Word: caravaggian
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Monks, it seems, are as subject to the tides of fashion as less holy men. Zurbaran's Caravaggian intensity started to drop out of favor after 1650. What the Spanish church wanted was the sweetness and emotional flexibility of Murillo, and Zurbaran had turned to producing devotional paintings by the score for the provincial market in Latin America. Some of the late madonnas in which he tried to rival Murillo's sentimental grace are sugary beyond belief, and the swarms of putti that infest them are among the ugliest in Spanish...
...said one thing, the collectors said another, and this time the collectors were right. Caravaggio found influential patrons almost as soon as he arrived in Rome in 1592-93; they included Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who owned eight of his paintings, and Vincenzo Giustiniani, who had 13. The Caravaggian cave of darkness was not invented yet. His early work tends to be bathed in a crisp, even, impartial light, recalling Lorenzo Lotto and (more distantly) Giorgione. Typical of this manner were The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, which is not in the show, and the Metropolitan's Musicians...
...perhaps) surrounded by rainy twilight and the glimmer of bones, with a curl of smoke still issuing from an extinguished votive lamp. A vanitas? A more personal lamentation? Impossible to say; yet there is more real feeling in this restrained image than in many a square yard of post-Caravaggian bombast...
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