tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42092313019843207992024-02-19T15:13:38.904+00:00View from the BowCinquecento : Seicento : Settecento --- Music : Arts : ThoughtSeingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.comBlogger116125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-59498077762775217982011-01-19T17:32:00.004+00:002011-01-19T18:24:34.898+00:00The return of Giotto's Crucifix<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-wTUd2KqPtjWpo6v8UblhvoaS_PVMvsrk1c-giaMuOIiTugaQAXbiWbE0NCZQqG_YsYxFZelWbmf94Z-ktbYZBDPPNNmR0H_27A5S_Ni15HpiXlCdcddjaiy0XCtSJEUBPzSX751qeMMw/s1600/giotto+croce+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-wTUd2KqPtjWpo6v8UblhvoaS_PVMvsrk1c-giaMuOIiTugaQAXbiWbE0NCZQqG_YsYxFZelWbmf94Z-ktbYZBDPPNNmR0H_27A5S_Ni15HpiXlCdcddjaiy0XCtSJEUBPzSX751qeMMw/s400/giotto+croce+1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>The return of Giotto's Crucifix - Forgotten jewel of an age</b><br />
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by Goffredo Silvestri<br />
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(Article in <a href="http://www.repubblica.it/speciali/arte/recensioni/2011/01/14/news/il_ritorno_della_croce_di_giotto_gioiello_dimenticato_da_un_secolo-11227105/">La Repubblica</a>, 14th January 2011)<br />
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FLORENCE: Formerly in the sacristy for 84 years, this monumental work is now back in the Florentine church for which it was painted in 1310-1315, after a careful 8-year long restoration by the <i>Opificio delle pietre dure</i> (OPD) which has restored the luminosity and brilliance of its colours and glazes, its volumes and its modelling.<br />
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Someone should have the patience to write a history of art recounting the crimes of displacement of art works in churches when convenient, to the point of their destruction either through loss or damage. For example Duccio's <i>Maestà</i>, which hung on the high altar of Siena Cathedral until 1506, when it was moved to a wall in the transept. In 1771 the two painted sides of the panel were split into two separate paintings, hung in two separate chapels, while another part hung in the sacristy. Soon afterwards these parts were sold to collectors and foreign museums.<br />
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In this particular history of art, one of the foremost places is occupied by the monumental <i>Crucifix </i>by Giotto (4.67m high by 3.60m wide) in the Florentine church of Ognissanti (All Saints). Painted according to historians either in the period 1310-1315 or in the 1320's for the monastic order of the <i>Umiliati </i>who then occupied the church and convent, it was located on the partition wall about four feet high that separated the choir reserved for the clergy from the nave for the faithful. This wall, which also had a central doorway, would have seemed to our eyes like a brutal obstruction, but it must have been spectacular, since the <i>Crucifix </i>was accompanied by four other panels by Giotto mentioned by Ghiberti (who wrote a century after the death of the master): the large (325cm x 204cm) <i>Madonna and Child enthroned among the angels</i> (the famous <i>Madonna of Ognissanti</i> now in the Uffizi), the small (75cm x 178 cm) <i>Dormition of the Virgin</i> in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, the <i>Madonna with the Child in her arms</i> (now lost), and an unknown panel. In addition, the wall was also decorated with frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio (<i>St Jerome in his Study</i>) and Botticelli, who is buried in the Church (<i>St Augustine in his Study</i>).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLCa5O1_o5N6rYUBsMXBz9HVHlSWC7hiHspzHBTa4q19FvwvgxzZzt2a2L_sWp7pk-XRSCbavofwP5Gejoz3HAv0nflKU9bvxWCISzadfQo1meXR6R6cgw2Vblu-fWmXwsFhxFb9Oc6iUu/s1600/croce-dopo-large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="698" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLCa5O1_o5N6rYUBsMXBz9HVHlSWC7hiHspzHBTa4q19FvwvgxzZzt2a2L_sWp7pk-XRSCbavofwP5Gejoz3HAv0nflKU9bvxWCISzadfQo1meXR6R6cgw2Vblu-fWmXwsFhxFb9Oc6iUu/s640/croce-dopo-large.jpg" width="588" /></a><br />
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Between 1564 and 1566 Vasari had the wall demolished (with the detachment and transfer in one piece of the frescoes to the refectory) and the Ognissanti restructured (like Santa Maria Novella and other churches) in line with the liturgical changes made by the Council of Trent in 1563. The <i>Crucifix </i>was moved to the wall at the side, then to a chapel in the transept which was used as a cloakroom, where, squeezed between two wardrobes, the <i>Crucifix </i>was neglected and abused to the point of physical damage. Finally, it was moved to the sacristy in 1926, when that arm of the transept was converted into a memorial of the First World War. So for the last 84 years Giotto's <i>Crucifix </i>has virtually disappeared, passsed into oblivion even for the faithful. But who recalls that in 2000 Antonio Paolucci, then a conservator, in an "acclaimed concession" loaned the <i>Crucifix </i>to the historic exhibition at the Galleria dell'Accademia, which was the resumé of the "critical appraisal of sixty years of studies and research on Giotto." The <i>Crucifix </i>was billed as "Giotto" in the exhibition conceived and curated by Angelo Tartuferi and Franca Falletti, and as "follower of Giotto" ('Parente di Giotto') in the accompanying volume of critical appraisal.<br />
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The loan of the <i>Crucifix</i> had been conditional on its subsequent restoration, and the <i>Opificio delle pietre dure</i>, once work on the earlier (1285-1290) Giotto <i>Crucifix </i>in Santa Maria Novella had finished in 2001, began painstaking work on the Ognissanti <i>Crucifix </i>the following year. And now, after eight years of study, scientific examination, the search for a new method of cleaning, and restoration, once again the <i>Crucifix</i> appears in the church of Ognissanti, in the raised chapel in the left transept, the <i>Cappella dei Caduti</i> (chapel of the fallen), accessed by a small flight of steps. Mounted on a newly designed metal base, it now stands, looking almost relieved to be back, under the ancient Gothic arches, even more so thanks to the lighting system from below and its slight forward inclination (as it used to be on the partition wall). In the Santa Maria Novella, the Giotto <i>Crucifix </i>had been relocated back to its old "more respectable" position in the centre of the nave. Something impossible in the Ognissanti while "preserving all the restructuring work of the sixteenth century and the Baroque period," and in the nave there is no space.<br />
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The church of Ognissanti was founded in 1251 by the <i>Umiliati </i>friars, followers of St. Benedict, who, while keeping faith with their Lombard origins, had adopted a fruitful life of production and trade in wool cloth in Florence, whose earnings were used for works of charity. Unfortunately, when the <i>Umiliati </i>were replaced in 1561 by the Minor Observant Franciscans, their archives were destroyed or dispersed. But the great works of art remained: in the Chapel of the Vespucci family, two frescoes by Ghirlandaio, the principal <i>illustratore </i>of the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent: the <i>Madonna of Mercy</i> and the <i>Piet</i><i>à</i>, in the sacristy the <i>Crucifixion</i> fresco by Taddeo Gaddi, and in the refectory the fresco of the <i>Last Supper</i> by Ghirlandaio and, as mentioned above, the frescoes by Ghirlandaio and Botticelli from the partition wall.<br />
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There were three directors of the OPD during the period of restoration (Cristina Acidini, Bruno Santi and Isabella Lapi Ballerini), while the work itself was overseen throughout by Marco Ciatti (head of the restoration laboratory for paintings on panel and canvas) and Cecilia Frosinini (head of the fresco division, which had already begun a diagnostic examination, "with significant results," of another work, "completely" Giotto's, the cycle in the Peruzzi chapel). Ciatti also edited the book <i>L'officina di Giotto</i> (Giotto's Workshop, 252p, published by Edifir, in the valuable series <i>Problemi di conservazione e restauro</i>) which includes both technical details of the restoration and critical perspectives...<br />
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Video report (in Italian) by the OPD on the return of the Giotto <i>Crucifix </i>to the church of Ognissanti:<br />
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In the <i>Crucifix </i>(painted in egg tempera), Christ is represented as <i>Christus patiens</i>, suffering, about to expire. The tension in the muscles of the arms is treated with delicacy, but the ashen colour is so imprinted in the flesh that it is a "true body", of a sculptural consistency that suggests it was modelled from life. The tips of the fingers are of "purest white", and the lips flushed. The body hangs on a more intimate Cross, the 'heart' of the triumphant Cross painted with gilded bands; at its centre an overflowing mosaic of starred crosses, squares and ellipses. The 'beams' of the Cross are painted in "bright, but deep and intense blue," the precious <i>lapis lazuli</i> inlaid with greater or lesser amounts of lead white, as in the sloping pedestal to which Christ's feet are pinned (by a single nail). The blue is crossed by thin red lines, cinnabar blood with more purplish glazes. On the forehead are a few drops of "pure red lacquer."<br />
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The Cross terminates in quatrefoils with gold backgrounds. To the left is Mary, prematurely aged, a pained expression in her characteristic slanted eyes, all wrapped up in a blue mantle that serves as a protection and almost as a hiding-place, again painted with <i>lapis lazuli</i> whose blue becomes more luminous when depicting the volume of her hands and covered arms. On the right is St John the Evangelist, in a pink mantle over a blue robe also painted with <i>lapis lazuli</i> and lead white. From his eyes a stream of tears descend, and from his mantle emerge his "most beautiful tightly joined hands", clasped so as not to explode in a gesture of despair. The preparatory drawing "shows through the thin layer of colour." The cheeks of the Virgin and of St John, the 'Mourners', show a flush caused by tears, achieved by multiple applications of cinnabar. Above is the <i>Blessing Christ</i> in pink robe and blue mantle, on which is mounted a large book with a red cover. Probably during the damaging period in the transept chapel of Ognissanti, the <i>Crucifix </i>has lost the edges of the golden quatrefoils of the 'Mourners' (remade for the exhibition of 1937 and retained in the modern restoration). Most importantly, it has lost the lower part of the Cross, just below Christ's pierced and bleeding feet, where it is probable that Giotto repeated his invention in the <i>Crucifix </i>of Santa Maria Novella, the rock of Golgotha with the skull of the first man to represent humanity.<br />
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Before the current restoration, the colours of the <i>Crucifix </i>were "extremely dim and dark" due to a layer of "very dull and greyish" surface material, negating the volumes and the modelling, the "refined decoration and detail". The test results showed an "unusual" overlay consisting of a vegetable-based gum (like apricot) and calcium oxalate, from a previous cleaning intended to "varnish" the work. Its main detrimental effect was due to its having collected dirt, fine particles of air pollution, and the soot from candles. Conversely, it maintained a layer of "very thin and old paint" on the surface. With the restoration has come a transformation from an object seen through a dirty curtain to a brightness and brilliance of the golds, the blues and the "textures"; the rivulets of blood, the details of the Christ, the contours of his chest and groin, the tense bands of muscles in his arms and legs, the strands of his hair and beard, his eyelashes. Also the glazes: not a complete innovation (neither for Giotto nor for other artists like Perugino or Pinturicchio), but nonetheless it is of great interest that Giotto in the Ognissanti work used them more extensively compared to that in the Santa Maria Novella; glazing in Christ's halo (which is painted in relief); glazed paste and painted glazes (even in minute plant motifs), and gold in imitation of precious stones and enamels, in <i>cabochon </i>style or pyramid shapes; in blue, green, white and reddish-white colours; in the frame red and blue glazing alternating with pale green; at the centre of the three beams a large glass-coloured painted and gilded glaze (only one survives). The scientific examination revealed residues of lead foil around the glazes, "perfectly reflective", resembling those in the halo of <i>Christ the Judge</i> in the panel in the Scrovegni chapel.<br />
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From the technical point of view the biggest "hitch" was to develop an "innovative" method of cleaning everything (not the traditional solvents which previous "heavy abrasions" indicated would have been disastrous), but "water-based systems" a much slower technique and used with a new type of laser. The <i>Crucifix </i>is in fact an "extremely delicate" painting, built up "with very thin layers of colour" and a preparatory base "extremely sensitive" to moisture, perhaps "because of a small amount of glue used as an adhesive binding for the chalk." The examination uncovered some interesting details: Giotto changed the size and position of the halo (which was lowered and reduced in size) affecting the "entire figure" of the Christ. The head would have been "much higher" than in any other of Giotto's Crucifixes. The strips of parchment and (probably used) linen, spread out over the panel as "shock absorbers" to "restrict" the natural movements of the wood under the preparatory layers and the painting itself. One of the "indicators of the care and refinement of execution" of the <i>Crucifix </i>is the different techniques used in painting the <i>Blessing Christ</i> relative to the other figures. Here the depiction of the flesh is "more compact and denser." Ciatti indicates that this is typical of Giotto (as found in the Santa Maria Novella Crucifix), the "juxtaposition of areas of meticulous and subtle brushwork and other features strongly marked by large brushstrokes, almost brusque like in some of the folds of the Virgin's mantle."<br />
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When it comes to Giotto (or other great masters) there is always a lurking doubt as to the attribution of a work, in whole or in part. Always remember - recommends Ciatti - that in the Middle Ages a work created according to the modern mind, the creation of "an individual artist, the unique and unrepeatable product of his hand and creative genius, is unimaginable." Mediaeval artistic production is "collective in nature", constructed with numerous, often specialised, collaborators, especially in the studio of a highly successful artist like Giotto, working on many commissions from major clients in different cities. The term 'studio' should not be "synonymous with inauthenticity." On the one hand "the great innovative drive and the continuing transformation of modes of expression, due to which Giotto is never repetitive nor equal to himself from one work to another, can only be traced to his own ingenuity and creativity"; on the other hand "the direct participation of a large group of collaborators" was inevitable. In the book, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle notes that in the Ognissanti <i>Crucifix </i>it is not simply the lobed panels at the extremities which are innovative, but "rather the emphasis on the <i>pathos </i>of the story", the "emotional tension" of the 'Mourners'. And the body of Christ is portrayed in "a much more analytical fashion" than the Christ of Santa Maria Novella. All these aspects can only be down to the inventiveness of Giotto. After the restoration "the primary result" is the hand of Giotto "inevitably in collaboration with his studio."<br />
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For Cristina Acidini, currently director of the Florentine art historical heritage and its complex of museums, the <i>Crucifix </i>(of an "unquestionable beauty of painted material"), carries after its restoration the onerous weight of a Giotto attribution in its arms, and carries it with dignity." Giorgio Bonsanti sees in the <i>Crucifix </i>a "slight decrease in technical quality" compared to the Crucifixes of Santa Maria Novella, Rimini and Padua... For Bonsanti the expressions of Mary and St John are a "kind of grimace." "Definitely a very intense and impressive effect," but not the universal representation of suffering charactistic of other figures painted by Giotto. The Ognissanti <i>Crucifix </i>is a "product, however great, of the studio of Giotto," due to the "tendency" defined as 'Follower of Giotto', as invented by Giovanni Previtali. This would have been a personality with "recognisably similar stylistic characteristics" to those of Giotto. For Ciatti the <i>Blessing Christ</i> must "really be the result of the hand of an assistant who either completed or began the work" in the absence of the master, with a technique similar to that used previously by Giotto, "who in the meantime had already changed." But Ciatti confirms the doubts about this 'follower' that would have accompanied the master, "almost from the beginning, for decades." A solution that does not satisfy the vast majority of critics.<br />
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Beyond the artistic evaluation, Ciatti cites the care with which Giotto, nothing short of an "astute businessman", supervised the economic aspect of his business, and says that he would never have favoured an "internal competition". It was against Giotto's interests to give the opportunity of exposure to someone of value to him, allowing him to nurture a reputation he might have profited from outside of his studio. The at least twenty-year-long relations that Giotto maintained with the <i>Umiliati </i>was not only an artistic one. A document dated September 1312, quoted by Alessandro Cecchi, reveals that the master was trading in "woolen" goods and charging "an exorbitant price (unum telarium francigenum)." Further documents attest to his relations with Vespignano Vicchio, since he visited the Mugello to buy land and houses. And the coins found beside the body of the painter in his grave under the floor of the old Duomo in Florence (a few yards from the tomb of Brunelleschi), serve to confirm the age of Giotto (about seventy) in January 1337, but also indicate his love of money to "to the point of usury." His teeth were his "tax return," worn down as could have been only those of someone who regularly ate "lots of meat, cooked meat above all," which "only those who had money" could afford.<br />
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<a href="http://www.repubblica.it/speciali/arte/gallerie/2011/01/12/foto/giotto-11121627/1/">Pictures </a>of the restoration process in La RepubblicaSeingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-7393456481585207472011-01-12T00:32:00.001+00:002011-01-12T00:39:47.070+00:00Vivat Leo! Music for a Medici Pope<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Vivat Leo! Music for a Medici Pope<br />
<b>Cappella Pratensis</b><br />
directed by Joshua Rifkin<br />
Label: Challenge Classics<br />
Release date:15th Nov 2010<br />
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Dutch vocal ensemble Cappella Pratensis perform works by Franco-Flemish composers from the Medici Codex (1518), a collection of sacred motets belonging to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, composed of music for use by the private chapel of Pope Leo X.<br />
