Tag Archives: Michelangelo Buonarroti

bruegel: cosmic frailties

Much like Michelangelo, Bruegel created a symbolic colossus from the material of the human figure. But the two artists’ colossi resemble one another only in the monumentality of their weight a breadth. Michelangelo idealized man as the supreme intellectual and … 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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every good work of art is a kind of joke

“No , the French spirit will never live in this German larva, in this beer-filled thing which is at the Salon.” wrote a rival sculptor in the “Revue de Monde Catholique”. Others dubbed Rodin “the Michelangelo of the goiter”. The … Continue reading

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Attics of their mind

Painters across the centuries, the millennia, have always conjured out of their imaginations, fantastic towers and cities which do not exist. Sometimes a product of the subconscious, and sometimes a liberal artistic freedom, these artists created a dream architecture of … Continue reading

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BRONZE SCULPTURE: ALCHEMIST CONSOLATION PRIZE

The Gates of Hell on which Auguste Rodin worked for two decades,is presently among twenty bronzes  outside in the Sculpture Garden of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Designed by Robert Mittelstadt, the concept seeks to evoke the spirit … Continue reading

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A PIED PIETER OF THE LESS DROLL

In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s picturizations of proverbs and parables, the Netherlandish peasant is employed only as a pantominist, but in the paintings of peasant life he comes into his own as Bruegel’s symbol of significant man. People who are … Continue reading

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HEAVEN AS A TENSE & DISQUIETING PLACE

The central incident in El Greco’s painting, ”The Burial of Count Orgaz” is a vulgar and morally pointless miracle. The painting was done to remind a reluctant parish of its feudal duty. Most of the proceedings preceding and surrounding the … Continue reading

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STRANGE MANNERISMS

The arts had come under grave suspicion as offenders against dignity, restraint and decorum. The tide was running toward a new puritanism in the Roman Catholic Church when the council of the church fathers, originally summoned to set the Church’s … Continue reading

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CALAMITY OF CONTENTMENT

”The civilisation which surrounded Savonarola on every side was a civilisation which had already taken the wrong turn, the turn that leads to endless inventions and no discoveries, in which new things grow old with confounding rapidity, but in which … Continue reading

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