Word: berensons
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...event, Sir Kenneth expects to go right on as before in his new job. A student of famed Critic Bernard Berenson and the youngest man (30) ever to direct Britain's National Gallery, he hopes to do his best for both conservatives and moderns. Said he: "I am probably one of the few men living who likes both Sir Alfred Munnings and [Modernist] Graham Suterland...
Certain to stay are such masterpieces as the circular Adoration of the Magi (see picture), which was begun by the great and devout 15th Century Florentine, Fra Angelico, and finished by his more worldly junior, Fra Filippo Lippi. Renaissance Scholar Bernard Berenson surmises that Fra Angelico painted the radiant Virgin and Child and the background figures, and that Fra Filippo is responsible for the sharply characterized foreground figures on the right. Other standouts in the collection are Benozzo Gozzoli's Dance of Salome and Beheading of St. John the Baptist, a grisaille (grey monochrome) frieze by Giovanni Bellini, portraits...
...carvings of workaday subjects were both vigorous and elaborate. The dean of Renaissance art experts, Bernard Berenson, was instantly reminded, when he first saw them, of "the Early Christian sarcophagi that line the grand staircase of the Lateran Museum in Rome. The same stumpy, neckless bodies, with disproportionately big heads of late antique shape, the same crowding, the same . . . distribution of light and shade...
Writing in the Italian art review, Commentari, Berenson said that Sani's sculptures were not merely "like" the late Roman ones, they were just as good. In Sani's Rustic Dance, for example, "you get the bosses, the depth of shadow, the highly conventionalized foliage, the architecture, even, of a Third or Fourth Century sarcophagus. Looking attentively, you are amused to discover couples dancing in our own way and in our own clothes . . . One could fill pages pointing out the whirling couples, the musicians, the carousers admirably characterized each with his peculiar way of grasping, of moving...
That something, Berenson thinks, is a spiritual affinity for a long-dead world. Artists, he writes, may sometimes "wake up in a world not their own . . . Many are . . . perchance Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Ostrogoths, Sarmatians, Bulgars or 'late Romans' as I believe Alberto Sani to be . . . Frequenting no schools, and unaffected by stale conventions as little as by those now cooking up, he remains a fascinating phenomenon, an artist, a real artist out of his time...