Word: pietas
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...foot of a curving staircase in the little modernistic Villa Sanseverino stands the last privately owned Michelangelo in the world, the Pieta Rondanini.* Every month, dozens of visitors go out to the outskirts of Rome by bus, ring the villa's bell, and ask to see the unfinished, life-sized statue of the dead Christ and Virgin Mary on which the 89-year-old Renaissance master was working when he died. The 72-year-old Countess Ottavia Sanseverino has always let the tourists in, interrupting her meals and muddying her gleaming marble floors, even though one gaping art lover...
...recently financial troubles forced the Sanseverinos to put their Pieta up for sale. They soon found that disposing of a masterpiece was not so easy. There were few prospective buyers for a work of art which Italian experts valued at $1,000,000 or more. Whoever bought it would also have to worry about a 90% government tax on the sale-and admit to a fortune which might be subject to more taxes in the future...
...make things even more difficult, the Italian government hoped to buy the statue itself, did its best to force the selling price down to a figure it could afford. As soon as the Pieta was announced for sale, the government's council of fine arts promptly ruled that the Pieta might not leave Italy, thereby spiking any possible foreign offers, including a rumored $550,000 bid from the former White House envoy to the Vatican, Myron C. Taylor...
...Metropolitan Museum (TIME, April 14, 1947), which had never before exhibited a one-man show of a living artist. The rest, all done withinć the past 20 years, had been brought from Yugoslavia by his brother Petar. The hit of the Metropolitan show was a 5½ ton Pieta done in the muscular, dramatically contorted tradition of Michelangelo, and too big to transport to Pittsfield. The Berkshire exhibition emphasized Městrović's carved wooden bas-reliefs and single figures whose intensity made Hungarian Sculptor de Strobl's vaster ideas look blown up (see below...
...drawing stage (see cut). Says Barr: "Its figures are facts-the famished, waxen cadavers of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen. The fury and shrieking violence which made the agonies of Guernica tolerable are here reduced to silence. For the man, the woman and the child this picture is a Pieta without grief, an entombment without mourners, a requiem without pomp...