 13, 2010). This work is labeled circa 1597; from the ceiling of the Villa Boncompagni-Ludovisi in Rome, recently opened to the public.

Antonio Vivaldi

News results for Vivaldi

Telegraph.co.uk

Vivaldi is so this season, says Google‎ - 1 hour ago Vivaldi's 332nd birthday is marked today by a Google doodle. Here are three reasons why he's immortal Everyone should have their 332nd birthday marked by a ...

El Greco in . . . Greece

The stunning 1983 discovery of the signature of Domenikos Theotokopoulos on an exquisite Byzantine icon dramatically enlarged our knowledge of the enigmatic painter far better known as El Greco (1541-1614). This small egg tempera on wood panel depicting the Dormition of the Virgin has long been owned by the archdiocese of the Greek island of Syros but was rarely seen. It had suffered passages of overpainting and minor abrasions, and these were delicately removed or restored in the wake of its new acclaim. Yet even with some of its decorative surface effaced, it bears the markings of what would be El Greco's richly synthetic career. The panel follows the traditional, stylized format of the popular Byzantine subject, and embodies the deeply emotive character of Greek icon painting as a whole. But it reflects as well a burgeoning interest in the depiction of real space and of animated, sculptural figures, and so suggests the artist's early exposure to the naturalistic painting of Italy even before he sailed from his native Crete for Venice around 1567.

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The Onassis Cultural Center in New York

For most New Yorkers today, the name Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) means the gilded bronze equestrian monument to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street: Victory, crowned with laurel and clutching a palm frond, strides ahead of the bearded general, with his fierce gaze and windblown cape, erect on his snorting horse. A century ago, Saint-Gaudens would have also been widely known for his Diana—a tall, athletic nude, stepping forward as she releases an arrow from her bow—a landmark sculpture that once dominated the New York skyline from the tower of the original Madison Square Garden. (Removed when the building was razed in 1925, Diana is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) In 1908, not long after the sculptor's death, the Metropolitan Museum installed a memorial exhibition of 154 of Saint-Gaudens's works in the Great Hall—what was then the Sculpture Court. Now we can broaden our acquaintance with the artist at the far more modest "Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," a finely tuned exhibition, on view through Nov. 15, that showcases the Met's considerable holdings of the sculptor's works and provides a context for his celebrated monuments. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bronze cast of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, 1910. That the Sherman Monument largely defines Saint-Gaudens for many of us is entirely appropriate. The sculpture exemplifies his distinctive refined, vigorous style, a synthesis of acutely observed naturalism and classical idealism, informed by the legacy of the Renaissance. The Sherman Monument shares the assured forms and the tense equilibrium between powerful warhorse and powerful rider first announced by those quintessential mounted warriors of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata, in Padua, and Verrocchio's Colleoni, in Venice. There are even echoes of the iconic Roman bronze that inspired both Donatello and Verrocchio, the equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius, once the centerpiece of the Campidoglio, in Rome.


Verrocchio's Colleoni



















Donatello's Gattamelata