Word: federico
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Directed by Federico Fellini...
...Pippi de'Giannuzzi was born in Rome, took the city's name, worked in Raphael's studio and, as a very young man, must have known both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, it was in Mantua that he found his voice as an artist. As architect and painter to Federico II Gonzaga, he became Mantua's virtual artistic dictator in his 20s and remained so until he died at the early age of 47. There, projects poured from him in an undiverted stream: not only frescoes and panel paintings and the innumerable sketches that preceded them, but also designs...
There he had no rivals and no clergy breathing censoriously down the back of his neck. Federico II Gonzaga's court was a secular one; not even his tamest eulogists could have called the Duke pious. He was, however, brave, generous, greedy, obsessed with his own virtu (which meant prowess, not virtue) and determined to go down in history for his martial skills, his classical learning and his devotion to all vertical and horizontal forms of the chase. In Giulio, this son of Isabella d'Este found a court artist whose libidinousness and intelligence fit his own. Both men moved...
...great expression of their relationship was Palazzo Te itself, which Giulio designed from the ground up as a pleasure pavilion for Federico. This rectangular, single-story building, with its courtyards, pools, screen colonnade and enfilade of frescoed rooms, was Giulio's masterpiece. Its architecture would inspire many future designers, among them Inigo Jones and Sir John Vanbrugh. But its frescoes, which have been thoroughly and sympathetically cleaned in recent years, would be no less influential...
Some were almost impenetrably learned: no ordinary visitor today knows enough about Renaissance astrology to "read" the arcane designs in the Room of the Winds. Others are quite straightforward, like those in the chamber in which Federico had Giulio and his assistants paint life-size effigies of his favorite horses, with their names written underneath them. In between there is an amazing variety of images, some of which seem to teeter between grandeur and farce in a way unheard of in Renaissance art before...