Bernini and one side of the moat
Bernini. Are the roots of heaven made of stone? The vision of Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini… Bernini appeared just at the moment when the papacy was going through its most intensive phase of art patronage....
View ArticleBernini : once more with oomph and feeling
Bernini. Counter Reformation overstatement…A pitiless unromantic view of death was another Counter Reformation theme. Bernini went to the macabre iconography of the Middle Ages and borrowed the death’s...
View Articlebernini: it ought to rock him
Bernini: behold the roots of heaven. They are made of stone… In 1623 Cardinal Barberini became Pope Urban VIII and, according to a probably apocryphal anecdote, told Bernini: “it is your great good...
View ArticleBernini:smoothing the bump on the bourbon shnoz
With Bernini perhaps the roots of heaven were made of stone. But Bernini and his short sejour in France at the behest of Louis XIV, was something short of heavenly and the divine…. …Nor could Bernini...
View Articlevenus rising: and no boyfriend in sight
She was the perfect beauty. Beloved of prince and painter, Simonetta Vespucci was the Renaissance ideal. … The visage of a ravishing, young woman appears again and again in the art of Sandro...
View Articletrump these for size
The noble houses of eighteenth-century England. By 1750 the Western world had captured a vast commerce unequaled in human history. The riches derived from it, enabled men of property, the merchant...
View Articlebenevolent nature: and then came darwin
…The world was not only imaginatively comprehensible, it was benevolently ordered. It is true that, ever since Copernicus and Galileo, the earth could no longer be regarded as the center of the...
View Articlere-cycle the past
In earlier times pagan temples were converted into Christian churches, mausoleums made to serve as fortresses, sarcophagi put to use as bathtubs: by such thrifty and practical expedients untold...
View Articlebruegel: keeping identity with nature
For Pieter Bruegel the Elder, man is faulty, he is potentially noble, and that his existence is legitimized by his position as an integral but not central unit of the cosmos- although not within such...
View Articlebruegel: discarding the idealized for commonplace
It can be said that Bosch and Bruegel are not much alike in effect. Bosch’s greatest work is calculated to give rise to shivers of spiritual terror linked to sexual excitement as the primal reflex...
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