United States or Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Compared with those sternly straightforward portraits of his Florentine and Roman time, where ugliness and baseness are never attenuated by one tittle, and alloyed nobility or amiability, as with his finer models, like the two Donis, husband and wife, and Bibbiena, is never purified of its troubling element; compared with them the Venetian portraits are mere insincere, enormously idealized pieces of colour-harmony; nay, the portraits of Velasquez are mere hints given rapidly by a sickened painter striving to make those scrofulous Hapsburgs no longer mere men, but keynotes of harmonies of light of what the people really are.
Have you heard the news Domenico Cennini, here, has been telling us? that Pagolantonio Soderini has given Ser Piero da Bibbiena a box on the ear for setting on Piero de' Medici to interfere with the marriage between young Tommaso Soderini and Fiammetta Strozzi, and is to be sent ambassador to Venice as a punishment?"
He complains a little, but all in good humour; and good-naturedly asks what he was to expect, when so many hungry kinsmen and partisans were to be served first. Well and wisely asked too, and with a superiority to his fortunes which Leo and Bibbiena might have envied.
He was betrothed to Maria di Bibbiena, a niece of Cardinal Bibbiena. The day of the wedding had been set, and the Pope was to perform the ceremony. But the Pope regarded Raphael as a servant of the Church: he had work for him to do, and moreover he had fixed ideas concerning the glamour of sentimentalism, so he requested that the wedding be postponed for a space.
I never could obtain anything; and complaining one day to Messer Bernardo da Bibbiena and Attalante how that I was unable to stay any longer in Rome, but that I must go away, with the help of God, Messer Bernardo said to Attalante that he must remember that he was to give me money in any case, and he had two thousand ducats of the Chamber given to me, which are the moneys, with that first thousand for marbles, that they put to the account of the tomb; and I estimate that I should have more for the time lost and the work done.
On the other hand, popular prose-comedy, as treated by Machiavelli, Bibbiena, and Aretino, might have had a future, if its matter had not condemned it to destruction. This was, on the one hand, licentious to the last degree, and on the other, aimed at certain classes in society, which, after the middle of the sixteenth century, ceased to afford a ground for public attacks.
Circumstances made the life of courts the best obtainable; but there is no trace of French 'oeil-de-boeuf' servility. In connection with the general subject of tact and taste, the Cardinal Bibbiena introduces an elaborate discussion of the different sorts of jokes, which proves the high value attached in Italy to all displays of wit.
After another doubtful Raphael the sly Cardinal Divizio da Bibbiena, No. 158 let us look at an unquestioned one, No. 151, the most popular picture in Florence, if not the whole world, Raphael's "Madonna della Sedia," that beautiful rich scene of maternal tenderness and infantine peace. Personally I do not find myself often under Raphael's spell; but here he conquers.
And then where is there a better inn than Albergo Amorosi of Bibbiena, unless, indeed, it be the unmatched hostelry at Fivizzano? As for inns, in general they are fair enough; though none, I think, so good as the Amorosi. You may sleep and eat comfortably at Stia, either at Albergo Falterona or Albergo della Stazione Alpina.
The young Medici bade him speak, but when he had heard the warning he laughed, and his friends laughed with him. Bibbiena, one of Piero's closest friends, and later to be the subject of one of Raphael's masterpieces, cried aloud in scorn to Cardiere: "Fool! Dost think that Lorenzo gives thee such honor before his own son that he would thus appear to thee rather than to Piero?"
Word Of The Day