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<b>Track listing</b>:<br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><b>Silva, A</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">: Gaude felix Florentia</span></b><br />
<b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><b>Willaert</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;">: Virgo gloriosa; Saluto te, sancta Virgo Maria</span></b><br />
<b>de la Fage</b>: Videns dominus civitatem desolatam<br />
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<b>Mouton, J:</b> Nesciens Mater; Per lignum salvi; Exalta regina Gallie</div>
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<b>Despres</b>: La Déploration de Johannes Ockeghem; Miserere mei, Deus</div>
<b>Silva, A</b>: Omnis pulchritudo Domini<br />
<b><b>Festa, C</b>: </b>Inviolata, integra et casta es<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirI2AJqrBnFHS_Y2ZVR5jgifH6nJslnnB-e9_WBGOb4839Hn7OX_QnVD5syxWp_dJ6wbkQITrdBkOXUCfMPmqzMC83U6YTm3Y8th_ptlZ1qamlJfmgAMuU1-Uk8fjDajqfWASjs6RcFWDQ/s1600/Pope+Leo+X+with+Cardinals+Giulio+de%2527+Medici+and+Luigi+de%2527+Rossi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirI2AJqrBnFHS_Y2ZVR5jgifH6nJslnnB-e9_WBGOb4839Hn7OX_QnVD5syxWp_dJ6wbkQITrdBkOXUCfMPmqzMC83U6YTm3Y8th_ptlZ1qamlJfmgAMuU1-Uk8fjDajqfWASjs6RcFWDQ/s640/Pope+Leo+X+with+Cardinals+Giulio+de%2527+Medici+and+Luigi+de%2527+Rossi.jpg" width="496" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael, 1483-1520)<br />
<i>Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi</i><br />
Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence</td></tr>
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Extracts from the sleeve notes by Joshua Rifkin:</div>
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<b>Godiamo ci il Papato, poichè Dio ci l’ha dato</b>.</div>
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<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=viewfro04-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B0048W3PQC&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>‘Let us enjoy the papacy, since God has given it to us’ – –thus, according to a contemporary report, Giovanni de’ Medici, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, on becoming pope in March 1513. Enjoy it he did. In the eight years of his reign, Leo X, as Giovanni now became known, lived extravagantly, holding banquet after banquet, hunt after hunt, and sometimes parading a white elephant through Rome. His costly enthusiasms extracted their price, of course; within two years of taking the throne, he had turned a handsome surplus left him by his predecessor into a deficit, and before long he had to raise funds by such dubious tricks as selling indulgences on a grand scale – provoking what would eventually become the Reformation. Yet Leo did not exhaust the papal treasury on frivolous things alone. A man of extensive humanistic learning, he supported notable scholars and poets, including Pietro Bembo; commissioned major works from Raphael; and initiated significant building projects. Above all, Leo loved music. He knew it from the inside, possessing sufficient technical knowledge to compose in five voices. He staffed the papal choir – the body responsible for music at liturgical services – with some of the most eminent singers and composers of his day, and he maintained a private body of musicians that similarly included several highly prized singers, composers, and instrumentalists. His awareness of musical developments extended well beyond Rome, moreover; he particularly admired the French royal <i>maestro di cappella</i> Jean Mouton, the most influential composer of the day, whom Leo had occasion to meet in 1515 and named to a highly honorific church position.<br />
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Report from Brabant TV on the recording sessions including short interview (in English) with Joshua Rifkin:<br />
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Much of the music heard at Leo’s court has vanished. We don’t know what his lutenists performed, nor can we retrieve the improvisations of his wind players. But we have an impressive record of the sophisticated polyphony sung around him: several manuscripts and printed books produced at his court or in its immediate orbit preserve works of both his own composers and others favoured by him and his musicians. A particularly vivid image of Leo’s musical world comes from the so-called <i>Medici Codex</i>, a collection of 53 motets possibly meant at first for Leo’s private use but ultimately presented to his nephew Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, as Lorenzo returned with his new bride, the French princess Madeleine de la Tour d’Auvergne, to Italy in the late summer of 1518. With the exception of the first and last pieces, all the music on this recording comes from the Medici Codex.<br />
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Johannes de La Fage (fl. 1516), <i>Videns dominus civitatem desolatam</i>, à 4<br />
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In or about June 1516, a Ferrarese emissary in Rome wrote to tell Cardinal Ippolito d’Este of ‘a contrabass, the best in Italy’, who had recently arrived in Rome with a French cardinal ‘who has departed and has left him here, ill’: ‘it is someone called La Fage … and according to the pope’s judgment he is a great man’. No further trace of La Fage survives, except his music – including, as if to confirm Leo’s high regard, two four-voice motets in the Medici Codex. <i>Videns dominus</i>, very likely a prayer against the plague, certainly belongs among the most expressive pieces of the era, deftly blending homophony and imitative writing to portray the anguish of a ruler confronting a scene of desolation.<br />
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Jean Mouton (1459-1522), <i>Exalta regina Gallie</i>, à 4</div>
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Jean Mouton led the French royal chapel when Leo X and Francis I met at Bologna in December 1515. At the time, he stood at the height of his career. His ascent, however, makes a puzzling story. From 1478 to the end of the fifteenth century, he held a number of what look like minor positions in northern France; yet only a few years into the new century, he became the first musician at the royal court, serving as <i>maestro di cappella </i>to Queen Anne of Brittany, King Louis XII, and, after Louis’s death, Francis I. His works, meanwhile, spread throughout all of western Europe, becoming an example for an entire generation of composers. Leo’s admiration for Mouton clearly transcended any political boundaries: <i>Exalta regina Gallie</i>, which the composer wrote to celebrate the French victory at Marignano, survives nowhere but in the Medici Codex.<br />
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Costanzo Festa (c.1490-1545), <i>Inviolata, integra et casta es</i>, à 8<br />
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Costanzo Festa, the only native Italian among the major composers of his generation, joined the papal choir in 1517; of his prior whereabouts, we know only that he had visited Ferrara in 1514 and 1516, and would appear to have spent some time in the service of a noble family on the island of Ischia off Naples. Festa evidently came from Piedmont, a significant crossroads of French and Italian culture, and he unmistakably took Mouton as his principal model. The Medici Codex contains several of his works, as do some of the large choirbooks made for the papal singers during Leo’s reign: <i>Inviolata, integra et casta es</i> comes from one of these, in a copy made by one of the scribes who wrote the Medici Codex. An eight-voice quadruple canon, it follows the example of Mouton’s <i>Nesciens mater</i>; the five-voice <i>Inviolata</i> of Josquin, also part of the Leonine repertory, seems to lurk in the background as well. Festa lays out the three sections of the motet as a set of canons that grow increasingly close in pitch and time: at the octave, separated by four breves; at the fifth, at an interval of three breves; and for the final apogee, at the fourth and a distance of only one breve. For most of the first two sections, the two four-voice groups remain separate from one another; but in the last, the tight overlap produces an almost continuous eight-part texture in which the top voices of each group call back and forth to each other in a fashion that seems almost to anticipate Monteverdi.<br />
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Listen to further extracts from Vivat Leo! on the <a href="http://www.cappellapratensis.nl/site.php?id=45">Cappella Pratensis</a> website<br />
<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-56048310037248916922011-01-11T00:51:00.000+00:002011-01-11T00:51:44.486+00:00A Festival of Music in Venice<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;">
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho4eZFdfDxtKdRTmL7O5_GR8_zeke0pL_uDMBP2FO9LB6EOdxvjxYH1dM2bI_Ihr5Fz8eBDJCYHqbE9ET1w69ViIl0hkWqNs-OpJDYn0jG83505XZYAo4pjNMa-cw67FKIr7mjwhts5fN7/s1600/Assumption+of+the+Virgin2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho4eZFdfDxtKdRTmL7O5_GR8_zeke0pL_uDMBP2FO9LB6EOdxvjxYH1dM2bI_Ihr5Fz8eBDJCYHqbE9ET1w69ViIl0hkWqNs-OpJDYn0jG83505XZYAo4pjNMa-cw67FKIr7mjwhts5fN7/s400/Assumption+of+the+Virgin2.jpg" width="312" /></a></td></tr>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari</i>, Venice</td></tr>
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<a href="http://www.martinrandall.com/getdoc/2ca6b62a-b125-4ced-94cc-8ace72d0c4c6/A-Festival-of-Music-in-Venice-(1).aspx">Martin Randall Travel</a>, the leading cultural holiday specialists, are offering a sumptuous 6 day package holiday in Venice from 13th to 18th March 2011, to include seven private concerts in some of the most spectacular concert venues in the Serenissima, performed by internationally acclaimed ensembles. Admission to the concerts is exclusive to those who take the package which includes a choice of eight different four- or five-star hotels, flights from the UK, talks about the music, receptions and dinners. There are also several optional walks and visits led by art historians to choose from.<br />
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<b>Concert programme</b>:<br />
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<b>1. Imago Virginis</b></div>
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performed by <b>Odhecaton</b></div>
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<b></b>directed by Paolo da Col</div>
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This programme of Franco-Flemish composers is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and includes music by Josquin Des Prés, Johannes Ockeghem, Jean Mouton and Nicolas Gombert.</div>
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Venue: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_dei_Miracoli,_Venice">Santa Maria dei Miracoli</a> (houses works by Tullio Lombardo, Alessandro Vittoria, Vincenzo dalle Destre, Lattanzio da Rimini, etc.)</div>
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYo0GeN_BVIj0UtV5_KuKkOhPmF8ThDiC8G9EEStuRftUJZ-TQ0Nt5i6suyF5w2lttosaTmc7Dvpjci8jW8m4pQKUJaGifNmf5f-Hi_g4cIQmF4DUkFY81Ow1ACAnXskPx1jEJA_-n71ep/s1600/Santa_Maria_Dei_Miracoli_%2528interno%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="397" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYo0GeN_BVIj0UtV5_KuKkOhPmF8ThDiC8G9EEStuRftUJZ-TQ0Nt5i6suyF5w2lttosaTmc7Dvpjci8jW8m4pQKUJaGifNmf5f-Hi_g4cIQmF4DUkFY81Ow1ACAnXskPx1jEJA_-n71ep/s400/Santa_Maria_Dei_Miracoli_%2528interno%2529.jpg" width="600" /></a></td></tr>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Interior, <i>Santa Maria dei Miracoli</i></td></tr>
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<b>2. Songs of Venice</b></div>
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performed by <b>Christopher Maltman</b> with Malcolm Martineau</div>
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This selection of songs about or inspired by Venice provides a radical change of sound world to the rest of the festival with songs by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Fauré and Hahn.</div>
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Venue: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Pisani_Moretta">Palazzo Pisani Moretta</a> (works by Giambattista Tiepolo, Gaspare Diziani, Giuseppe Angeli, etc.)</div>
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilgxf4y-v6wt_l55r8NibBX3_g_d3nkYcxh0eSXCB4GaI_AjDzq4kY2gufOrJPCMgk9cpY5NanW4ceG_104S1Ml3C9k7Rmmeuj8nWvHWqhsgt5DpNKzo12U4K9kMyqWr__YZkoTLITirdH/s1600/sala_guarana.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilgxf4y-v6wt_l55r8NibBX3_g_d3nkYcxh0eSXCB4GaI_AjDzq4kY2gufOrJPCMgk9cpY5NanW4ceG_104S1Ml3C9k7Rmmeuj8nWvHWqhsgt5DpNKzo12U4K9kMyqWr__YZkoTLITirdH/s400/sala_guarana.jpg" width="600" /></a></td></tr>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sala del Guarana, <i>Palazzo Pisani Moretta</i></td></tr>
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<b>3. Monteverdi: L’Incoronazione di Poppea (highlights)</b></div>
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performed by <b>La Venexiana</b></div>
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Soloists: Roberta Mameli, Martina Belli, Valentina Coladonato, Claudio Cavina, Alberto Allegrezza</div>
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A concert performance of highlights from Monteverdi's operatic masterpiece first performed in Venice in 1643</div>
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Venue: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateneo_Veneto">Ateneo Veneto</a> (works by Tintoretto, Veronese, Palma il Giovane, Pietro Longhi etc.)</div>
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk1KFwnuTe1HNQPeThvQcLFvkI9qbR5sTxq7OnFRseO-50l-soKvpK8NsfQ5ceqcQH__bJzi2tsW7kZpgPNLb0ItvrxdYE8KyqMBZJoz4kRREb5W-CwT85sRbno3DyWhgrTAOU2N13wlBd/s1600/aula-magna-ateneo-veneto.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk1KFwnuTe1HNQPeThvQcLFvkI9qbR5sTxq7OnFRseO-50l-soKvpK8NsfQ5ceqcQH__bJzi2tsW7kZpgPNLb0ItvrxdYE8KyqMBZJoz4kRREb5W-CwT85sRbno3DyWhgrTAOU2N13wlBd/s400/aula-magna-ateneo-veneto.jpg" width="600" /></a></td></tr>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Aula Magna, <i>Ateneo Veneto</i></td></tr>
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<b>4. From Venice to Naples</b></div>
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performed by <b>I Sonatori della Gioiosa Marca</b></div>
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directed by Giorgio Fava</div>
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This programme of sonatas and concertos traces a musical route through the Italian late Baroque from Venice to Naples and includes works by Vivaldi, Giovanni Reali, Francesco Mancini, Francesco Durante and Domenico Sarri.</div>
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Venue: <a href="http://www.italyguide.com/ACCOGLIE/HOTEL/venezia/zenobio/palazzo_zenobio_degli_armeni_eng.htm">Palazzo Zenobio</a> (works by Tiepolo, Dorigny, Lazzarini, etc.)<br />
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0JWcO3idRJm-2TIy9wwUZHUOVBDod7nALc2wXGzRaLmfLqF4CkXZZ2AGPZPGebbMZlpU1-6wi8p7-__qbOhPWuMsiiNSClunCDVpFQtNVcRoqV84dI4-eLUuNi-9vbAUdsDz70hjafKD8/s1600/Palazzo_Zenobio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="399" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0JWcO3idRJm-2TIy9wwUZHUOVBDod7nALc2wXGzRaLmfLqF4CkXZZ2AGPZPGebbMZlpU1-6wi8p7-__qbOhPWuMsiiNSClunCDVpFQtNVcRoqV84dI4-eLUuNi-9vbAUdsDz70hjafKD8/s400/Palazzo_Zenobio.jpg" width="600" /></a></td></tr>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hall of Mirrors, <i>Palazzo Zenobio</i></td></tr>
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<b>5. Music for the orphanages</b></div>
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performed by Iestyn Davies - <i>countertenor</i></div>
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with <b>Accademia Bizantina</b></div>
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directed by Ottavio Dantone</div>
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A concert of sacred music including Vivaldi’s Nisi Dominus (RV608) and Porpora’s Salve Regina.</div>
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Venue: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_Gloriosa_dei_Frari">Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari</a> (works by Titian, Giovanni Bellini, Donatello, Tullio Lombardo, Jacopo Sansovino, Paolo Veneziano,Vivarini, etc.)</div>
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAWrwvp8lyiqWB_ZU2HLfYeslZk-sa_i8qaol0xHI5jq3YVrfvFHKu86Y02tVUBKmwBV6l2PeXJlnTvNRyVgZ6AscniKkvtckHr_4IUmmFT5c2EmT4xxRxrLDlGSlvG3Tx4nO2-QtQzUa6/s1600/apse-c-paradox.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="414" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAWrwvp8lyiqWB_ZU2HLfYeslZk-sa_i8qaol0xHI5jq3YVrfvFHKu86Y02tVUBKmwBV6l2PeXJlnTvNRyVgZ6AscniKkvtckHr_4IUmmFT5c2EmT4xxRxrLDlGSlvG3Tx4nO2-QtQzUa6/s400/apse-c-paradox.jpg" width="600" /></a></td></tr>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">High Altar with Titian's <i>Assumption of the Virgin<br />Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari</i></td></tr>
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<b>6. Vivaldi: Catone in Utica </b></div>
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performed by <b>La Serenissima</b></div>
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directed by Adrian Chandler</div>
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Soloists to include Mhairi Lawson, Sally Bruce-Payne and Hilary Summers</div>
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A concert performance of Vivaldi's opera Catone in Utica (RV 705), first performed at the Teatro Filarmonico, Verona, in 1737.</div>
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Venue: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuola_Grande_di_San_Giovanni_Evangelista">Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista</a> (works by Tintoretto, Tiepolo, etc.)</div>
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrcESHE9S482A4nf3qRJJyYsHKEfMIEpTRmgK_C4oxNaX9p11zrEUPikoTQNp1ep3kgzxmP9VXB1CPtGsKJzQEYa_ZnxOjR3FZho6kObtsCTuZzCDbxSL9gWeRM_daDcBjdUD_Y03WwpV-/s1600/s+giovanni+evangelista.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="450" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrcESHE9S482A4nf3qRJJyYsHKEfMIEpTRmgK_C4oxNaX9p11zrEUPikoTQNp1ep3kgzxmP9VXB1CPtGsKJzQEYa_ZnxOjR3FZho6kObtsCTuZzCDbxSL9gWeRM_daDcBjdUD_Y03WwpV-/s400/s+giovanni+evangelista.jpg" width="600" /></a></td></tr>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Interior, <i>Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista</i></td></tr>
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<b>7. Music for San Rocco</b></div>
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performed by <b>The Gabrieli Consort & Players</b></div>
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directed by Paul McCreesh</div>
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A spectacular reconstruction of a concert given at the Scuola di San Rocco, on 16th August 1608 to celebrate the feastday of its patron saint with canzonas, motets and sonatas by the confraternity’s Maestro di Capella, Giovanni Gabrieli. </div>
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Venue: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuola_Grande_di_San_Rocco">Scuola Grande di San Rocco</a> (works by Tintoretto, Titian, Palma il Giovane, etc.)<br />
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH69Rd8vFmgcy_slhfoZ0wqtiYZ5VRYeXblcmzAEYeR5ghyphenhyphen3NjQi1Ze_tigkcOOpgRGRJ5Mduhmt_Ihb-pjMRlWuwTAD7Ys7_tJLQJNPE5DZQEJauiicPYaTwvpCNKWyPHECQkq4ZwnFdh/s1600/rocco.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="453" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH69Rd8vFmgcy_slhfoZ0wqtiYZ5VRYeXblcmzAEYeR5ghyphenhyphen3NjQi1Ze_tigkcOOpgRGRJ5Mduhmt_Ihb-pjMRlWuwTAD7Ys7_tJLQJNPE5DZQEJauiicPYaTwvpCNKWyPHECQkq4ZwnFdh/s400/rocco.jpg" width="600" /></a></td></tr>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sala Superiore, <i>Scuola Grande di San Rocco</i></td></tr>
