Word: raphaels
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...easel at Sotheby's in London, one day in 1938, was a filthy, yellowed, unframed Italian madonna. John Paul Getty gazed at it. "It looks like a Raphael," the richest man in the world recalls muttering to himself. "I liked it." He bid and got it for a paltry...
Getty kept the painting, uncleaned, in storage for a quarter-century until a year ago, when a restorer at London's Thomas Agnew & Sons began to remove the scummy varnish. Was it Raphael's famous Madonna di Loreto of around 1510, known through more than 30 existing copies and through art-history references? X-ray and infra-red photography at London's Courtauld Institute probed its veil of oils, and now the best experts that Agnew can find say cautiously that the work seems to be an authentic Raphael. "The lightning strikes," said Getty. But, he adds...
...Raphael may be more than ever a name that sets collectors and the art market aquiver, but to a group of British painters who worked a century ago, his work and life span (1483-1520) marked the point where art went wrong. They longed for the "faithfulness" to nature of the Italians who preceded him, and joined together in a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood...
This bit of bravado did not seriously damage Raphael's reputation, and the Pre-Raphaelites themselves grew to seem the epitome of Victorianism, sweet as treacle and finicky as a lace antimacassar. Too pretty, too pious and too much concerned with the past, read the 20th century's indictment. Pre-Raphaelite prices sank so low that in 1955, one work, Ford Madox...
...raped, maimed Lavinia, daughter of Titus Andronicus, painted by Larry Rivers (for Show Magazine) to celebrate Shakespeare's 400th birthday. Willem de Kooning's Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point cocks the abstract expressionist's eye at nature. There is even the genial easel tradition in Raphael Soyer's portrait of his painting twin Moses...