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The Man Who Broke Michelangelo’s Nose
Renaissance sculptor Pietro Torrigiano has long held a place in
the public imagination as the man who broke Michelangelo's nose.
Indeed, he is known more for that story than for his impressive
prowess as an artist. This engagingly written and deeply researched
study by Felipe Pereda, a leading expert in the field, teases apart
legend and history and reconstructs Torrigiano's work as an
artist.
Torrigiano was, in fact, one of the most fascinating characters
of the sixteenth century. After fighting in the Italian wars with
Cesare Borgia, the Florentine artist traveled across four
countries, working for such patrons as Margaret of Austria in the
Netherlands and the Tudors in England. Toriggiano later went to
Spain, where he died in prison, accused of heresy by the
Inquisition for breaking a sculpture of the Virgin and Child that
he had made with his own hands. In the course of his travels,
Torrigiano played a crucial role in the dissemination of the style
and the techniques that he learned in Florence, and he interacted
with local artisanal traditions and craftsmen, developing a
singular terracotta modeling technique that is both a response to
the authority of Michelangelo and a unique testimony of artists'
mobility in the period.
As Pereda shows, Torrigiano's life and work constitute an ideal
example to rethink the geography of Renaissance art, challenging us
to reconsider the model that still sees the Renaissance as
expanding from an Italian center into the western periphery.
eBook
Edgar Degas
Degas was closest to Renoir in the impressionist’s circle, for both favoured the animated Parisian life of their day as a motif in their paintings. Degas did not attend Gleyre’s studio; most likely he first met the future impressionists at the Café Guerbois. He started his apprenticeship in 1853 at the studio of Louis-Ernest Barrias and, beginning in 1854, studied under Louis Lamothe, who revered Ingres above all others, and transmitted his adoration for this master to Edgar Degas. Starting in 1854 Degas travelled frequently to Italy: first to Naples, where he made the acquaintance of his numerous cousins, and then to Rome and Florence, where he copied tirelessly from the Old Masters. His drawings and sketches already revealed very clear preferences: Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Mantegna, but also Benozzo Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, Titian, Fra Angelico, Uccello, and Botticelli. During the 1860s and 1870s he became a painter of racecourses, horses and jockeys. His fabulous painter’s memory retained the particularities of movement of horses wherever he saw them. After his first rather complex compositions depicting racecourses, Degas learned the art of translating the nobility and elegance of horses, their nervous movements, and the formal beauty of their musculature. Around the middle of the 1860s Degas made yet another discovery. In 1866 he painted his first composition with ballet as a subject, Mademoiselle Fiocre dans le ballet de la Source (Mademoiselle Fiocre in the Ballet ‘The Spring’) (New York, Brooklyn Museum). Degas had always been a devotee of the theatre, but from now on it would become more and more the focus of his art. Degas’ first painting devoted solely to the ballet was Le Foyer de la danse à l’Opéra de la rue Le Peletier (The Dancing Anteroom at the Opera on Rue Le Peletier) (Paris, Musée d’Orsay). In a carefully constructed composition, with groups of figures balancing one another to the left and the right, each ballet dancer is involved in her own activity, each one is moving in a separate manner from the others. Extended observation and an immense number of sketches were essential to executing such a task. This is why Degas moved from the theatre on to the rehearsal halls, where the dancers practised and took their lessons. This was how Degas arrived at the second sphere of that immediate, everyday life that was to interest him. The ballet would remain his passion until the end of his days.
eBook
Leonardo da Vinci
A reconstruction of Leonardo's emotional life from his earliest years, it represents Freud's first sustained venture into biography from a psychoanalytic perspective, and also his effort to trace one route that homosexual development can take.
eBook
The man who broke Michelangelo's nose
\"Explores the life and work of the Renaissance sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, disentangling legend from history in his life story and reconstructing his work as an artist and in particular as a sculptor\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Bernini: His Life and His Rome
Narrated in the traditional mode of biography, chronologically from birth to death, Mormando's well-researched account recounts the life of Baroque Rome's rightful successor to the Renaissance genius of Michelangelo-as Gian Lorenzo was first observed in his youth by Pope Paul V. The opening chapter, \"The Neapolitan Meteor,\" moves from Bernini's humble beginnings to his rise in Rome as a master sculptor whose virtuosity would win him the admiration of the popes while arousing the poisonous envy of his rivals. Son of, and apprentice to, the Tuscan sculptor Pietro, and his wife, the Neapolitan beauty Angelica, il cavaliere Gian Lorenzo Bernini, handsomely employed in the services of numerous papal courts, succeeded in fashioning himself the richest and most celebrated artist of his time, acquiring great fame even abroad, most notably in the court of King Louis XIV.
Book Review