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Full details of the package including concerts, venues, accommodation options and optional extras on the <a href="http://www.martinrandall.com/getdoc/2ca6b62a-b125-4ced-94cc-8ace72d0c4c6/A-Festival-of-Music-in-Venice-(1).aspx">Martin Randall website</a></div>
<div style="font-weight: normal;">
<a href="http://www.martinrandall.com/podcasts/Martin_Randall-Venice.mp3">Podcast </a>(MP3) by Roderick Swanston and Martin Randall previewing the festival</div>
<div style="font-weight: normal;">
Thomas Coryat's description of a concert in San Rocco as mentioned by Roderick Swanston was featured in this <a href="http://viewfromthebow.blogspot.com/2010/11/coryats-crudities.html">earlier post</a></div>
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</div>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-62967392973528226452011-01-10T03:54:00.000+00:002011-01-10T03:54:50.166+00:00Simone Kermes - Angels and Demons<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgwyncmmNN_b9fjSzuh707MCEVSk0QdbJtwfr3X__JvoXbRFDb63CiYCoPxE6h6cyrcSVHPJCQcsMiTizea0l5lxYhT4X4WgW2O4S5Yj8SOsyEJZt7ygV87X3VciNXVko78pGtC9k9ACj_/s1600/kermes+anges.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgwyncmmNN_b9fjSzuh707MCEVSk0QdbJtwfr3X__JvoXbRFDb63CiYCoPxE6h6cyrcSVHPJCQcsMiTizea0l5lxYhT4X4WgW2O4S5Yj8SOsyEJZt7ygV87X3VciNXVko78pGtC9k9ACj_/s400/kermes+anges.jpg" width="400" /></a>
A concert from the Villa Medici, Rome<br />
given as part of the Villa Aperta Festival, Rome, August 2009<br />
<br />
Simone Kermes, soprano<br />
<b>Le Musiche Nove</b><br />
directed by Claudio Osele<br />
<br />
<b>Programme</b>:<br />
01. Antonio Vivaldi - L'Olimpiade - <i>Siam navi all'onde algenti</i><br />
02. Riccardo Broschi - La Merope - Sinfonia<br />
03. George Friedrich Handel - Giulio Cesare - <i>Se pieta di me non senti</i> (omitted due to copyright restrictions)<br />
04. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi - L'Olimpiade - T<i>u me da me dividi</i><br />
05. Johann Adolf Hasse - Marc'Antonio e Cleopatra - Sinfonia<br />
06. Antonio Vivaldi - Griselda - <i>Agitata da due venti</i><br />
07. Domenico Gallo - Follia in sol minore<br />
08. Leonardo Leo - Il Demetrio - <i>Manca sollecita</i><br />
09. Leonardo Vinci - Artaserse - <i>Fra cento affanni e cento</i><br />
10. Nicola Porpora - Lucio Papirio - <i>Morte amara</i><br />
11. Johann Adolf Hasse - Viriate - <i>Come nave in mezzo all'onde</i><br />
12. Henry Purcell - Dido and Aeneas - <i>When I am laid in earth</i><br />
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<embed src="http://embedr.com/swf/slider/simone-kermes-angels-and-demons/590/650/default/false/std" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" width="590" height="650" wmode="transparent"></embed></object><a href="http://embedr.com/playlist/simone-kermes-angels-and-demons" style="background: transparent url(http://embedr.com/img/embedr-custom-video-playlists.gif); float: right; height: 35px; margin: 0; outline: none; padding: 0; position: relative; top: -35px; width: 115px;" target="_blank"><span style="display: none;">Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com</span></a>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-91783468941950712952011-01-09T03:23:00.002+00:002011-01-09T05:00:32.878+00:00Maurice-Quentin de la Tour, the laughing author<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBaWzcc_hyrMg0_-uJ3nopVYXSPXpNnjSSlXWoYUxJ4VnTxVxLECuQmrbNdbfNPkqD5mYlZYwwWTsB9RF4AuKcJR0mV-tM5OPyerFk5y6kL5Pq2MFAhRFhw21VIGuU78GcVuDvZLDvzjTv/s1600/Self+Portrait+pointing.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBaWzcc_hyrMg0_-uJ3nopVYXSPXpNnjSSlXWoYUxJ4VnTxVxLECuQmrbNdbfNPkqD5mYlZYwwWTsB9RF4AuKcJR0mV-tM5OPyerFk5y6kL5Pq2MFAhRFhw21VIGuU78GcVuDvZLDvzjTv/s400/Self+Portrait+pointing.jpg" width="362" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Maurice-Quentin de la Tour (1704-1788), <i>Self-portrait pointing</i><br />
Private collection</td></tr>
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(extracts from an article on <a href="http://www.pileface.com/sollers/article.php3?id_article=1117">pileface</a>)<br />
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Who was Maurice-Quentin de la Tour? Louis Fourcaud, in 1908, described him as a "reprimander" (<i>morigéneur</i>); Diderot in his <i>Salons </i>of 1763 and 1767, as "an odd man, but a good man", "an honest and true man." He is said to have dabbled in poetry, politics, metaphysics and theology, and even in astronomy. In a letter of 1753, Miss Prevost called him an ardent champion of Italian music (like Rousseau). He is said to have have learned Latin at age fifty-five (Diderot, <i>Salon of 1769</i>). He described himself, in a letter of 1770, as "always busy with all kinds of achievements, and consequently with the happiness of mankind," ready to "forget himself like an atom in the space of the universe" but convinced that the desire for immortality is "inside ourselves, united with the love of truth, justice and charity", and a believer in divine providence.</div>
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<b>The Antoine-Lecuyer Museum in St Quentin</b>:<br />
<embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" flashvars="height=385&width=590&file=http://www.pileface.com/media/video/latour.flv&image=http://www.pileface.com/sollers/IMG/jpg/preview_musee_antoine_lecuyer.jpg" height="385" src="http://www.jeroenwijering.com/embed/player.swf" width="600"></embed>
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<b>La Tour by the Goncourt brothers</b>:</div>
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"... La Tour painted his portraits in pastel. The irritability of his nerves, the delicacy of his health forced him to abandon the practice of oil painting. By focusing on this kind of painting with coloured pencils, where he found his genius, he followed his times. He conformed to this fashion that seemed to revive and renew in France during the eighteenth century the French taste for pencil drawing in the sixteenth. And who knows whether he was influenced in his vocation by the sojourn in Paris of la Rosalba in 1720 and in 1721? La Tour was able to witness this triumph of pastel, this fortune in pencil by the Venetian, who was visited by the Regent, sought out by the great and the good, snowed under with commissions and money, sollicited, begged for a portrait by Parabère and the de Pries, the greatest ladies of the court, taken with the charm of her art, which gave women an indescribably light vapourous life, a breath of likeness in floral colours. However it was, La Tour soon benefited from the craze for pastels created by la Rosalba. "He took little time with his portraits," said Mariette, "not tiring out his models at all; he made good likenesses, he was cheap. His press was good. He became the commonplace painter."</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo0d3Vq2fZN9FLM2s13H4HIQJ46c_S19oCid1mGUbaU3nSaxph9_vaDLgbVFRxn3chZYAWzLBrF_hsQBhhmHGBcRp9ebJKLo7h4q7IKeqUlF0PtCzlkwirtLflgoWzpVNo44cCZydLY2My/s1600/Portrait+of+Antoine+Watteau.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgo0d3Vq2fZN9FLM2s13H4HIQJ46c_S19oCid1mGUbaU3nSaxph9_vaDLgbVFRxn3chZYAWzLBrF_hsQBhhmHGBcRp9ebJKLo7h4q7IKeqUlF0PtCzlkwirtLflgoWzpVNo44cCZydLY2My/s400/Portrait+of+Antoine+Watteau.jpg" width="298" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757), <i>Portrait of Antoine Watteau</i><br />
<i></i>Museo Civico Luigi Bailo, Treviso</td></tr>
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About this time, some portraits he had made for the Boullongne family were noticed by Louis de Boulogne, the principal painter to the King, who discovered in them, behind their casual execution, the innate gift that makes verisimilitude natural to the hand of a portraitist; he wanted to see La Tour; he encouraged him, promising him a future if he wished to work. And was it not the voice of Boulogne, amid the unanimous praise given to a finished portrait of the young painter, who gave him this stern advice: "Draw, young man, keep on drawing"? Grand words that saved La Tour from the trade. Renouncing profit and easy success, he did not paint for two years, withdrew and immersed himself in the study of drawing; and from these two years spent in searching, and the years of effort that followed, advised and guided by the friendship of Largillière and Restout, emerged the great draughtsman, the greatest, strongest and most profound of the entire French school, the draughtsman-physiognomist; he emerged a brand new pastellist, acceding to power, to strength, to all the energy of expression, with his tender and caressing pencils, intended only, it seems, to express the pulp of the fruit, the smoothness of the skin, the "featheriness" of the clothing of his time; he emerged a creator in pastel, who, in this feminine art addressed to women, in the drawings of la Rosalba, in this painting of floating coquetry, half-fixed, volatile, like the powder of grace, draws out and erects a male art, expansive and serious, a painting of such intensity of expression, such contours and such an illusion of life, that his painting manages to threaten, to disturb all the other painting, and for a time the doors of the Academy closed in fear of the art of the Master."<br />
<br />
- Jules and Edmond Goncourt, <i>La Tour</i><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe3l3zz3RMKphOVqU7OXEtSsbcjcnFX7uj1ci9z-vaTl_zsDk5a2Wsr_NlAuWB1I8_BXsw-a1FcZ_XCslTttLTCHCiAAnpAX1gcXpCkZ3uMD3VqoiwwxXRwx2-QzJMKCEHl62yYwUtidY3/s1600/Voltaire.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhe3l3zz3RMKphOVqU7OXEtSsbcjcnFX7uj1ci9z-vaTl_zsDk5a2Wsr_NlAuWB1I8_BXsw-a1FcZ_XCslTttLTCHCiAAnpAX1gcXpCkZ3uMD3VqoiwwxXRwx2-QzJMKCEHl62yYwUtidY3/s400/Voltaire.jpg" width="307" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">La Tour, Study for <i>Portrait of Voltaire</i><br />
Musée Antoine-Lecuyer, St Quentin</td></tr>
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"La Tour had not yet been accepted by the <i>Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture</i>, and consequently had not even had any works exhibited at the <i>Salon</i>, when he was approached by Voltaire in 1735 to paint his portrait. This particularly prestigious commission, given the renown of the sitter, constituted an extraordinary opportunity to promote his name, and he seized it masterfully. As he reveals in his correspondence, Voltaire first posed for the artist in April of that year. It seems that the pastellist first made at least two preparatory pastels, of which one subsequently belonged to Emile then Jules Strauss, and is now kept in the National Museum in Stockholm, and the other acquired by the Antoine Lecuyer Museum in 1995. In the first, the face of the author of The Henriade and Zaire is drawn facing the viewer, venturing a smile that makes him purse his lips, and fills his eyes with malice. In the second, the philosopher is drawn in three-quarter view, slightly turned to the right. It is this more dynamic pose that was finally chosen.<br />
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Now lost, the final work was a half-length portrait to the waist, the torso facing right, holding a book in his left hand, his face challenging his admirer. Even before receiving this portrait, in April 1736 Voltaire asked his friend the Abbé Moussinot to make two fair copies. The first was to be executed with great care in order to serve as a prototype for all those that would be painted subsequently. To this end, Voltaire had hoped it would be retouched by La Tour himself and that it would serve primarily as a model for a miniature to be mounted in a ring. These are now various copies, such as the one painted in pastel kept at the Château de Ferney and the one painted in oil belonging to the Antoine Lecuyer Museum, which, according to tradition, was given by Voltaire to Madame de Champbonin in 1737, or the engravings that were made at the end of 1735, which enable us to know the original composition. When the autograph pastel by La Tour reached Cirey in November 1736, it did not have the desired effect on its commissioner. Indeed, on 17th November Voltaire wrote to the Abbé Moussinot that he would have preferred it "a little denser and with more vivid colours." Covered in white and lightly embellished with pink, the study in the museum in St Quentin had certainly been scrupulously reproduced in the final work, to the point of rather disappointing the artist's first famous patron."<br />
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- Xavier Salmon, <i>Le voleur d'âmes, Maurice Quentin La Tour</i>, Artlys, Versailles, 2004.<br />
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<b>Portraits by La Tour - Slideshow</b>:<br />
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<a href="http://www.museeantoinelecuyer.fr/default.asp?lang=fr">Antoine Lecuyer Museum</a> website<br />
<a href="http://arts-graphiques.louvre.fr/fo/visite?srv=mtr&radiobutton=oeuvre&quicksearchinput=maurice-quentin+de+la+tour">Works by La Tour</a> at the Louvre Museum<br />
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<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-13280417930757018402011-01-08T00:29:00.000+00:002011-01-08T00:29:12.345+00:00Cleopatra - Natalie Dessay sings Handel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgC9dA6Ldg4zFnC-9zZ22gToB0cDErovYUecfbVW2tKHctG3qeYpvPvZpRRIswMnUWpV0nLX_FUFSo3wAKT6n0lBaGFLVdwa7Av9x0u0XFI0JKYLN4N1ZY6tmlWPnm_Y81xq8PU1Pl9rOd/s1600/cleopatra.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgC9dA6Ldg4zFnC-9zZ22gToB0cDErovYUecfbVW2tKHctG3qeYpvPvZpRRIswMnUWpV0nLX_FUFSo3wAKT6n0lBaGFLVdwa7Av9x0u0XFI0JKYLN4N1ZY6tmlWPnm_Y81xq8PU1Pl9rOd/s400/cleopatra.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>Handel: Cleopatra</b><br />
Arias from <i>Giulio Cesare</i><br />
Natalie Dessay (soprano)<br />
with Sonia Prina (alto)<br />
<b>Le Concert d’Astrée</b><br />
directed by Emmanuelle Haïm<br />
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Label: Virgin Classics<br />
Release date: 10th Jan 2011<br />
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<b>Track listing</b>:<br />
Overture from Giulio Cesare<br />
Tutto puo` donna vezzosa<br />
V' adoro, pupille<br />
Venere bella<br />
Vuo dar vita<br />
Piangerò la sorte mia<br />
Troppo crudeli siete<br />
Se pietà di me non senti<br />
Da tempeste il legno infranto<br />
Caro! Bella! Più amabile beltà<br />
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At the Paris Opéra in early 2011, Natalie Dessay will take on a new starring role: <i>Cleopatra </i>in Handel’s <i>Giulio Cesare</i>, now the most popular of all the composer’s stage works. The many facets of the Egyptian queen – captured by Shakespeare in the phrase “infinite variety” – are depicted in a sequence of contrasting arias, both lyrical and brilliant, making the character a superb showcase for the French soprano’s talents as a singing actress.<br />
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Promotional video for <i>Cleopatra </i>from Virgin Classics:<br />
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<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FWldMeNR8IA?fs=1&hl=en_GB&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="590" height="385"></embed></object><br />
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<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=viewfro04-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B004CHURRS&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>Conducting the impressive cast and the period-instrument orchestra Le Concert d'Astrée at the Opéra – and on this new recording of excerpts from Giulio Cesare – is Emmanuelle Haïm, who first collaborated with Dessay in the late 1990s; both artists were involved in a Paris production of Handel’s <i>Alcina</i>, Haïm as <i>répétiteur </i>(for William Christie) and Dessay in the sparkling role of <i>Morgana</i>. Since then, the two have developed a close working relationship which has produced a number of Virgin Classics recordings, including several works by Handel: cantatas (in a collection called <i>Delirio</i>), the <i>Dixit Dominus</i> and the oratorio <i>Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno</i>, a recording which left the French magazine Diapason “looking forward to Emmanuelle Haïm’s next exciting Handelian adventure”.<br />
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Dessay describes Haïm as the <i>metteur en scène</i> – the stage director – for her voice, while Haïm describes Dessay’s voice as “an exceptional instrument which can take on a thousand forms ... Its virtuosity and flexibility make you forget all the difficulties presented by the music.” Haïm goes on to say that: “Handel is the composer for the voice. He demands special qualities that Natalie possesses: an ability to create colours, to embody words in song and to let the imagination speak.”</div>
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Promotional video for <i>Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno</i>, released by Virgin Classics in 2007:</div>
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Reviewing <i>Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno</i>, Le Monde de la Musique observed that “the virtuosity and rich palette of Le Concert d’Astrée enable Emanuelle Haïm to match the colours and tempo to the emotion expressed”, while the New York Times wrote that: “Ms. Haïm directs the superb Baroque orchestra Le Concert d'Astrée in a fleet, immaculate performance that dances among airy, profound and sensuous moods. The excellent quartet of singers is led by the radiant, bright voice of the soprano Natalie Dessay, whose rapturous <i>Bellezza </i>traverses innocence, defiance and penitence by way of some impressively agile coloratura. <i>Tu del ciel ministro eletto</i>, her spare, haunting final aria with plaintive violin accompaniment, is glorious.” In Britain, the The Sunday Times found that “Natalie Dessay dazzles in Beauty’s arias – she is gorgeous in the sublime penitential concluding number … With Haïm conducting with élan, this is the best available version of this glorious score.”</div>
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Promotional video for <i>Bach Cantatas</i>, released by Virgin Classics in 2009:<br />
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Outstanding soprano Natalie Dessay and conductor Emmanuelle Haïm have come to a great understanding with their numerous Handel recordings, especially <i>Delirio </i>(Handel Cantatas), which sealed their musical companionship and paved the way for numerous recording projects on Virgin Classics. After their recent recording of Bach’s <i>Magnificat </i>and Handel’s <i>Dixit Dominus</i>, Natalie Dessay and Emmanuelle Haïm present their first all-Bach recital.<br />
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The programme features three of Bach’s superb Cantatas, including the great <i>Ich habe genug</i>, in Bach’s own arrangement for soprano, BWV 82a. The other two Cantatas are two of only four sacred cantatas that Bach wrote for solo soprano: <i>Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen</i> (Praise God in All Lands) is one of Bach's best known cantatas, with an important part for solo trumpet, here performed by young British musician Neil Brough. Both the soprano part, which calls for a high C in the first and last movements, and the solo trumpet part, which at times trades melodic lines with the soprano on an equal basis, are extremely virtuosic. The third cantata <i>Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut</i> (My Heart Swims in Blood) is one of the earliest cantatas Bach composed – its vocal part is technically demanding and contains challenges which Natalie Dessay meets with the highest artistry.<br />
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A complete performance of <i>Se pietà di me non senti </i>from <i>Giulio Cesare</i>:<br />
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For comparison, here are two alternative versions of this aria, sung by <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBSrpgAeDLI">Simone Kermes</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrpu2ckgvI4">Maria Bayo</a> respectively (audio only).<br />
