Word: brunelleschi
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ROSS KING King has made a career of elucidating crucial episodes in the history of art and architecture (Brunelleschi's Dome, Michelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling). This time he's at play in the fields of French art and society from 1863 to 1874, years when France preferred academic painters, with their lusty goddesses and uplifting battle scenes. But what France preferred was under challenge by a rising (and sometimes backbiting) new group of artists. At the same time, the vainglorious Emperor Louis-Napoléon was stumbling into the calamities of war and revolution. Eventually art would imitate life...
...clear evening in Florence, from a rear terrace of the 15th century Palazzo Frescobaldi, you can see the lighted campanile of Brunelleschi's late masterwork, the Santo Spirito Church, commissioned by a Frescobaldi in the mid-1400s. The church is almost 150 years younger than the family's 700-year-old business. Now the Frescobaldis, best known for their sumptuous Brunello di Montalcino wine, are coming out of the Middle Ages, forming international alliances that would impress even their arch rivals, the Medicis, and embarking on a marketing strategy for the 21st century...
...have recognizably Utopian elements. One of the most charming items in this show is a Renaissance miniature from Florence by Zanobi di Strozzi, circa 1470, showing St. Augustine of Hippo dreaming up the City of God, taking dictation (so to speak) from an image of Florence itself, complete with Brunelleschi's great dome, which floats in the blue air before...
...Sano di Pietro and the Master of the Osservanza are not exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence was the locus classicus of Renaissance thought...
...peculiar rather than radical. Its main element is a 660-ft. glass slab laced into a Beaux-Arts, Manhattanist corset of pinky-gray granite. This shaft sits on an entrance block that is an enormous pastiche of the courtyard front of Brunelleschi's 15th century Pazzi Chapel in Florence. One cannot guess from drawings or models how well this will work. To take a small, private Renaissance chapel and inflate it to nearly the size of the Baths of Caracalla is the kind of perversity Johnson enjoys but has never been allowed to do on such a scale before...