Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Francis, rapt in contemplation, is sublime in steadfastness and intensity of faith; the kneeling donor is as pathetic in the humility of his adoration as any similar figure in a Quattrocento altar-piece, yet his expressive head is touched with the hand of a master of the full Renaissance.
If so, and there is no valid reason to doubt the statement, Giorgione left unfinished a picture on which he was at work some years before his death, for the style clearly indicates that the artist had not yet reached the maturity of his later period. The figures still recall those of Bellini, the modelling is close and careful, the forms compact, and reminiscent of the quattrocento.
The only fault in this otherwise faultless product of the purest quattrocento inspiration, is that the façade is a frontispiece, with hardly any structural relation to the church it masks: and this, though serious from the point of view of architecture, is no abatement of its sculpturesque and picturesque refinement.
He eschewed the arabesques, the labyrinths of foliage and fruit enclosing pictured panels, the candelabra and gay bands of variegated patterns, which enabled a quattrocento painter, like Gozzoli or Pinturicchio, to produce brilliant and harmonious general effects at a small expenditure of intellectual energy.
As an artist, he has thoroughly outgrown the quattrocento style, and falls short only by a little of the greatest. In assigning him a place among the predecessors and precursors of the full Renaissance, I am therefore influenced rather by the range of subjects he selected, and by the character of his genius, than by calculations of time or estimate of ability.
Barbarelli never absolutely threw off the trammels of the Quattrocento, except in his portraits, but retained to the last not as a drawback, but rather as an added charm the naïveté, the hardly perceptible hesitation proper to art not absolutely full-fledged.
But the true force of the man, what made him a commanding master of the middle period, what distinguished him from all his fellows of the quattrocento, is the passionate delight he took in pure humanity the nude, the body studied under all its aspects and with no repugnance for its coarseness man in his crudity made the sole sufficient object for figurative art, anatomy regarded as the crowning and supreme end of scientific exploration.
The nude has been carefully studied and well realized. The finest composition of this series is a large panel representing a double action Salome at Herod's table begging for the Baptist's head, and then presenting it to her mother Herodias. The costumes are quattrocento Florentine, exactly rendered.
Taken in their aggregate, the wall-paintings I have described afforded a fair sample of Umbrian and Tuscan art in its middle or quattrocento age of evolution. It remained for Buonarroti to cover the vault and the whole western end with masterpieces displaying what Vasari called the "modern" style in its most sublime and imposing manifestation.
The Quattrocento that time of homely peace and the simple quiet of John Ball and his fellows lay behind. Raphael had begun his Roman Period, which was to round out his working life of barely eighteen years, ere the rest of the Pantheon was to be his. Before this his time had been his own, but now the Church was his mistress.
Word Of The Day