<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-61687097804291117882011-01-07T00:31:00.002+00:002011-01-07T00:41:03.031+00:00Rome and Antiquity - Reality and Vision in the 18th Century<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0clwmg78oUqAChW9sEBjU_Hh9Af4-Q-Oz2nyiEYCh1opxH1gdG2xas9nvW1sZrpZZB_NTL6TyqYy13G3ugTu8PHCxJQG6TaI8-nK6YNgel68OFug6xkcAhiOnnNBGGPL4AyprQyTRS45W/s1600/Orsay+Minerva.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0clwmg78oUqAChW9sEBjU_Hh9Af4-Q-Oz2nyiEYCh1opxH1gdG2xas9nvW1sZrpZZB_NTL6TyqYy13G3ugTu8PHCxJQG6TaI8-nK6YNgel68OFug6xkcAhiOnnNBGGPL4AyprQyTRS45W/s400/Orsay+Minerva.jpg" width="336" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Orsay Minerva, </i>2nd century AD<br />
(marble replaced late 18th century)<br />
Musée du Louvre, Paris</td></tr>
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<b>Rome and Antiquity. Reality and vision in the 18th century</b></div>
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Palazzo Sciarra, Rome</div>
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30th November 2010 - 6th March 2011</div>
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The Fondazione Roma, chaired by Prof. Emmanuele Francesco Maria Emanuele, is turning the spotlight on ancient art once more, with an extraordinary new event dedicated to the rediscovery of classical antiquity in Rome in the eighteenth century. curated by Carolina Brook and Valter Curzi, the exhibition gathers works of art and archaeological finds which highlight the key factor behind Rome’s rise to international renown in the eighteenth century, namely the rediscovery of classical Antiquity: a model for the arts, learning and style that spread throughout Europe. Promoted by the Fondazione Roma, the exhibition <i>Roma e l’Antico. Realtà e visione nel ’700 </i>(Rome and Antiquity. Reality and vision in the 18th century) has been organised in conjunction with Arthemisia group and springs from a partnership with the Capitoline Museums, the Vatican Museums and the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca.</div>
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The exhibition features an extraordinary nucleus of 140 works, including sculptures, paintings and sophisticated pieces of decorative art, and sees the involvement of important museums in Italy and abroad: as well as Rome’s most important museums, the National Galleries of Parma, Turin and Florence, the Canova Museum in Possagno, the Prado Museum, the Royal Palace and Archaeological Museum in Madrid, the Louvre, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Dresden’s Museum of Archaeology, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Royal Academies of London and Madrid.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Mengs_Parnasus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="315" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Mengs_Parnasus.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anton Rafael Mengs (1728-1779), <i>Apollo and the Muses on Mount Parnassus</i><br />
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg</td></tr>
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Divided into seven sections, the exhibition explores the appeal of eighteenth century Rome and its extraordinarily cosmopolitan character: a city of monuments and magnificent ruins, interest in its historical past grew during the eighteenth century due to the archaeological digs which increasingly brought significant finds to light. The exhibition opens with a selection of <i>vedute </i>of ancient Rome and a group of <i>capriccio </i>paintings.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE4hz2gAcsLdcB0-mhjfgXxZY2F2YrtcTj8Y-yZng9n7XZiHAOEK1TyDNJ4PAnwmaerHR_lZ1VR_a3TBndo42eeZpFHAnzbedvDTpOefuPETYdXqGMhzIzTnLWSTWutE9HwxSnW-IFLBRp/s1600/Piranesi+Architectural+Capriccio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhE4hz2gAcsLdcB0-mhjfgXxZY2F2YrtcTj8Y-yZng9n7XZiHAOEK1TyDNJ4PAnwmaerHR_lZ1VR_a3TBndo42eeZpFHAnzbedvDTpOefuPETYdXqGMhzIzTnLWSTWutE9HwxSnW-IFLBRp/s400/Piranesi+Architectural+Capriccio.jpg" width="302" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1780), <i>Architectural capriccio</i><br />
Private collection</td></tr>
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The second section examines the great season of Roman archaeological digs in the eighteenth century which gave rise to the discipline of archaeology. The major works present in this section include the Capitoline <i>Flora </i>and <i>Eros</i>, the former found in Tivoli in 1744 and the latter from the important collection belonging to Ippolito d’Este, the <i>Herm of Pericles</i> from the Vatican Museums, the inspiration for a famous sonnet by Vincenzo Monti, and the valuable series of watercolour etchings illustrating the colourful wall paintings of the <i>Domus </i>at Villa Negroni and the <i>Domus Aurea</i>, now lost. The interiors of the latter can be admired in the video featuring the virtual reconstruction of this lavish residence.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgojgwkYmRf_1xhTbMvbEtZ_gdPB2auGROKvNZq2mEj-7wb-NLTDnId5Y8LteRb-HhZkw0t2Xouv3a1mdl9EEo2yzInw290IvzDGEd361YXDMjGWxA9aswqUYXOjgs_0BeplYf3fbVLeCAi/s1600/Capitoline+Flora.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgojgwkYmRf_1xhTbMvbEtZ_gdPB2auGROKvNZq2mEj-7wb-NLTDnId5Y8LteRb-HhZkw0t2Xouv3a1mdl9EEo2yzInw290IvzDGEd361YXDMjGWxA9aswqUYXOjgs_0BeplYf3fbVLeCAi/s640/Capitoline+Flora.jpg" width="366" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Flora</i>, 2nd century AD<br />
Musei Capitolini, Rome</td></tr>
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The topics of restoration, falsification and art dealing, of much interest to collectors in the day, are explored in the third section, which features the extraordinary <i>Minerva d’Orsay</i> from the Louvre, the result of restoration additions in white marble onto an extremely rare archaeological find in golden onyx. The latter, together with the 2nd century A.D. sculptures from the Prado (<i>Head of Serapis</i> and <i>Bust of Hercules</i>) and Dresden (<i>Bust of Marcus Aurelius</i> and <i>Lemnian Athena</i>), highlight how the aristocratic Roman collections dispersed, with the consequent diaspora of works abroad. On the occasion of the exhibition these masterpieces are making an exceptional return to Italy after more than two centuries.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbP_ATsbEh6RbPbS3mlgMsbjOsEOQBFX8QkFiN6yCmLM2m7rPjvToF2lf5AuaB8WU0my1QoCM544RzUPpvY_uCVCKXqR1blTK9XdzU-IYFhVzy0g1Y29nBRW0DAN9PGzDHJs9ogdlch7rT/s1600/Apollo+with+Lyre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbP_ATsbEh6RbPbS3mlgMsbjOsEOQBFX8QkFiN6yCmLM2m7rPjvToF2lf5AuaB8WU0my1QoCM544RzUPpvY_uCVCKXqR1blTK9XdzU-IYFhVzy0g1Y29nBRW0DAN9PGzDHJs9ogdlch7rT/s1600/Apollo+with+Lyre.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Apollo with Lyre</i>, 2nd century AD<br />
Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City</td></tr>
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The subsequent section documents the work of two of the most famous Roman workshops, those of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and explores their trading activities for the first time. The exhibition features two extraordinary marble vases by the latter, who was primarily known as an etcher, made by assembling the fragments of ancient artefacts that he assiduously collected. As for Cavaceppi, the section presents a little-known group of terracotta pieces copied from famous classical works, illustrating the wealth of designs available to be reproduced in his workshop.</div>
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCMeVU5QvhspQIuvA0tEdOIUwpMKziINE1y9siBNjThEg8m0uWBWq7wmsMm_E3e4BVN7McR4USqFplOeryFOG7iciej2c5R_RxJYH4WeFrwapVOc2rIGrZNOtAXYyZ-v8aLU24NCqhX7dq/s1600/kauffman+Virgil+Reading+the+Aeneid+to+Augustus+and+Octavia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="445" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCMeVU5QvhspQIuvA0tEdOIUwpMKziINE1y9siBNjThEg8m0uWBWq7wmsMm_E3e4BVN7McR4USqFplOeryFOG7iciej2c5R_RxJYH4WeFrwapVOc2rIGrZNOtAXYyZ-v8aLU24NCqhX7dq/s400/kauffman+Virgil+Reading+the+Aeneid+to+Augustus+and+Octavia.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), <i>Virgil reading the Aeneid to Augustus and Octavia</i><br />
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg</td></tr>
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The fifth section illustrates artistic training in the city and the spread of the Roman educational model, as the rest of Europe began to acknowledge the prime importance of classical antiquity.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA8ts7DVR5nzftdGBn3lWmM6-Eeuw-0S7LE-EpCJwl4Xamx0NH0AGWfue4WfaNUmDxh5bTMRDkMNvDLo9sR5-o6J2mv__F_V9mPDXpTMuWKwQmoqSdtJdEBgMmsAunJXhVhBDQLRg81g6y/s1600/Valadier+Dessert+Service+of+Carlos+IV.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="185" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgA8ts7DVR5nzftdGBn3lWmM6-Eeuw-0S7LE-EpCJwl4Xamx0NH0AGWfue4WfaNUmDxh5bTMRDkMNvDLo9sR5-o6J2mv__F_V9mPDXpTMuWKwQmoqSdtJdEBgMmsAunJXhVhBDQLRg81g6y/s640/Valadier+Dessert+Service+of+Carlos+IV.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Luigi Valadier, <i>Dessert service for Carlos IV</i> (1778)<br />
Museo Arqueologico y Palacio Real, Madrid</td></tr>
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One specific section looks at style and interior décor, featuring the stunning Dessert Service created by Luigi Valadier in 1778 and subsequently purchased by King Carlos IV of Spain. This incredible piece is both priceless and unique: a three metre long centrepiece in antique marble and semi-precious stones decorated with reproductions of classical buildings that the famed Roman sculptor and goldsmith dreamt up for an exceptionally wealthy clientele.<br />
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi652QAUk-aTjMHCbzG7IU0qNb-B_yquEHMG-jdHvxVmKKKdT9ZpDFtJcqwXoQXkDbWGwifoHq_JkIhmZ-O0LX2W0POWUaO_j4cL3Iz2UYDhbnYVLOTCIEPwpOrLPB00mu9ihDLwYmt3Xos/s1600/Hector.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="407" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi652QAUk-aTjMHCbzG7IU0qNb-B_yquEHMG-jdHvxVmKKKdT9ZpDFtJcqwXoQXkDbWGwifoHq_JkIhmZ-O0LX2W0POWUaO_j4cL3Iz2UYDhbnYVLOTCIEPwpOrLPB00mu9ihDLwYmt3Xos/s400/Hector.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), <i>Male nude study</i> or <i>Hector</i><br />
Musée Fabre, Montpellier</td></tr>
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The last section of the exhibition gathers a selection of paintings and sculptures by the most famous artists who looked to classical antiquity for inspiration. Antonio Canova, significantly acknowledged in his time as the greatest “emulator of Phidias”, closes the exhibition, with two masterpieces: <i>Venus and Adonis</i> from the Possagno Gypsotheque, and the <i>Winged Cupid</i> from the Hermitage.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0tW7piiJHN5AbZZKrhp_bC0ihtm8uxRR8yKzAdy8w_gYTrjOTuSLBlqBffuiYGwgEqwxS9QUn8LvadGRbWXCF_7wWzMHvQ-7LU47vESz-jLvbeFjDMXGiT-Crb-1VIp5TP8d4R8MVXWaJ/s1600/Canova+Winged+Cupid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0tW7piiJHN5AbZZKrhp_bC0ihtm8uxRR8yKzAdy8w_gYTrjOTuSLBlqBffuiYGwgEqwxS9QUn8LvadGRbWXCF_7wWzMHvQ-7LU47vESz-jLvbeFjDMXGiT-Crb-1VIp5TP8d4R8MVXWaJ/s1600/Canova+Winged+Cupid.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antonio Canova (1757-1822), <i>Winged Cupid</i><br />
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg</td></tr>
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The exhibition also features a highly original and atmospheric virtual reconstruction of the lost interiors of the <i>Domus Aurea</i>, designed by Stefano Borghini and Raffaele Carlani. Modern virtual technology has been used to bring historic drawings and watercolour etchings of this ancient artwork to life, giving us the chance to relive the vision that would have greeted eighteenth century observers. Visitors to the exhibition will thus be able to experience this fascinating spectacle of frescoes, stuccoes and mosaics and fully enter into the enthralling atmosphere of the rediscovery of antiquity.<br />
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<a href="http://www.fondazioneromamuseo.it/it/le_mostre/future/roma_e_antico.html">Fondazione Roma</a> official exhibition page<br />
Exhibition page of sponsor <a href="http://www.arthemisia.it/?IDC=2&ID=161">Arthemisia Group</a></div>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-24549861721854897172011-01-06T00:57:00.000+00:002011-01-06T00:59:31.181+00:00Chardin - The Painter of Silence<table style="text-align: right; float: right; margin-left: 1em" class="tr-caption-container" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: center"><a style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; clear: right; margin-right: auto" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZk3bttIA0yCsrSdcgCPq1twhfNaj_y2ltxW5UdhPc_hMAbqp73fJ3LqWaJ1DO2Fxx-7td6TAbpGxPmg2qbQaI2LV6MHvXbsaimRWZBVdhKeYDy_mbcTjLj7TmDetVriMQxZobuNfL_dw-/s1600/The+Soap+Bubble.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZk3bttIA0yCsrSdcgCPq1twhfNaj_y2ltxW5UdhPc_hMAbqp73fJ3LqWaJ1DO2Fxx-7td6TAbpGxPmg2qbQaI2LV6MHvXbsaimRWZBVdhKeYDy_mbcTjLj7TmDetVriMQxZobuNfL_dw-/s400/The+Soap+Bubble.jpg" width="400" height="382"></a></td></tr> <tr> <td style="text-align: center" class="tr-caption"><i>The Soap bubble</i><br>Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York</td></tr></tbody></table><b>Chardin: the painter of silence</b><br>Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara<br>17th October 2010 - 30th January 2011<br>Prado Museum, Madrid<br>28th February - 28th May 2011<br><br>The Palazzo dei Diamanti celebrates one of the most extraordinary artists of all time, Jean Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), with the first monographic exhibition ever organised in Italy. The result of collaboration between Ferrara Arte and the Prado Museum in Madrid, and curated by Pierre Rosenberg, the world's leading expert on the artist, the show covers the whole career of this protagonist of eighteenth century art who, with his innovative painting technique and anti-conformity with regard to traditional academic rules, was able to elevate everyday domestic objects and the gestures of ordinary people to the subject of artistic expression.<br>Fifty-two masterpieces from some of the world's leading public and private collections will provide an unrepeatable opportunity to encounter this remarkable poet of everyday life who has been loved and admired by many of the greatest modern painters, such as Cézanne, Matisse and Morandi.<br> <table style="text-align: center; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" class="tr-caption-container" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: center"><a style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimo9Qyv33oYjUOHayQ4p1hJ4wDJrZ-eEO7OAzGxQWRTwSUOaRQdJQq3DbzopTHJ7MXUpFOGX1zjVCertKJtsFLwOr6BIcIL32bDXTYazOtZ7SQLIeYhnR4LixuFe69wWkMi5nEuKhWEwb-/s1600/Basket+of+plums%252C+bottle+and+glass+of+water+and+2+cucumbers.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimo9Qyv33oYjUOHayQ4p1hJ4wDJrZ-eEO7OAzGxQWRTwSUOaRQdJQq3DbzopTHJ7MXUpFOGX1zjVCertKJtsFLwOr6BIcIL32bDXTYazOtZ7SQLIeYhnR4LixuFe69wWkMi5nEuKhWEwb-/s400/Basket+of+plums%252C+bottle+and+glass+of+water+and+2+cucumbers.jpg" width="580" height="523"></a></td></tr> <tr> <td style="text-align: center" class="tr-caption"><i>Basket of plums, bottle, glass of water and cucumbers</i><br>Frick Collection, New York</td></tr></tbody></table>Chardin was one of the most original artists of his time. From a young age, he refused to follow the traditional paths of instruction through the academies and was one of the few young artists at the time not to make the Grand Tour in Italy. Furthermore, of all genres of painting, he avoided exactly those that in France at the time would have guaranteed status and fortune to the artist: the painting of historical or mythological subjects. Nonetheless, in 1728, the <i>Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture</i>, to which Chardin had applied by submitting his first striking still lifes, recognized his talent and admitted him to their ranks as a "painter skilled in animals and fruits". Although he painted still lives, which were considered a minor genre and therefore no guarantee of success, Chardin soon became well known within the competitive Parisian scene.<br><br> <table style="text-align: right; float: right; margin-left: 1em" class="tr-caption-container" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: center"><a style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; clear: right; margin-right: auto" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfTyYYPkLzblDAXU3BeLZQB9v9ZanJU3jQpfisaMKadgnE7gNSPtDRyr6PqZEig44gHJpj_cZSTp3z57f9so_jyJO7rc4xTKRt32nqTiPCppfwEKsuQIO70lO0F2iOt-SHL2z7XjTSOtBc/s1600/Girl+playing+with+racquet+and+shuttlecock.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfTyYYPkLzblDAXU3BeLZQB9v9ZanJU3jQpfisaMKadgnE7gNSPtDRyr6PqZEig44gHJpj_cZSTp3z57f9so_jyJO7rc4xTKRt32nqTiPCppfwEKsuQIO70lO0F2iOt-SHL2z7XjTSOtBc/s400/Girl+playing+with+racquet+and+shuttlecock.jpg" width="328" height="400"></a></td></tr> <tr> <td style="text-align: center" class="tr-caption"><i>Girl with Shuttlecock</i><br>Private collection</td></tr></tbody></table>Over the next decade, he broadened his subject matter to include the human figure, with remarkable success. While eighteenth century France was busily engrossed in the luxurious life of the court and its <i>fêtes galantes</i>, fashioning a lifestyle from the ephemeral, Chardin was describing another reality. A contemplative and careful painter, he created the least "Parisian" canvases of the century by painting silence: a silence which pervaded both his still lives, picturing common domestic utensils arranged on rustic tables, and his interiors, in which the domestic servants and the offspring of the French bourgeoisie are shown thoughtfully going about their daily activities. Ornamental embellishment was banished, the pictures became poems to daily life, sensitively portraying humble people and transforming them into the key figures of their time. This period gave rise to such masterpieces as <i>The Cellar Boy</i>, <i>The Governess</i> and <i>The Young Draughtsman</i> in addition to the touching pictures of children at play, such as <i>The Soap Bubble</i>, <i>Girl with Shuttlecock</i> or <i>Child with a Top</i>. In each of these works, through an astonishing technical ability based on the correlations between tone and colour and the variations in the effects of light, the artist manages to convey to the observer his emotional response to his subjects.<br><br> <table style="text-align: left; float: left; margin-right: 1em" class="tr-caption-container" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: center"><a style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; clear: left; margin-right: auto" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuZwJmUbAlePiKpIdYzAVDQl_1yL6Jtj1BblAF6Ex2CjCLmtRQ7L9NDRA7owK8apLHJ2FMIFboEKEFYKXtDMeHRbkWzf6jw5jr0zcdbltJiO6FVxd2xrleyhGTbPGNK7S5daY04A7eOWyJ/s1600/A+Vase+of+Flowers.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuZwJmUbAlePiKpIdYzAVDQl_1yL6Jtj1BblAF6Ex2CjCLmtRQ7L9NDRA7owK8apLHJ2FMIFboEKEFYKXtDMeHRbkWzf6jw5jr0zcdbltJiO6FVxd2xrleyhGTbPGNK7S5daY04A7eOWyJ/s400/A+Vase+of+Flowers.jpg" width="321" height="400"></a></td></tr> <tr> <td style="text-align: center" class="tr-caption"><i>A Vase of Flowers</i><br>National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh</td></tr></tbody></table>Even when he returned to painting still life, Chardin continued to paint in this spirit, creating masterpieces like <i>Bouquet of Carnations, Tuberoses and Sweet Peas</i>, on loan from Edinburgh, about which Charles Sterling, one of the great art historians of the previous century, wrote: "Alongside Poussin and Claude Lorrain, Chardin is the one who has had the greatest influence on modern painting. Certain researches of Manet and Cézanne are inconceivable without Chardin. It would be hard to imagine anything more ‘advanced' in the way of layout and pictorial handling than the Edinburgh's <i>Vase of Flowers</i>. It stands out above anything of the kind painted by Delacroix, Millet, Courbet, Degas and the Impressionists. Only in Cézanne and in post-Cézannian painting can we hope to find so much power in so much simplicity."