Word: verrocchio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Throughout his long life, and for 150 years after his death, George Stubbs (1724-1806) was known as a horse painter. Never mind the Parthenon frieze, the Marcus Aurelius, the equestrian portraits of Verrocchio or Donatello, or any of the rest of the vast repertory of equine imagery in Western art: horse painting, like "sporting" art generally, tends to be seen as a minor style of aesthetic tailoring, shaped to reflect the blunt amusements of a class not much liked by connoisseurs. Painters like Sir Alfred Munnings, who filled canvas after canvas with accurate replications of poised fetlocks and lobb...
...course, anyone who has seen a clay modello by Bernini or a Della Robbia plaque, a Kändler figure or terra cotta Madonna by Verrocchio, knows that all ready. In that sense the debate is pointless. But the misunderstanding survives, though clay is the oldest form of sculpture: God did not chip Adam from marble, or weld him together...
...ranking (Dürer? Raphael? Ingres?). But of the first two there can be little doubt. One was Michelangelo; the other was Leonardo da Vinci. The bastard son of a Florentine notary, Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. Almost from the moment that he emerged from Verrocchio's workshop in the 1470s and began his long, peripatetic and disappointed life among the courts of Rome, Milan, France and his home town, Florence, his graphic power was a source of utter astonishment to his contemporaries. When commentators applied the adjective divino to him (as they regularly...