Tag Archives: Giorgio Vasari

the “salai” copy: hold your hand original

Its the Mona Lisa industry. Eventually it will get traced all the way to Neil Armstrong on the moon and the 9-11 attacks. Maybe its the collective occult obsession and the “inside job” is to be found within the sacred … Continue reading

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slow worker

from Giorgio Vasari’s account of Leonardo and his work on the Last Supper, his unconventional disposition, his salesmanship and the perplexing bent of secular humanism which was disconcerting to the defenders of the faith…. He also painted in Milan, for … Continue reading

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paranoid spittled walls

This exaltation of the violent compulsive spontaneity so reified by the Dada movement, Andre Breton and Max Ernst in particular was put to almost absurd extremes into an effort to appropriate Leonardo Da Vinci into their nihilistic process of attacking … Continue reading

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man of the stars and moon: different strokes

What makes Leonardo da Vinci so special? He had all the characteristics that could not match a prospective employment or job description. Vasari called him “variable and unstable”; a man who took interest in learning many things, and then after … Continue reading

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closet painter

A “flamboyant homosexual” as Dan Brown labeled Leonardo is misleading and irrelevant unless the author was searching for a DNA code for gay tendencies and not the other trail of splatter leading to the holy grail. Although a kind of … Continue reading

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looking for clues: a smile for arcadia

In Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud found similarities between jokes and work of art. Though not known as much of a comic or given to the guffaw, Freud found the humor in the sketch of the … Continue reading

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beyond desire : unbound

In our society which rewards hard vulgar glamour, pixelized abstractions of the fetish and negates the value of sublime soft beauty, is it possible to escape the cheaply profane? Is modernism’s purpose the destruction of beauty and the pursuit of … Continue reading

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book of hours of the times

He can be seen both as climactic figure of the Middle Ages and as a herald of the Renaissance. The first great realist in French art, he painted with magical perfection in a time of change and disarray. In his … Continue reading

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hail mary: the secret language of words

Very contrary about this Mary story. Religion, refugees claimants and hipsters. the congregation is convened. Was there a second sitting for the Last Supper? Can Albrecht Durer’s Virgin and Child with Saint Anne be termed “religious trivia” within the context … Continue reading

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prodigies: pilgrimage to simplicity

The prodigies. Children who know too much. The old sixteenth-century proverb says “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” What makes a prodigy? It seems pretty evident that there is a genetic component to the form … Continue reading

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