<br><br>Chardin gained public appreciation of his works beginning with the canvases he exhibited at the Salon from 1737. His pictures were also enthusiastically greeted by the critics, including the great Denis Diderot, who in 1763 publically lauded the realism of the painter's still lifes. Chardin was also much admired by the King of France, Louis XV, to whom the painter gave <i>The Diligent Mother</i> and <i>Saying Grace</i>, receiving in return the sovereign's esteem, and in 1757, the great privilege of residing and working at the Louvre.<br><br> <table style="text-align: right; float: right; margin-left: 1em" class="tr-caption-container" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: center"><a style="margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; clear: right; margin-right: auto" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ffQIW1CU0iGzo_6JaG9hLw98IA3UIeXvHsS4wqLA3FuioNb_HpqvbTcj3m3-NBNRehkf3G3eU0uUacO3veO5sEgCm2ZhAIqJ0leGaI8Yazz1XMHvwaiCPU5ozaALmza6zdRz9IYoaeSG/s1600/Water+Glass+and+Jug.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ffQIW1CU0iGzo_6JaG9hLw98IA3UIeXvHsS4wqLA3FuioNb_HpqvbTcj3m3-NBNRehkf3G3eU0uUacO3veO5sEgCm2ZhAIqJ0leGaI8Yazz1XMHvwaiCPU5ozaALmza6zdRz9IYoaeSG/s400/Water+Glass+and+Jug.jpg" width="400" height="316"></a></td></tr> <tr> <td style="text-align: center" class="tr-caption"><i>Glass of water and coffee-jug</i><br>Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh</td></tr></tbody></table>Towards 1770, problems with his health caused Chardin to slow down, gradually abandoning painting in oils. However, without losing spirit, the elderly master inaugurated a new season in his art, using the delicacy of pastels to create portraits of extraordinary psychological intensity. With these works, we conclude the long career of this artist, who for all his life conceived of painting as a means of knowing reality, of carefully avoiding anecdotal content, while aiming for a timelessness reflecting the harmonious perfection between form and emotion.<br><br>The elevation of humble household utensils and the small daily activities of common people into artistic subject matter and his extraordinary technical skills made Chardin one of the most loved by modern painters such Cézanne, Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Morandi and Paolini, not to mention Vincent Van Gogh, who regarded Chardin "as great as Rembrandt."<br><br>The exhibition offers the occasion to retrace the key stages in Chardin's artistic career through a selection of works on loan from museums and private collections throughout the world, most notably, both for the quantity and the quality of the over 10 masterpieces generously lent, for the exceptional support of the Louvre.<br><br><a href="http://www.palazzodiamanti.it/index.phtml?id=709">Gallery of works</a> on the official exhibition site<br><br> <table style="text-align: center; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" class="tr-caption-container" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: center"><a style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNNcsvg6CFV9DlTFMb8OONal_NgSDKdSuFP6QRJMDlbCc55sRhW3D_UjvFXRo8msT7yjBi0lQ5n_6BV56Q0Wgb6qM-8Q1qhJjKNwzdwIuLgY-bs7hbDU9jML7yLr3-q4JRznJQ5-LmCfn1/s1600/Cat+with+salmon%252C+two+mackerels%252C+pestle+and+mortar.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNNcsvg6CFV9DlTFMb8OONal_NgSDKdSuFP6QRJMDlbCc55sRhW3D_UjvFXRo8msT7yjBi0lQ5n_6BV56Q0Wgb6qM-8Q1qhJjKNwzdwIuLgY-bs7hbDU9jML7yLr3-q4JRznJQ5-LmCfn1/s400/Cat+with+salmon%252C+two+mackerels%252C+pestle+and+mortar.jpg" width="317" height="400"></a></td></tr> <tr> <td style="text-align: center" class="tr-caption"><i>Cat with salmon, two mackerels, pestle and mortar</i><br>Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid</td></tr></tbody></table> <div style="text-align: center; clear: both" class="separator"></div> <div style="text-align: center; clear: both" class="separator"></div> <div style="text-align: center; clear: both" class="separator"></div> <table style="text-align: center; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" class="tr-caption-container" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" align="center"> <tbody> <tr> <td style="text-align: center"><a style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMCkSUEuChQy_o0bDGxoWDANeuQckCF60dMguo_IsUXaMO1RGFWaH20eygFdorXQd8qxxBZ1Ujm8pEqSv5nv0QIuMa15Bji2Kkt9MpQq4A2bjx1EpyxEbydVmFUMIZWu_fkhyphenhyphenpNde7ZsmC/s1600/The+Scullery+maid.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMCkSUEuChQy_o0bDGxoWDANeuQckCF60dMguo_IsUXaMO1RGFWaH20eygFdorXQd8qxxBZ1Ujm8pEqSv5nv0QIuMa15Bji2Kkt9MpQq4A2bjx1EpyxEbydVmFUMIZWu_fkhyphenhyphenpNde7ZsmC/s400/The+Scullery+maid.jpg" width="330" height="400"></a></td></tr> <tr> <td style="text-align: center" class="tr-caption"><i>The scullery maid</i><br>Hunterian Museum, Glasgow</td></tr></tbody></table> Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-89521719823937299952011-01-05T03:23:00.005+00:002011-01-05T04:19:19.228+00:00Landscape discovered in Raphael painting<b>X-ray discovery may rewrite an important
page in the history of art</b><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuJVUD8XvoypMqKzxEaaZ9-Jw6lUd9gixrA4BesizbLesXmvS08mQp6BblGibJcfEAC5eL0rjcRCvNY-lJzo5UGkAWQ0zahT1xJXLeysMWEjnC1hqJiTXOIBRKRTCDcH7eKN2M1TdT-WIt/s1600/The+Granduca+Madonna.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_1AJIE7G1DnQ/TSP
gAxHS4tI/AAAAAAAAAb0/QbXz1ECg9Bo/s640/Th
e+Granduca+Madonna.jpg" width="414" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael, 1483-1520),
<i>'Granduca' Madonna</i><br />
Palazzo Pitti,
Florence</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
(<a href="http://www.corriere.it/cultura/10_dicembre_23/quintavalle-raffaello_e6e98182-0eb3-11e0-bfcf-00144f02aabc.shtml">Corriere della Sera</a>, 23rd
December 2010):<br />
<br />
Could a dark, almost black background surrounding
the figures of one of Raphael's most famous paintings,
the <i>Granduca Madonna</i> in the Palazzo
Pitti in Florence, change the story of a painter and the
way he is researched? And it is possible that an
analysis of the panel recently conducted by the OPD
(Opificio delle Pietre Dure) in Florence could give a
definitive answer to a question that has divided three
generations of art historians between two theories:
has the black background always existed, or was it
added later? Here is the answer in a few words from
Marco Ciatti: "The parts painted over the black
background are successive retouchings." Is this an
opinion? No, it is a certainty, because the X-ray
fluorescence analysis, in practice a radiographic
procedure that analyses the chemical components of
the pigment, shows that the parts painted over the
black background and the background itself are not
original, but were added later than the Madonna and
Child.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-
caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvalXAhvX9mA5J57tS6lB3erscAB4KKwCtYaH7HiMm_Pl6_5iLROuH17XupUiHXZxh9c4ONDJPhM_DgIrIY8jqgEEh37k4VauJL0qWhUt2Wu7QQ8AdQVsidMwzP3_aJrDoYPzMymoMOJBn/s1600/granduca+x-ray.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1AJIE7G1DnQ/TSP
b4M4uUTI/AAAAAAAAAbw/bFUs3CXZWIc/s640/
granduca+x-ray.jpg" width="465" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The x-ray image showing
the layer of paint beneath the black background
surrounding the Madonna and Child
(1), with a balustrade behind
them (2), a landscape (3), a corniced structure closing
the view behind the Madonna (4), and another
structure visible on the left (5)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">[photo: Corriere della
Sera]</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
But to understand this we need to mention other
factors. The Pitti Madonna is one of the last pictures
showing Raphael's dialogue with Leonardo da Vinci.
What is certain is that in all the Madonnas painted by
Raphael in the years around 1505-07 a landscape
appears, to mention only the <i>Terranova
Madonna</i> in Berlin, the <i>Madonna
of the Meadow</i> in Vienna,
the <i>Cowper Madonna</i> in the
National Gallery in Washington,
the <i>Madonna of the Goldfinch</i> in
the Uffizi and the <i>Belle
Jardinière</i> in the Louvre. There is also a
drawing in the Uffizi, which is universally recognised
as a study for the Granduca Madonna. In this drawing
one can see two things: the painter's initial idea was to
paint an ovoid picture, later transformed into a
rectangular one; also, in the drawing, unique
architectural elements to the left and right are clearly
marked. So Raphael envisaged the Pitti Madonna
within a space constructed to give breadth and depth
to the figures. Moreover the recent X-ray, conducted
with new techniques, but preceded by another thirty
years ago, has helped define the image painted by
Raphael: the interior of a room, a window, perhaps a
balustrade, and beyond this, to the right, a landscape.
The painting was intended to contain architectural
structures like in the Madonna in the Hermitage in St.
Petersburg, and moreover Raphael, in this period, also
painted portraits in an architectural landscape, such
as the <i>Lady with a unicorn</i> in the
Galleria Borghese in Rome, and the <i>Portrait of a lady</i> in the
Louvre, a strongly Leonardo-esque design with a vast
landscape background.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-
caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg57LIkEg6PxreX6hEQp1USfn_919FYg96tATsznrIhHkpCXhz4uGmCIBDfwm5C1xuBYPcyhoqzctFpyfYr1VJx7Xrqp35M3SDD52bUVu-h4VjFtceo4Y5CxERz2rj5L9qUi_b3Ut1d3-xZ/s1600/Lady+with+a+Unicorn.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_1AJIE7G1DnQ/TSP
h4PATqqI/AAAAAAAAAb4/y7PDjNFMA5c/s400/L
ady+with+a+Unicorn.jpg" width="305" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lady with a unicorn</i><br />
Galleria Borghese, Rome</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><br /></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Raphael always paints his figures within a space, and
immerses them in encircling light, so it is unthinkable
that he painted the <i>Granduca Madonna</i> with the
edges silhouetted against a black background. Critics,
confronted with this issue, have suggested a
change of mind by Raphael, which, after the Uffizi project,
holds that the painting would originally have had an
architectural background which Raphael then erased
by superimposing a dark covering. This argument is
undermined not only by the drawing in the Uffizi, but
also by another 16th century painting which
clearly echoes the <i>Granduca Madonna</i>, and
depicts the Virgin before a ledge with a large
landscape behind. So, at least until the latter part of
the sixteenth century, the architectural features and
landscape of the Pitti tableau would have been visible.
Taking into account the recent physical analysis of the
painting, the black background could be an addition of
the seventeenth century; it is certainly previous to its
acquisition by the Grand Duke in 1800, when the
painting was described as "peeled in some places,"
since the first copy of the painting, made in 1803,
already shows the dark background.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMsEnQbKLvNqSrjjjCXLf7aNYTiJnlHofhQwhY6fl8HFb6-OITSoSvfX4Ug2MMGcWC-UqScLGpGtvxNKlNDKqcwZbKSgJ4GmIylFaURC2x_1HKcC9XYyHJ9BDOxxqi_o87MffXFn9CWXLJ/s1600/Madonna+with+Beardless+St+Joseph.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMsEnQbKLvNqSrjjjCXLf7aNYTiJnlHofhQwhY6fl8HFb6-OITSoSvfX4Ug2MMGcWC-UqScLGpGtvxNKlNDKqcwZbKSgJ4GmIylFaURC2x_1HKcC9XYyHJ9BDOxxqi_o87MffXFn9CWXLJ/s400/Madonna+with+Beardless+St+Joseph.jpg" width="305" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Madonna and Child with St Joseph</i><br />
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
But what difference does it make whether the
<i>Granduca Madonna</i> has behind her an
architectural landscape or a black background? The
black contours surrounding the image of the Madonna
and Child deprive the figures of space and prevent us from understanding the dialogue between Raphael
and Leonardo, which culminated between 1505 and
1506. This dialogue necessarily implies an encircling
light, an insertion of forms into a space which, for
Leonardo, and thus also for Raphael, signified the
continuity of creation and a subtle adherence to the
'philosophy of light', in other words Neoplatonic
philosophy. Later, around 1506 and even more in
1507, Raphael moves towards Michelangelo, his forms
become more distinct, volumes are emphasised. In
the <i>Granduca Madonna</i>, even today one
senses the presence of a soft encircling light which
suffuses the figures, now shut off by the black
outline.<br />
<br />
So I think the elimination of the dark background is
now required, to reveal the original text, but the
question remains: what led to the covering up of
Raphael's precious text which, as evidenced by the X
-rays, still exists? Some marginal damage? And is the
panel itself still intact or, as it seems, has it been
cropped? In short, the problems are many; it is
certain that we are confronted with a discovery that
will forever change the image of the <i>Granduca
Madonna</i>, diffused in millions of copies and now seen
as almost holy. Think about it: we are about to see
disappear forever the only known Raphael that was
disguised as a Caravaggio!<br />
<br />
Arturo Carlo Quintavalle<br />
(translation: A Curran)<br />
<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-48292164981765322072011-01-04T00:46:00.003+00:002011-01-04T01:22:10.298+00:00A Filippo Lippi Masterpiece in Milan<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw6Sadfz9uUn-xPdC5zcxi-1xYO7vOnhDyDY5SPdMq1ElJO_2IWtAXUEQQF3MnX4Rsb6KZj33ZNQbdVJ1znsCQtXCLOtc1LtSojs0xMnp8I3ykKIlryOx8qnsvKK91s5UMhNKi0tn5K6FP/s1600/Adoration+of+the+Child+with+Saints2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="528" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw6Sadfz9uUn-xPdC5zcxi-1xYO7vOnhDyDY5SPdMq1ElJO_2IWtAXUEQQF3MnX4Rsb6KZj33ZNQbdVJ1znsCQtXCLOtc1LtSojs0xMnp8I3ykKIlryOx8qnsvKK91s5UMhNKi0tn5K6FP/s400/Adoration+of+the+Child+with+Saints2.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), <i>Nativity</i> or <i>Adoration of the Christ Child with Saints</i><br />
Museo Civico, Prato</td></tr>
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An important work of the Tuscan Renaissance is currently on show in Milan. On the occasion of the eighth annual <i>Masterpiece for Milan</i> programme, the great painting of the <i>Nativity</i> by Filippo Lippi (1406-1469) will be on display at the Diocesan Museum in Milan until January 30, 2011, on loan from the Prato Civic Museum which is currently closed for restoration.<br />
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The <i>Nativity </i>scene takes place in the naturalism of a beautiful landscape among angels, shepherds, rocks and bushes. The Christ Child in swaddling clothes lies on the mantle of the Virgin kneeling before him. Beside them kneels the figure of St. Joseph absorbed in prayer, and to each side St. George and St. Vincent Ferrer, who beholds a vision of Christ in an illuminated <i>mandorla</i>. The profile of the Virgin has the features of Lucrezia Buti, the nun whom Fra Filippo Lippi fell in love with. The work, painted probably around 1456, was initially conceived as only the core group, to which Lippi added the figures of the two saints, perhaps at the request of his patrons.<br />
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Presentation of the painting by Luca Frigerio for Itleditore:<br />
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"He made so many admirable works that it really was a miracle." Perhaps this enthusiastic praise by Vasari should suffice to understand the artistic stature of Filippo Lippi, the Florentine friar whose life was to say the least adventurous, a superb painter of the Tuscan Renaissance already struck by the revolution of Masaccio. If, however, and with good reason, one wishes to see with one's own eyes the justification of such praise, one can visit the Diocesan Museum in Milan, where one of Lippi's most beautiful works will be on display until 30th January, a truly idyllic <i>Nativity </i>where all is silence and prayer, contemplation and truth.<br />
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This work, the choice for the eighth edition of the hit show <i>A Masterpiece for Milan</i>, is from Prato, a city where Fra' Filippo spent a long time making a series of works that art historians now assess as "the most important and significant body of work" in fifteenth century Italian art. The <i>Nativity </i>is a panel around a metre and half square, which was originally kept at the local Dominican monastery, portraying Mary and Joseph adoring the Christ Child in the context of the 'Holy Night', with the stable in the background with the ox and the ass, young shepherds who play bagpipes and horns, and in the heavens an angelic choir. On either side, two saints: to the left of the martyr St George, his hands joined like the Virgin's, his face pale and delicate, almost feminine, in contrast with the burnished armour of the seasoned warrior. On the right St Vincent Ferrer, wearing the habit of the Dominican order to which he belonged, in contemplation of Jesus but, surprisingly, not of the Divine Infant lying in front of him but of the apparition of Christ the Judge which is painted in miniature above his head, the first 'protagonist' of his impassioned preaching.<br />
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The presence of St Vincent can help in the dating of this painting, because the saint of Valencia, a supporter of the reunification of the Church during the schism of Avignon, was in fact canonized in 1455; it is plausible to think that the panel was commissioned from Filippo Lippi by the Dominicans in the months immediately following this event. A hypothesis confirmed by the fact that the painting seems to have been painted in two distinct stages, the two side figures having been added in later.<br />
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An orphan, having lost his mother at birth and his father when only a few years old, Filippo was reared by an aunt until out of infancy, and then as a young boy entrusted to the care of the Carmelites of Florence. He was not an exemplary student, but the brothers who were his teachers soon realised his extraordinary gift for drawing, and encouraged him on this path. A talent which, as related by Vasari, even saved his life: on leaving the monastery, while travelling through the March of Ancona, he was kidnapped and enslaved by saracen brigands, but was freed in exchange for a magnificent portrait he made of his master.<br />
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However Lippi, it seemed, wanted to bear witness to the union of genius and recklessness... Implicated in various trials, the friar while in Prato fell in love with a girl destined for the veil, "who had a wonderful air and grace," to quote again from Vasari. From this relationship Filippino was born, whom Filippo intended to follow his father's excellence in the arts. And tradition has it that in the face of the Christ Child, the painter has portrayed his newborn son, while that of Mary recalls the sweet features of his young mother. A "miracle" of grace and beauty, such as never seen before, as subsequently only Lippi Junior could equal, and, not surprisingly, Botticelli, the pupil of the same Fra' Filippo.<br />
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- Luca Frigerio (translated by A Curran)<br />
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Also in Milan, the Palazzo Marino has had Titian's masterpiece <i>Woman with a Mirror</i> on loan from the Louvre in Paris since the beginning of December. This display is due to end on 6th January 2011.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tiziano Vecellio (Titian, 1490-1576), <i>Woman with a Mirror</i><br />
Musée du Louvre, Paris</td></tr>
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This painting, created in the early 1500s, is being displayed along with copious historical background material and analysis, both aesthetic and scientific. It is presented in a glass display case designed to enhance the canvas and highlight all its details. Its colouring celebrates the beauty of a dreamy-looking young woman with bowed head, blue eyes, wavy blond hair, her bare shoulders revealing her unblemished skin, while the refinement of the <i>chiaroscuro </i>announces the great talent of the master which was about to become manifest. The charming lady is portrayed at a dressing table where, if one looks closely, a male figure holds out a hand mirror in his right hand, and behind her a larger convex mirror, enabling us to behold her from both front and back, Titian portrays all the aspects which characterised beauty and the feminine ideal in sixteenth century Venice.<br />
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This work is part of the collections of the Louvre, where it is normally displayed a short distance from the famous <i>Mona Lisa</i>, and its arrival in Milan is a collaborative effort of the city of Milan and the Paris museum, in order to promote the Italian cultural heritage.<br />
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Presentation of the exhibition by ArsLife Italy, including an interview with curator Valeria Merlini, and yet more wholly inappropriate background music, which seems to be <i>de rigeur</i> for all these video presentations:<br />
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For Italian speakers, here is a fifteen-minute feature on the background to the painting, presented in the inimitable 'sexy' style of Italian TV:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO1LLRA2P9u_3nITnt7QnQZeovMSrN0t9-0G-13kZKlG9VJ3W3bY6D0p_8c_XjcsuaVLJcwHsNp637SfSCC5uEuBpJ4z1d-cyhwIg53C21g2bSitChyphenhyphenE9HuN_Qm9bnai056gsfgchTQSY9/s1600/icanova+02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO1LLRA2P9u_3nITnt7QnQZeovMSrN0t9-0G-13kZKlG9VJ3W3bY6D0p_8c_XjcsuaVLJcwHsNp637SfSCC5uEuBpJ4z1d-cyhwIg53C21g2bSitChyphenhyphenE9HuN_Qm9bnai056gsfgchTQSY9/s320/icanova+02.jpg" width="212" /></a></div>
The i-Canova app, launched in November 2010, is a virtual visit to the Canova Museum in Possagno and constitutes a comprehensive guide to the museum, accessible with a few touches on an i-Phone or i-Pad screen.<br />
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Downloadable directly from the Apple AppStore, the application tells the story of the artist's life, describes the places where he worked, and presents his most important works displayed in landscape mode, in the picturesque setting of the Possagno museum, with the ability to access more detailed information on each work.<br />
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The Canova Museum in Possagno thus becomes the first museum in the Veneto region to develop a dedicated i-Phone App, fully functional and ready to use on the new i-Pad platform.<br />
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Possagno is the birthplace of the great neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822). The museum and gypsotheque, opened in 1836, houses original plaster casts of most of his great sculptures, along with terracotta models, drawings and paintings.<br />
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<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), <i>Portrait of Antonio Canova</i><br />
Museo Canova, Possagno</td></tr>
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Antonio Canova was born in Possagno (near Treviso), about 80 km from Venice, on November 1, 1757: at age four he lost his father, Pietro Canova, and his mother, Angela Zardo, was remarried soon after to Francesco Sartori and moved to the Crespano area, but Antonio remained in Possagno with his grandfather Pasino Canova, a stonemason and sculptor of local renown. These events marked Antonio Canova's sensibility for life. From an early age, he showed a natural inclination for sculpture, making small pieces with the clay of Possagno; it is said that at the age of six or seven, at a dinner of Venetian nobles in a villa in Asolo, he created a lion in butter with such skill that all the guests were astonished. The host, the Venetian Senator Giovanni Falier, recognised Antonio's artistic talents and undertook to oversee his study and training.<br />
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In 1768, Canova began working in the Torretti workshop in Pagnano d'Asolo, not far from Possagno: this environment was for little Antonio (whom everyone called "Tonin") a real school of art. The Torretti introduced him to the Venetian world, full of cultural and artistic ferment. In Venice, Canova frequented the classes at the Accademia on drawing from the nude, drawing inspiration from the collection of plaster casts in the gallery of Filippo Farsetti. After leaving the Torretti studio, he started his own workshop, and created the first works that made him famous in Venice and the Veneto: <i>Orpheus and Euridice</i> (1776), and <i>Daedalus and Icarus</i> (1779).<br />
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Unofficial video of the Gypsotheque in Passagno (slightly fixated on male posteriors):<br />
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<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Hercules and Lichas</i><br />
Gipsoteca, Passagno</td></tr>
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In 1779, Canova made his first trip to Rome, where he made his finest works (from the <i>Three Graces</i> to <i>Cupid and Psyche</i>, from the Funerary Monuments of Popes Clement XIII and XIV and Marie-Christine of Austria to the many mythological subjects, such as <i>Venus and Mars</i>, <i>Perseus with the head of the Medusa</i>, and <i>Hector and Ajax</i>) and where his patrons were kings, princes, popes and emperors from all over the world. In Rome, he stayed at the Palazzo Venezia, home of the Venetian ambassador Gerolamo Zulian, who was a great patron of Venetian artists such as Novelli, Selva, Quarenghi, Piranesi, Morghen and Volpato. Zulian secured Canova his first commissions in Rome, and commissioned from him directly <i>Theseus and the Minotaur </i>(1781) and <i>Psyche </i>(1793).<br />
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While there he met Domenica Volpato, daughter of the engraver Giovanni, with whom he had a troubled relationship. His reputation was growing in Italy and abroad; he received new and challenging commissions from all over Europe. Soon his art, modelled on the techniques of the ancient Greeks, from drawing to clay, from plaster to marble, developed into a formidable body of work, growing ever closer to the themes of classical mythology. "I work all day like a beast," he wrote to his friend Cesarotti, "but it is also true that I spend most of the day listening to volumes on Homer being read to me."<br />
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<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Orpheus and Eurydice</i><br />
Museo Correr, Venice</td></tr>
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The arrival of Napoleon on the European political scene (he was crowned emperor in 1804) led to a fertile period of artistic production for Canova (the <i>Napoleon</i> at Apsley House and other Napoleonic busts, the marble <i>Letizia Ramolino</i>, the famous <i>Paolina</i> at the Villa Borghese); at the same time he resisted the offer to become the official artist at the French Emperor's Court, and indeed in 1815, immediately after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Canova was in Paris, with his half-brother Giovanni Battista Sartori: thanks to his skillful diplomacy numerous valuable works of art stolen by Napoleon were brought back to Italy from France. Pius VII, in recognition of his great efforts in defence of Italian art, gave him the title of Marquis of Ischia, with an annuity of three thousand crowns, which he wished to donate in support of art academies.<br />
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In July 1819, Canova was in Possagno to lay the foundation stone of the temple that he wanted to construct and donate to his community as a parish church: this majestic building would only be completed ten years after his death on October 13, 1822, in the house of his friend Francesconi in Venice. His body, at the behest of his half-brother, was first buried in the old parish church, and in 1832 transferred to the Temple.<br />
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Report by ArsLife on the 2009 Canova exhibition in Forli: Canova - The Classical Ideal in Sculpture and Painting:<br />
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Today in Possagno, visitors to the places known to Antonio Canova, the dining room, the garden, the arcade, the great pine tree he planted himself, the scuderia, the kitchen, the 'little tower" ... can still hear the locals speak of him, of his "holidays" devoted to painting, of the simple and rustic feasts his devoted countrymen held for him when he returned from Rome or Paris or Vienna, and immersed himself in the peace of his own countryside and his home.<br />
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<a href="http://www.museocanova.it/index.php?lang=en">Canova Museum</a>, Passagno official website<br />
<a href="http://www.museocanova.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=114&Itemid=88&lang=it">Gallery of works</a> in the Canova Museum in Passagno<br />
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<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Paolina Borghese as Venus Vinctrix</i><br />
Galleria Borghese, Rome</td></tr>
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="560" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWuuy4vI3FTMNn4jyAc83cSJ7i_l3hjFt6ynQxqL1y_Min9zhRvLfab5UFGFrtgCLd41WRRKQmagW_VgSmGPTzgxOhXIJjltOkPK91vk4qDzvdkS9hB4O-4hW_uxCGQK6ASUSARTpZbvJ2/s400/Cupid+and+Psyche.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="350" /></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Cupid and Psyche</i><br />
Musée du Louvre, Paris</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWuuy4vI3FTMNn4jyAc83cSJ7i_l3hjFt6ynQxqL1y_Min9zhRvLfab5UFGFrtgCLd41WRRKQmagW_VgSmGPTzgxOhXIJjltOkPK91vk4qDzvdkS9hB4O-4hW_uxCGQK6ASUSARTpZbvJ2/s1600/Cupid+and+Psyche.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGgnvCALjr2jBxbA0gn-WeWmFpfT13r9c8C_WZA4SWIz2qZnAqyq7M2pfg5g0dW0QoJn7TnAtjFBJ3EycehmwoiTpo-xJwQuNs_J2cxB6lY-zvEPtZlCGILHrmsrAD5UCQ8-DPySo4CxA7/s1600/Perseus+with+the+head+of+the+Medusa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGgnvCALjr2jBxbA0gn-WeWmFpfT13r9c8C_WZA4SWIz2qZnAqyq7M2pfg5g0dW0QoJn7TnAtjFBJ3EycehmwoiTpo-xJwQuNs_J2cxB6lY-zvEPtZlCGILHrmsrAD5UCQ8-DPySo4CxA7/s400/Perseus+with+the+head+of+the+Medusa.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Perseus with the Head of the Medusa</i><br />
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York</td></tr>
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit-WD4S5EiSX8pDDp08gsIEz2biiYdfJT3xVSR2mlrEil6eRX_r4G7gMZkcgn6swLpEPPzgzhKqmAQZeIGGkvsjNt-zywxhdf4HkZRXCkQWt1MmyDWiUmQP4lcQztwI9tlvHQhOq9D5xQ0/s1600/Daedalus+and+Icarus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="543" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit-WD4S5EiSX8pDDp08gsIEz2biiYdfJT3xVSR2mlrEil6eRX_r4G7gMZkcgn6swLpEPPzgzhKqmAQZeIGGkvsjNt-zywxhdf4HkZRXCkQWt1MmyDWiUmQP4lcQztwI9tlvHQhOq9D5xQ0/s400/Daedalus+and+Icarus.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Daedalus and Icarus</i><br />
Museo Correr, Venice</td></tr>
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRNrNgXEi6gzj8pvvVol-FG3atpAtI7ciJ7HzN2l-TwMuPDIZAa9cntAuX8lzehbnHe6x6paH0ewT61WWYjXQK07kqAhjVZMsmuJ7l0RbKuv-Lh9exg-jOxeSkWG8bUWj6Mo_1GzYPB2dl/s1600/Theseus+and+the+Minotaur.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="362" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRNrNgXEi6gzj8pvvVol-FG3atpAtI7ciJ7HzN2l-TwMuPDIZAa9cntAuX8lzehbnHe6x6paH0ewT61WWYjXQK07kqAhjVZMsmuJ7l0RbKuv-Lh9exg-jOxeSkWG8bUWj6Mo_1GzYPB2dl/s320/Theseus+and+the+Minotaur.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Theseus and the Minotaur</i><br />
Victoria and Albert Museum, London</td></tr>
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvVENDPsPDXDifq7qUWMXDnXgVWmXu3aZYPtTcXLgvWsI7H0FNjdS1FUGHlzffcm6XBELp7CPoUM_AXSFQF7YFEQ7dD0EqG5pkjrv4zffD4uneDVJI8NWE0XBhyphenhyphenmwAI_OonTiKtUmooHAE/s1600/Tomb+of+Pope+Clement+XIII.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="604" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvVENDPsPDXDifq7qUWMXDnXgVWmXu3aZYPtTcXLgvWsI7H0FNjdS1FUGHlzffcm6XBELp7CPoUM_AXSFQF7YFEQ7dD0EqG5pkjrv4zffD4uneDVJI8NWE0XBhyphenhyphenmwAI_OonTiKtUmooHAE/s400/Tomb+of+Pope+Clement+XIII.jpg" width="450" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Tomb of Pope Clement XIII</i><br />
Basilica of St Peter, Rome</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-40615183000435609462011-01-02T00:25:00.000+00:002011-01-02T00:25:00.585+00:00Philippe Jaroussky sings Caldara<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmfQ6Q_5p9cN3Sal-dcUpUwmvwVOYFWOJEx1eeMzoInyTgoVYfPSAsezjWPqNdGi76qH9fZCmI9kBUrSfCmgYv8D00ntSCCg1HJeJgKoplbqv7Rb8_AgnzgJNTTtR8jxW_JwSGYojyFdI4/s1600/jaroussky.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmfQ6Q_5p9cN3Sal-dcUpUwmvwVOYFWOJEx1eeMzoInyTgoVYfPSAsezjWPqNdGi76qH9fZCmI9kBUrSfCmgYv8D00ntSCCg1HJeJgKoplbqv7Rb8_AgnzgJNTTtR8jxW_JwSGYojyFdI4/s400/jaroussky.jpg" width="305" /></a></div>
Philippe Jaroussky sings <b>Caldara</b>: Forgotten Arias<br />
Film of a concert given at the Prinzregenttheater, Munich<br />
along with footage from the rehearsals<br />
Director: Claus Wischmann (2009)<br />
Running time: 43 mins<br />
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Arias by Antonio Caldara (1670-1736)<br />
+ Antonio Vivaldi: Concerto for violoncello in D minor RV 407<br />
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Philippe Jaroussky - <i>countertenor</i><br />
<b>Concerto Köln</b><br />
directed by Emmanuelle Haim<br />
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French singer Philippe Jaroussky is passionately dedicated to forgotten repertoires. After bringing back to life the legendary castrato Carestini, and exhuming the works of a forgotten Bach (<i>La dolce fiamma</i>), he now focuses on the Italian opera composer Antonio Caldara. Philippe Jaroussky has been perusing Caldara's vast catalogue for some time, and has unearthed more than one unjustly forgotten aria.<br />
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Accompanied by Concerto Köln, Philippe Jaroussky now brings these works into the 21st century. Arte TV's <i>Maestro</i> series followed the singer and musicians during their reappropriation of these unknown works and filmed excerpts from their presentation in concert at Munich's Prinzregententheater.<br />
<br />
<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=viewfro04-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B004C56SVY&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>Antonio Caldara (1670-1736) was one of the greatest opera composers of his time. In Mantua, Barcelona and Rome, but especially at the imperial court in Vienna, he composed over seventy works for the stage. Caldara straddles the Italian art of melody and Germanic counterpoint. He managed to combine these two styles, where many others had tried in vain. From this vast repertoire, Philippe Jaroussky has chosen songs that match his voice, combining lyric sweetness and vocal clarity. With Concerto Köln, he sought out arias which each express a unique mood. The result is a programme rich in colours and emotions, driven by ever-changing forms of expression.<br />
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Up to this point, the musicians could not draw on any recordings of works by Caldara; Philippe Jaroussky and Concerto Köln were thus travelling through unexplored territory, in the footsteps of an almost forgotten composer. <i>Maestro </i>accompanies the musicians on this journey with excerpts from the concert and rehearsals. Their concert tour culminated in the release in November 2010 of the album <i>Caldara in Vienna</i> by Philippe Jaroussky with Concerto Köln under Emmanuelle Haim.<br />
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<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-88261514142776110712011-01-01T00:41:00.002+00:002011-01-01T03:53:27.500+00:00The Goldberg Variations 30 years on<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;">
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<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Glenn_gould_sitting_in_front_of_CBC_building.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="384" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Glenn_gould_sitting_in_front_of_CBC_building.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
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<td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Glenn Gould (1932-1982) - Bench statue, Toronto</td></tr>
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<br />
Happy New Year! Now that 2011 is upon us, I thought it might be appropriate to revisit Glenn Gould's recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations BWV988, made 30 years ago in 1981, and compare it with a 'modern' performance. It is hard to describe to a younger generation just what a sensation Gould's 1981 recording made when it was released; looking back one understands that much of its appeal was due to the fact that Gould's vision of the piece, so rarely for the time, did not pass through the prism of the 19th century, for instance the almost complete absence of any 'romantic' pianistic reflexes, like rubato, sustaining pedal etc..<br />
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It is interesting to hear this radio interview Gould gave in 1981 to co-incide with the release of the new recording, and where he compares this recording to the previous one he had made in 1955. It includes his famous disparaging remark, referring to the 1955 version, that "there is a lot of 'piano-playing' going on there."<br />
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<br />
Thus Gould did not see himself as in any way opposed to the 'historically informed' approach to Bach which was at that time just beginning to make its presence felt, except that he did not view his own approach as any less 'authentic' than theirs. Here then is Glenn Gould performing the complete Goldberg Variations, in a film made by Bruno Monsaingeon in 1981 during the recording sessions in New York.<br />
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<div style="height: 625px; width: 580px;">
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<br />
A still electrifying performance that sounds anything but dated, but how different to this one, by Pierre Hantai in 2000 at the Villa Medici in Rome:-<br />
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<div style="height: 625px; width: 580px;">
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<embed src="http://embedr.com/swf/slider/pierre-hantai-plays-bachs-goldberg-variations/580/625/default/false/std" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" width="580" height="625" wmode="transparent"></embed></object><a href="http://embedr.com/playlist/pierre-hantai-plays-bachs-goldberg-variations" style="background: transparent url(http://embedr.com/img/embedr-custom-video-playlists.gif); float: right; height: 35px; margin: 0; outline: none; padding: 0; position: relative; top: -35px; width: 115px;" target="_blank"><span style="display: none;">Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com</span></a></div>
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Conclusions? For me the main differences are that while Gould's interpretation brings to the fore the structural aspects of the piece, its verticality and contrapuntal complexity, Hantai's, in addition to its flexibility and the attention given to articulation and phrasing, sounds far more <i>cantabile</i>. The structure is still there, but the melodic flow is much more apparent. Most striking of all, however, is the question of geographical co-ordinates: one can hear how Gould, for all his heroic efforts to shake off the baneful influence of the 19th century, is still fully immersed in the musical culture that I grew up in myself, that of the primacy of German music. Thirty years later, it is clear that the musical centre of gravity has moved southwards, back to its rightful home: Italy.<br />
<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-4585042991908075642010-12-31T00:20:00.003+00:002010-12-31T01:40:24.396+00:00The Divine Comedy on the web<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhudawNz0k2SniTgJl18bFbSQeSaetZMEtVxCCoplW4FLwnA_WUDulZcb9_MGbCA6-S35l8UAxE1uKe-BevDWSg0uSg3A7ndktLTDJvb4Umip4-BBlcjLof0BZZ6NqohRBGBrNFXXGM9WZR/s1600/Portrait+of+Dante.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhudawNz0k2SniTgJl18bFbSQeSaetZMEtVxCCoplW4FLwnA_WUDulZcb9_MGbCA6-S35l8UAxE1uKe-BevDWSg0uSg3A7ndktLTDJvb4Umip4-BBlcjLof0BZZ6NqohRBGBrNFXXGM9WZR/s400/Portrait+of+Dante.jpg" width="266" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510), <i>Dante Alighieri</i><br />
Private collection</td></tr>
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"Italian literature begins and ends with Dante. But that is a great deal. In Dante the whole spirit of the Renaissance is to be found." - James Joyce.<br />
<br />
In case anyone is grasping for a new year's resolution, there are surely not many better than this: to read Dante's <i>Divine Comedy</i> from beginning to end. Thanks to the web, this can be a much more rewarding experience than simply reading a translation.<br />
<br />
There are of course many English translations out there, some good, some mediocre, but in our opinion any translation has to be read in conjunction with the Italian original, even if you don't speak any Italian. The best presented site I have been able to find is the University of Virginia's <a href="http://www.worldofdante.org/index.html">World of Dante</a>. As well as presenting the English and Italian texts side by side, this site features notes on people and places mentioned and several sets of illustrations, including the most famous series by Sandro Botticelli, Alessandro Vellutello, and Gustave Doré.<br />
<br />
We recommend studying <a href="http://www.worldofdante.org/gallery_botticelli.html">Botticelli's</a> underrated drawings while reading the text, so much richer and more accurate than Doré's sentimentalised 19th century vision.<br />
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More expansive notes and background to the text can be found at the University of Texas's <a href="http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/index.html">Danteworlds</a> site.<br />
<br />
Finally, we recommend reading the text in conjunction with an audio recording, better to appreciate Dante's poetry. The best freely available complete recording we have been able to find is by Iacopo Vettori, licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. It can be downloaded and listened to canto by canto in MP3 format and is available <a href="http://www.iacopovettori.it/recitazione/commedia/en/Default.aspx">here</a>.<br />
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm6UE-_poWxGPIvVvhbPULwNOrrsfulpnMQqNsaJz2LZCb4ayxItwJIgXYjLwGeR2ataLjnS5o37Ru0cl-H_j67hlJxwa0tAPwGpq3PnIQaNh4Nm_72W7JxGQp8ue73816koPXOP6sY13N/s1600/dante+domenico+di+michelino.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="437" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm6UE-_poWxGPIvVvhbPULwNOrrsfulpnMQqNsaJz2LZCb4ayxItwJIgXYjLwGeR2ataLjnS5o37Ru0cl-H_j67hlJxwa0tAPwGpq3PnIQaNh4Nm_72W7JxGQp8ue73816koPXOP6sY13N/s400/dante+domenico+di+michelino.jpg" width="560" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Domenico di Michelino (1417-1491), <i>Dante and the Three Kingdoms</i><br />
Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvAqm1ke5p7jEVLBu9nZZUPniyqUQFsY9WsNBTHSAuV2YO6izzkyESZQkgDnpueSbnKkKmHhHzIKt6Sb7L8jNc_nxKJq8_lTrJBp9YauCMUAlvr1sWFITN0mIk1aO49hWowBDVMr8o8ccs/s1600/Dante_-_Signorelli.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="386" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvAqm1ke5p7jEVLBu9nZZUPniyqUQFsY9WsNBTHSAuV2YO6izzkyESZQkgDnpueSbnKkKmHhHzIKt6Sb7L8jNc_nxKJq8_lTrJBp9YauCMUAlvr1sWFITN0mIk1aO49hWowBDVMr8o8ccs/s400/Dante_-_Signorelli.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Luca Signorelli (ca.1450-1523), <i>Dante Alighieri</i><br />
Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik6R7b0bwS-w-Q-Ydt7zvpVtlM0XIssON-6RnYaMbO9_nbRvs0cr920eLCz0l53Yfm44mzvLQgBNCejj0y0wzeBaIoWhoxzzcSOGotDNAw5amVIRhhm8Eq_mMvttuz85vRG-Jx6rI1MnK9/s1600/Allegorical+Portrait+of+Dante.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik6R7b0bwS-w-Q-Ydt7zvpVtlM0XIssON-6RnYaMbO9_nbRvs0cr920eLCz0l53Yfm44mzvLQgBNCejj0y0wzeBaIoWhoxzzcSOGotDNAw5amVIRhhm8Eq_mMvttuz85vRG-Jx6rI1MnK9/s400/Allegorical+Portrait+of+Dante.jpg" width="375" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), <i>Allegorical portrait of Dante</i><br />
National Gallery of Art, Washington</td></tr>
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<br /></div>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-64921699979383280842010-12-30T03:12:00.002+00:002010-12-30T03:52:46.489+00:00Stéphanie d'Oustrac at the Ambronay Festival<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB4oT-szphOZ4yv02mgTNLvydT7o05m9RfxHTG5L4Q18LPQ_vqrAP4DM46Y_KTdrab2EsLtCGBG2HsEUcZ7Ox1_b_Vn5Mq658xmIAzs4GJ8kfpTVAra9t10VZLPyPL4wwCnTj3hgwsk7Xl/s1600/d_Oustrac_Stephanie_clr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB4oT-szphOZ4yv02mgTNLvydT7o05m9RfxHTG5L4Q18LPQ_vqrAP4DM46Y_KTdrab2EsLtCGBG2HsEUcZ7Ox1_b_Vn5Mq658xmIAzs4GJ8kfpTVAra9t10VZLPyPL4wwCnTj3hgwsk7Xl/s400/d_Oustrac_Stephanie_clr.jpg" width="311" /></a></div>
A concert from the Ambronay Festival 2010:<br />
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Stéphanie d'Oustrac - <i>mezzo-soprano</i><br />
<b>Amarillis Ensemble</b><br />
directed by Héloise Gaillard<br />
concert filmed on 19th September 2010<br />
film by Olivier Simonnet<br />
courtesy of Arte Live Web<br />
Running time: 01:24:57<br />
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Dido, Queen of Carthage, desperate and abandoned by love; the Virgin Mary, figure of maternal love and suffering. Two vulnerable, distracted beings who, from ravishment to ecstasy, express the heart of human passion and baroque sensibility. Sharing an interest in rediscovery, Stéphanie d'Oustrac and the Amarillis Ensemble embody the infectious talent of the Baroque revival. The programme, which is woven around Stéphanie d'Oustrac's prodigious talent for translating the power of emotions, mixes the rediscovery of Cavalli's <i>La Didone </i>with some of the most renowned works of the baroque by Barbara Strozzi and the "divine" Monteverdi.<br />
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About the fervour and virtue of the Virgin Mary: pieces by Cavalli, Strozzi, Biagio Marini and Monteverdi; about Dido's adoration and desolation: pieces by Alessandro Scarlatti, Michelangelo Faggioli, Andrea Falconieri, Cavalli and Rossi, some of them unpublished.<br />
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<a href="http://stephaniedoustrac.com/welcome.html">Stéphanie d'Oustrac</a> official website<br />
<a href="http://blog.magnificatbaroque.com/2010/12/29/barbara-strozzi-virtuosissima-cantatrice/">Barbara Strozzi – Virtuosissima Cantatrice</a> article on Barbara Strozzi by Magnificat<br />
<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-91299655931068837072010-12-29T01:16:00.001+00:002010-12-29T03:21:12.231+00:00Dreaming Antiquity at the Louvre<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4aUpK2gldAVW6jhKqNjHiTFg9s-olW7ZREbyVkx1Z4fRv_bZ56c8TGWzLDX9H6TxaMPPadY7U-LC6LAx_x7hKH6ZRSjKkNELWd9SPrvt26we-XjIKFbx80_IXkrJKuwDUNULci49B78fW/s1600/David+-+Psyche+Abandoned.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4aUpK2gldAVW6jhKqNjHiTFg9s-olW7ZREbyVkx1Z4fRv_bZ56c8TGWzLDX9H6TxaMPPadY7U-LC6LAx_x7hKH6ZRSjKkNELWd9SPrvt26we-XjIKFbx80_IXkrJKuwDUNULci49B78fW/s400/David+-+Psyche+Abandoned.jpg" width="312" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), <i>Psyche Abandoned</i><br />
Private collection</td></tr>
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<b>Antiquity Rediscovered: Innovation and Resistance in the 18th Century</b><br />
Louvre Museum, Paris<br />
2nd December 2010 - 14th February 2011<br />
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<i>Antiquity Rediscovered: Innovation and Resistance in the 18th Century</i> features a selection of over one hundred and fifty major works that illustrate the emergence of the so-called 'neoclassical' movement, which spurred eighteenth-century Europe to look back to Antiquity once again. Running counter to the formal inventiveness of Parisian rococo and Italian 'decorative baroque' trends, which had spread across the continent, this stylistic revival concerned not only the visual arts and architecture but also a way of life, stimulated by archaeological discoveries and academic debate.<br />
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However, by the 1760s various alternative trends, based on other historical sources, emerged. They are included in this show under the themes of 'baroque revival', 'mannerist revival', and the quest for the 'sublime'—from Rome to Edinburgh and from Stockholm to Paris, artists flaunted their uniqueness by expressing their vision of an imagined Antiquity, one based less on archaeology and more on inspiration from the Renaissance, the seventeenth century, indeed the Middle Ages (associated with France’s own 'ancient' history).<br />
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Report on the exhibition by France2 TV (in French):<br />
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The final quarter of the eighteenth century nevertheless saw the lasting affirmation of a more universal idiom whose radical expression focused on heroic values, conveyed here through the themes of the Triumph of Mars, Great Men, the Defence of Virtue, and the Body Magnified. These sections feature masterpieces by David, Fuseli, Sergel, and Canova along with architectural plans, monumental canvases, and large marbles that convey the new aspirations of European society on the eve of Revolutionary upheaval.<br />
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This blog has nothing to add to the large <a href="http://mini-site.louvre.fr/saison18e/index_f.php?expo=antiquite_revee&langue=en">exhibition mini-site</a>, in English and French, which features high-quality digital images of all the major works in the exhibition; suffice it to highlight below a few items of interest to us. I should point out, however, that the official title of the exhibition, <i>L'Antiquité Revée</i> (dreamed antiquity) seems to me a much more apt title than their translation <i>Antiquity rediscovered</i>.<br />
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJnqsWDzIyaapUQcXFQWxto6emvm1sQYlYYEJMLeHjIJ9stSgD3GQErxKUarLNxltScHKVyuSBSgzvLDGK8LPF4MPGkVYguvysf7BliyqL6hGVbf_Magci3-jGBBCEw1QuQX_CMRm7mUX/s1600/Robert+-+Finding+of+the+Laocoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="407" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsJnqsWDzIyaapUQcXFQWxto6emvm1sQYlYYEJMLeHjIJ9stSgD3GQErxKUarLNxltScHKVyuSBSgzvLDGK8LPF4MPGkVYguvysf7BliyqL6hGVbf_Magci3-jGBBCEw1QuQX_CMRm7mUX/s400/Robert+-+Finding+of+the+Laocoon.jpg" width="560" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hubert Robert (1733-1808), <i>The Finding of the Laocoön</i> (1773)<br />
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond</td></tr>
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Painted eight years after Hubert Robert returned to France, this work appears to sum up the lessons learned by the artist during his long initiatory tour of Italy. For Robert, the important thing was not a scrupulous depiction of the real circumstances of the chance discovery of the large sculpted group known as <i>The Laocoön</i> in 1506; instead, he set the scene in a vast gallery that looks more like the plans he would later propose for the <i>Grande Galerie</i> at the Louvre than the authentic surviving cellars of Nero’s palace in Rome. The impression of vastness is enhanced by the back-lighting, and the perspective is cleverly shifted to the left in order to forestall any impression of monotony; meanwhile, the drama of the discovery of the sculpture is reinforced by the raking light coming from the right, as though from the wings of a theatre. Instead of clothing the women and workers in Renaissance garb, Robert shows them in working-class garments of his own day, strangely mingled with a few less-obvious figures wearing togas. The opening of a sarcophagus in the left foreground creates an atmosphere of profanation. Robert’s imagined archaeological scene evokes not so much a Renaissance discovery as the resurgence of a heroic past.<br />
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUoxlEIBlY0HBQNqK8T1YFL6nkhCHO1xCr6hIFmsIDwHFrMWoPlGIWMqDPnC05a-VerHZK23jm3bGII72e9-HKWmQWO457p60iz401KvEKGw-HINDCH3lt-Akk0ACr5TR5j2aU6Fz0kPnT/s1600/Fragonard+-+Coresus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="449" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUoxlEIBlY0HBQNqK8T1YFL6nkhCHO1xCr6hIFmsIDwHFrMWoPlGIWMqDPnC05a-VerHZK23jm3bGII72e9-HKWmQWO457p60iz401KvEKGw-HINDCH3lt-Akk0ACr5TR5j2aU6Fz0kPnT/s400/Fragonard+-+Coresus.jpg" width="560" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806)<br />
<i>The High Priest Coresus sacrificing himself to save Callirhoe</i> (1765)<br />
Musée du Louvre, Paris</td></tr>
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In 1765 Fragonard presented this very large painting in support of his candidacy for membership in the Academy. When exhibited at the <i>Salon</i>, the work was hailed by the public, as echoed in the press and by Diderot. The story of this ancient legend, told by Pausanias, is rather obscure though it had been the subject of a tragic play and an opera early in the eighteenth century: Coresus, a high priest of Dionysus, was in love with Callirhoe. In despair at his unrequited love, the priest announced that his god had ordered the young woman to be sacrificed. However, just when the innocent Callirhoe is about to be sacrificed, Coresus recoils at the horror of his deed and kills himself instead. Fragonard composed this painting like a theatrical play. The tragedy unfolds before spectators, in the intense glow of supernatural light. This painting thus functioned as an admirable standard-bearer for a spirited aesthetic quite different from the works advocated by Antiquity-loving purists, and it was supported by critics and the establishment. Fragonard’s admirably successful painting actually incorporated and corrected discoveries made by the promoters of Antiquity, yet it was free of excessive purism and above all endowed with an intense enthusiasm and passion totally alien to their marble-cold aesthetics.<br />
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDmQtIw1zdrlUTLEafCN4-NHc0Z0UykKsgDRKlvEGBfBfsBiW3sxtskKKR5Jfb9QHz66IOX4wQGEz5cZf3kE6AxIbftIIfM3OE9DdJCaeXbZMn1DW5TcQhIKQKKoDgYbURG5CO7kP_oObU/s1600/Solimena+-+Heliodorus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="403" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDmQtIw1zdrlUTLEafCN4-NHc0Z0UykKsgDRKlvEGBfBfsBiW3sxtskKKR5Jfb9QHz66IOX4wQGEz5cZf3kE6AxIbftIIfM3OE9DdJCaeXbZMn1DW5TcQhIKQKKoDgYbURG5CO7kP_oObU/s400/Solimena+-+Heliodorus.jpg" width="560" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Francesco Solimena (1657-1747), <i>The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple</i><br />
Musée du Louvre, Paris</td></tr>
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This painting was a sketch by baroque artist Francesco Solimena for his fresco adorning the inner façade of the church of <i>Gesù Nuovo</i> in Naples, completed in 1725. Fragonard made a copy of Solimena’s fresco during his tour of Italy. Fragonard’s staging of his Coresus was notably indebted to this composition. The Biblical subject comes from the Second Book of Maccabees (3:24–7). When Heliodorus tried to seize the treasure housed in the Temple of Jerusalem on the orders of the Syrian King Seleucos IV, he was driven out by angels on horseback. The scene takes place in a vast, open palace whose columns provide a magnificent setting and whose staircase was conducive to placing the groups at different levels, the better to link the various elements. Figures skilfully placed in the front corners function as <i>repoussoirs</i>, while large opposing masses and key contrasts of light and shadow were techniques that characterised paintings with the typical baroque spirit so alien to the restraint of Antique-style works inspired by Winckelmann.<br />
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3tgTtWGpOS6QrrVCbkPc5GU9UYVjGDuqu_6XrTOzmqcHo9KmYuvaKL1te4n5RFgxSrXCuQpGq1Gf0fy56BbcavmT3zMWGRmOMeCVzlD0UkXs6jD1OJpU2UVZY0iPTjad0jVjvngwQQKJQ/s1600/Mengs+-+St+Peter.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3tgTtWGpOS6QrrVCbkPc5GU9UYVjGDuqu_6XrTOzmqcHo9KmYuvaKL1te4n5RFgxSrXCuQpGq1Gf0fy56BbcavmT3zMWGRmOMeCVzlD0UkXs6jD1OJpU2UVZY0iPTjad0jVjvngwQQKJQ/s400/Mengs+-+St+Peter.jpg" width="281" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anton Rafael Mengs (1728-1779), <i>St Peter Enthroned</i><br />
Galleria Sabauda, Turin</td></tr>
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It was during his second stay in Madrid (1774-76), when he became First Painter to King Charles III, that Mengs—whom Winckelmann called the greatest painter of his day in 1764 and who was at the peak of his brilliant international career—conceived this painting. It reemploys the composition he had already used for a Saint Peter painted in <i>tempera </i>on the ceiling of the <i>Sala dei Papiri</i> (Papyrus Room) in the Vatican, here on a larger scale yet tighter composition that accentuates the monumentality of the image. Compared to the Vatican <i>St Peter</i>, the picture here is devoid of setting and the apostle henceforth stands out against a bare, luminous background that further stresses his powerful massiveness. Mengs combined this arrangement with a <i>chiaroscuro</i> technique that confers a sculptural quality to his painting, which would become typical of his late works. In this pivotal painting, Mengs was therefore revitalizing his approach, always marked by 'primitive' simplicity and grandeur yet henceforth concerned with lively, powerful expressiveness that harked back to great 'baroque' statuary.<br />
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-QRC-S6V-AYJtKdWBJuCplt2cpk4z0PJM_a5BlUa5CKX2bOYpzLj51lj8RXFV4o5BBWG5EgxxpyqNdhoHaXtniEjtu4bzLWo-XzgjAk4XhZxREzpKxT95Y5qG5Y9ibhRyBj6F8E2ollbg/s1600/Battoni+-+Education+of+Achilles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="399" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-QRC-S6V-AYJtKdWBJuCplt2cpk4z0PJM_a5BlUa5CKX2bOYpzLj51lj8RXFV4o5BBWG5EgxxpyqNdhoHaXtniEjtu4bzLWo-XzgjAk4XhZxREzpKxT95Y5qG5Y9ibhRyBj6F8E2ollbg/s400/Battoni+-+Education+of+Achilles.jpg" width="560" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787)<br />
<i>Thetis Confiding the Education of Achilles to the Centaur Chiron</i> (1760)<br />
Galleria Nazionale, Parma</td></tr>
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In 1760 Pompeo Batoni was commissioned to do this painting by the duke of Parma, Philip of Bourbon. The chosen subject was a fairly direct way to praise the education that the duke’s wife, Louise Élisabeth of France, intended to give their young son Ferdinand by confiding him to a prestigious, enlightened tutor, the abbé de Condillac. In the painting Batoni focuses on the moment when Thetis, Achilles’ mother, hands her son over to Chiron; Batoni did not invent the subject, which was already present in Italian Renaissance art and resurfaced in painting done in Emilia in the eighteenth century. In Batoni’s canvas there are obvious echoes of the art of Correggio and Raphael (the latter’s <i>Farnesina Galatea</i> can be recognized in the figure of Thetis) along with clear reminiscences of Parmigianino (the sinuous lines of the lithe figure of young Achilles) and of ancient sculpture (Chiron’s resemblance to a youthful centaur unearthed by Monsignor Furietti in Hadrian’s Villa in 1736).<br />
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAN6lgTVG6uzoTFPZgnnphe90ExSvRQR56ckS0ThChyphenhypheneRRq2NvtCvwnW1ZyK7KJPoHoZ46Psn5f8Km02eNyoHciQCFOcqhWDOjZU9AW0ar_4tsAdHZbuCWdhA5wAJtzFXeXEo0shOo1YRC/s1600/Fuseli+-+The+Nightmare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="448" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAN6lgTVG6uzoTFPZgnnphe90ExSvRQR56ckS0ThChyphenhypheneRRq2NvtCvwnW1ZyK7KJPoHoZ46Psn5f8Km02eNyoHciQCFOcqhWDOjZU9AW0ar_4tsAdHZbuCWdhA5wAJtzFXeXEo0shOo1YRC/s400/Fuseli+-+The+Nightmare.jpg" width="560" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), <i>The Nightmare</i><br />
Institute of Arts, Detroit</td></tr>
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Born in Zurich as Johann Heinrich Füssli, the artist known as Henry Fuseli moved permanently to London in 1779 after a ten-year sojourn in Rome. He aroused striking public interest on presenting this soberly titled painting, <i>The Nightmare</i>, at the Royal Academy show of 1782. He depicted a young woman lying on a bed in a room with contemporary furniture reflecting a stylized Antique taste. Although dressed in virginal white, the sleeping—or swooning—woman is tormented in her sleep by a little demon who crouches heavily on her belly. That is the <i>mara</i>—spirit or hag—who gives its name to the painting, because 'nightmare' originally meant not a bad dream but an incubus. According to a marginal Christian belief in the late Middle Ages, an incubus was a spirit that came to trouble women’s dreams with its sexual ardour. The horse whose head emerges from the left is clearly the fantastic spirit’s steed yet also an allusion to a passage in Romeo and Juliet that refers to a being who “gallops night by night through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love.” Fuseli’s painting was immediately engraved by Thomas Burke and swiftly became famous, indeed so popular that it spurred a great number of forgeries and caricatures. Fuseli himself produced painted and drawn replicas. Today this painting is certainly one of the most studied 'Romantic' or 'pre-Romantic' works of European art, henceforth presented as emblematic of the movement.<br />
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<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh9M0qZWPg8Y928n49qUOayZflCGXttIcuXksUAtU2ZCYqIYfAGXm0t48RUOgrm_8GY2CXF5s25BYRHn5Xugs22WeMzzBzWF5DWYAkqwMf9lL4ln3qvqb-nNdWjo1yC3zhh1Q-zmY0m4TT/s1600/Canova+-+Psyche.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh9M0qZWPg8Y928n49qUOayZflCGXttIcuXksUAtU2ZCYqIYfAGXm0t48RUOgrm_8GY2CXF5s25BYRHn5Xugs22WeMzzBzWF5DWYAkqwMf9lL4ln3qvqb-nNdWjo1yC3zhh1Q-zmY0m4TT/s400/Canova+-+Psyche.jpg" width="250" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antonio Canova (1757-1822), <i>Psyche</i><br />
Private collection</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Commissioned from Canova in 1789 by the English art lover Henry Blundell, this <i>Psyche </i>was completed in 1792 and sent to London where it was briefly exhibited in the summer of 1793 before being shipped to Ince Blundell Hall near Liverpool. Canova decided to depict the young heroine gazing at a butterfly as though meditating upon her own soul. It is emblematic of a work inspired by Antiquity yet resolutely different. Psyche’s body curves subtly as it occupies space; her slightly withdrawn right leg, like the clutch of drapery at her side, invite the beholder to circle around her. The choice of the theme—the concentration of the young woman gazing at a butterfly—creates a theatrical 'special moment' that runs throughout Canova’s art, riveting the beholder’s attention. The handling of the surface of the marble, whose finish was always the work of the sculptor himself, is dazzling, from the transparence of the fabric to the lovingly polished skin, creating a stimulating effect of reality in the context of idealised beauty.</div>
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<div>
(texts from the Louvre's official exhibition guide)</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"> <tbody>
<tr> <td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmdorTuyChyphenhyphenXvSpIQavHSXC9jjslmXJPJYPlEt1ATrUfjeBVbguki59IfgbSJvgbmGE4n7UkoM0217YCj4DUgkiduxUDAhtYtBZcsBPlSWEUS-a1FH2pYmzwnc2e81mG9fyT0Kqjx4ixLL/s1600/Canova+-+Psyche+Revived.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="570" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmdorTuyChyphenhyphenXvSpIQavHSXC9jjslmXJPJYPlEt1ATrUfjeBVbguki59IfgbSJvgbmGE4n7UkoM0217YCj4DUgkiduxUDAhtYtBZcsBPlSWEUS-a1FH2pYmzwnc2e81mG9fyT0Kqjx4ixLL/s400/Canova+-+Psyche+Revived.jpg" width="560" /></a></td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antonio Canova, <i>Psyche revived by Cupid's kiss</i><br />
Musée du Louvre, Paris</td></tr>
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<div>
The Louvre is unquestionably, along with the Prado in Madrid, at the forefront of the development of online presentation of art. Witness this superb <a href="http://www.louvre.fr/llv/dossiers/visu_oal.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198674197711&CURRENT_LLV_OAL%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198674197711&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=9852723696500839&bmLocale=en">multimedia presentation</a> (in English) of Canova's <i>Psyche revived by Cupid's kiss</i>, a work in the Louvre's permanent collections and not part of the exhibition, although it certainly fits with the theme.</div>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-68829393306906949612010-12-28T12:00:00.000+00:002010-12-28T12:00:13.348+00:00Carissimi - Oratorio della SS Vergine<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Ponte_-_s_Apollinare_restaurato_1060037.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Ponte_-_s_Apollinare_restaurato_1060037.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Basilica of Sant'Apollinare, Rome</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674)<br />
<b>Oratorio della Santissima Vergine</b><br />
Les Paladins<br />
directed by Jérome Corréas<br />
<br />
"Our dear Jacomo":<br />
<br />
It is not easy to reconstruct the life of Giacomo Carissimi: we do not even possess a portrait. What was believed to be his portrait has proved to be that of a contemporary, Alexander Morus or Alexandre More (1615-1670), a French Protestant pastor and theologian (Gloria Rose, 1970). Of Carissimi we know only that he was "tall, slender and inclined to melancholy," as he is described by Ottavio Pitoni in his <i>De’contrapuntisti e compositori di musica</i>. The few things we know for certain about him - arrived at by deduction, reading between the lines and hypothesis - do not enable us to draw up a specific profile, while his works endow him with a 'mythical' aura which do not permit of the extrapolation of a historical context.<br />
<br />
All of his autograph scores, which were preserved at the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico, were lost as a consequence of the suppression of the Jesuits during the two occupations of Rome by French troops in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There are therefore considerable uncertainties regarding the extent of his <i>oeuvre</i>, and contemporary criticism is still divided.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD230n01OoTgmPBpvdhoIF_l80L-gYIDeKXJayy26_nMePin2QNg8WCPstzM1WeI2F9t0QOflZrpRxwejf8Hq-IVU-v2q5bmBKB1cHD9dX7mv34BccJ-cYZEZP9dG49B56luOzIN6TaKiU/s1600/piazza+s+apollinare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD230n01OoTgmPBpvdhoIF_l80L-gYIDeKXJayy26_nMePin2QNg8WCPstzM1WeI2F9t0QOflZrpRxwejf8Hq-IVU-v2q5bmBKB1cHD9dX7mv34BccJ-cYZEZP9dG49B56luOzIN6TaKiU/s320/piazza+s+apollinare.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Piazza di S Apollinare with (right) the Palazzo di S Apollinare<br />
home of the Collegio Germanico-Ungarico<br />
founded by St Ignatius of Loyola</td></tr>
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Considered the "father of oratorio and cantata da camera", due to his extraordinary body of compositions, and through his famous music school which received illustrious students from all over Europe, Giacomo Carissimi invented a method of teaching which initiated the development of the European music schools we know today.<br />
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He was "an excellent composer of universal harmony, much acclaimed and pleasing to the ears of his time." Of him Athanasius Kircher, the great Jesuit scholar of that time, wrote: "Giacomo Carissimi, excellent musician of great renown. Master worthy of the church of Sant'Apollinare of the Collegio Germanico for the space of many years, surpasses the others for his invention and the happiness of his compositions, which carry the souls of the listeners towards every emotion. Without doubt his juicy compositions are full of vivacity of spirit."<br />
<br />
<div style="height: 630px; width: 580px;">
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<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-56593405973422890342010-12-27T01:16:00.000+00:002010-12-27T01:16:25.092+00:00Diderot still stirs<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Denisdiderot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Denisdiderot.jpg" width="310" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean-Honoré Fragonard, <i>Denis Diderot</i> (1769)<br />
Musée du Louvre, Paris</td></tr>
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Philippe Sollers, in <i><a href="http://www.philippesollers.net/diderot.html">Le Nouvel Observateur</a></i>, 23rd December 2010:<br />
<br />
On the 7th July 1746, the Parliament of Paris condemned a book to be "slashed and burned as scandalous, contrary to religion and morality." The volume was published deceptively in the Hague, "at the Company's expense," and circulated under the counter, with no named author. This last was 33 years old, and would be much talked about thereafter. His name was Denis Diderot, his book was called <i>Philosophical Thoughts,</i> and on its title page was this inscription in Latin: "This fish is not for everyone." Indeed not, as censorship soon understood, just as she understood it of that most dangerous of books: the <i>Encyclopedia</i>.<br />
<br />
For all who, at the time, conspired for a change of era, Diderot was<i> the Philosopher</i>. Funny philosopher, as far removed from the ancient saints of the profession as from today's social windbags. The author of <i>Indiscreet Jewels</i>, <i>The Nun</i>, <i>Rameau's Nephew </i>and <i>Jacques the Fatalist</i>, is first of all a whirlwind in action. He is everywhere and nowhere, an incessant effervescence. As Michel Delon rightly says, "his style is that of a troublemaker or guerrilla who is constantly changing places, who rejects any final position." Or again, speaking of this turbulent writer's numerous borrowings and citations <i>à la Montaigne</i>: "Diderot reveals not only the ideas that constitute him, he deploys his own ideas through recourse to otherness."<br />
<br />
<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=viewfro04-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=0140441735&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>He stirs, Diderot; he has multiple related identities; he drifts; he skids; he dialogues. Thinking is a continual conversation, a great swarming novel. "A single physical quality," he said, "can lead the mind to consider an infinite variety of things." To think is to make music, to dance, to hit out, to destroy the ignorant assuredness of every power. Listen to Catherine of Russia after her meetings with <i>the Philosopher</i>: "Your Diderot is an extraordinary man, I do not tear myself away from my conversations with him without my thighs all black and blue." It would have been better for the French monarchy to let itself be smacked on the thighs by this insolent man, rather than persecute the <i>Lumières </i>and send them to Russia or Prussia. Heroic times, when writers were banished and their writings "slashed", something the drab French of today seem to have no idea of.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh944D86xK-9W7__b3hf0_7cO2W0dT6R2nJZ5_wqDMVUjeyE0kP_KaCCkdquuTNrSxiyObLECScdclWdHi_v2KT5TSSPvWGfzMgnC7dDYd-1q7DVYXTCeQ84de2GEJTMIIsUJQfuybsxjwj/s1600/diderot+picasso.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh944D86xK-9W7__b3hf0_7cO2W0dT6R2nJZ5_wqDMVUjeyE0kP_KaCCkdquuTNrSxiyObLECScdclWdHi_v2KT5TSSPvWGfzMgnC7dDYd-1q7DVYXTCeQ84de2GEJTMIIsUJQfuybsxjwj/s320/diderot+picasso.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pablo Picasso, <i>Denis Diderot</i> (1954)<br />
Lithograph</td></tr>
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Read this: "I write of God: I count on few readers, and seek only a few who approve. If these thoughts please no-one, they can only be bad, but I will hold them for despicable, if they appeal to everyone. " Apart from the <i>Letter on the Blind</i> (prison for the author) and the little-known <i>Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero</i> (where Diderot celebrates Seneca), the most fantastic book in this collection [<i>Oeuvres philosophiques</i>, see below] is <i>D'Alembert's Dream</i>, a surrealist masterpiece. D'Alembert rants in his sleep; Mlle de Lespinasse, his mistress, takes notes of what he says in his dreams; Dr Bordeu, like a good psychoanalyst, interprets everything. It's mad, it's wonderful, thoughts that think their subterranean continuity, the "vibrating strings", of which we and all the world are made. It's a frenzied harpsichord, but "the philosophical instrument is sensitive; it is musician and instrument at the same time." Meanwhile, Mlle de Lespinasse receives a harsh cold lesson on sexuality and the baneful effects of continence. She readily accepts the demonstrations of the prophetic Dr Bordeu and says: "there is no difference between a physician awake and a dreaming philosopher." The revolutionary conclusion: "There is but one virtue: justice; one duty: to be happy; one corollary: do not overrate life, nor fear death."<br />
<br />
(translation: A Curran)<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.fr/Oeuvres-philosophiques-Denis-Diderot/dp/2070116425/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293327573&sr=1-1">Oeuvres philosophiques</a> (Pléiade edition, published 18th November 2010) at Amazon France<br />
<br />
Denis Diderot: Oeuvres Philosophiques <i>Tome 1</i>: Pensées, Réflexions, Lettre sur les Aveugles, Lettre sur les Sourds<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="500" scrolling="no" src="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UWoEdxQP2KsC&dq=inauthor%3Adiderot&pg=PP1&output=embed" style="border: 0px;" width="500"></iframe>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-85158667358455491852010-12-26T02:58:00.000+00:002010-12-26T02:58:20.729+00:00Thomas Lawrence - Regency Power and Brilliance<div style="text-align: left;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Sir_Thomas_Lawrence_001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Sir_Thomas_Lawrence_001.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), <i>Elizabeth Farren</i><br />
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York</td></tr>
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<b>Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance</b><br />
National Portrait Gallery, London<br />
until 23rd January 2011<br />
<br />
Thomas Lawrence was the greatest British portrait painter of his generation and one of the most celebrated artists in Europe in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This exhibition, the first in the UK for over thirty years, presents fifty-four works drawn from international public and private collections, some never before seen in public. A key figure in the history of British art,the exhibition provides a fresh understanding of Lawrence's career, exploring his astounding technical innovations, dazzling brushwork and bold use of colour through his greatest paintings and drawings. Stunning early works such as the beautiful full-length painting of actress Elizabeth Farren and the striking Arthur Atherley, are shown alongside majestic and powerful portraits of international statesmen, society figures, military leaders and royalty, created at the height of his fame, such as Pope Pius VII, Princess Sophia and the Earl of Aberdeen.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZg6aRUILB30ME9QRSAH_5OqJuJzLH8_nccfb9GCLhG8bJ7iRKDjmqbIsDww3rdwsezVHYIh0ioCmV5CrX09RnLnEey465WV0cY1Co_olgoGk9l1PEwnL8oFXoNwVj2VB2GbMwBKW6yOnq/s1600/Lady+Elizabeth+Conyngham.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZg6aRUILB30ME9QRSAH_5OqJuJzLH8_nccfb9GCLhG8bJ7iRKDjmqbIsDww3rdwsezVHYIh0ioCmV5CrX09RnLnEey465WV0cY1Co_olgoGk9l1PEwnL8oFXoNwVj2VB2GbMwBKW6yOnq/s400/Lady+Elizabeth+Conyngham.jpg" width="307" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lady Elizabeth Conyngham</i><br />
Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon</td></tr>
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Thomas Lawrence took the London art world by storm at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1790. Although virtually unknown, this precocious 21-year-old artist dazzled audiences with his daring full-length portraits of Queen Charlotte and the actress, Elizabeth Farren. Their frankness, vivacity and delight in textures and detail departed from the overblown allegories of <i>Grand Manner</i> portraiture. The critics proclaimed Lawrence the rival and successor to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founding President of the Academy.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisaNPHJDRi95VOCzU9ctae_l6J42MK7sG6oOIMzhS78v0Hx2Wih4Q8Cey_o7_Sx53eDZdxAD0OXogvnY2sM4Rif-HpXQ2A8nKcHKD2ndcx5AOPAv5f8_PXmUFdH-mYCQd53OAlmT-4-tY0/s1600/Mary+Hamilton.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisaNPHJDRi95VOCzU9ctae_l6J42MK7sG6oOIMzhS78v0Hx2Wih4Q8Cey_o7_Sx53eDZdxAD0OXogvnY2sM4Rif-HpXQ2A8nKcHKD2ndcx5AOPAv5f8_PXmUFdH-mYCQd53OAlmT-4-tY0/s400/Mary+Hamilton.jpg" width="270" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Mary Hamilton</i><br />
British Museum, London</td></tr>
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Britain’s victory in the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 enabled Lawrence to achieve the greatest international reputation of any British artist. Commissioned by the Prince Regent, Lawrence travelled across Europe painting a series of monumental portraits of the sovereigns and military leaders who were allied in the defeat of Napoleon. These epoch capturing portraits, which hang together in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, ensured Lawrence’s status and influence abroad.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQKlC7_18fX2z7fcKWYOlFyvHUr4QbCBpSurXQdRt7Us4IylsS7jqphgVdx8sNcKkXoQliP5cAv9PjvnYijrmz_rwkkxm96kdylBsklVX11iamBIGWnbZSDYdZQdluNU0RSvkr8HxMtPEh/s1600/Lady+Selina+Meade.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQKlC7_18fX2z7fcKWYOlFyvHUr4QbCBpSurXQdRt7Us4IylsS7jqphgVdx8sNcKkXoQliP5cAv9PjvnYijrmz_rwkkxm96kdylBsklVX11iamBIGWnbZSDYdZQdluNU0RSvkr8HxMtPEh/s400/Lady+Selina+Meade.jpg" width="318" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Lady Selina Meade</i><br />
Private collection</td></tr>
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Knighted for his role as the prince’s artistic envoy, Lawrence began the series in London in 1814 and left for the Continent in 1818. In Vienna, he painted Charles, Archduke of Austria, enjoyed the glittering social life of the aristocracy and undertook private commissions such as Selina Meade. Just as he was preparing to return, the prince ordered him to paint the Pope. Lawrence’s year in Rome was the apex of his artistic aspirations and his portrait of Pius VII was the crowning glory of his artistic mission.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg161Uo-byDG2FIodjK1KHDiI0UNa8Hu5LH4uj19JA_zoHtiBW3FAm5-mDfa9vQisZLwVqHSGcq8D5o5JyUWudxJ0cxNly4fpifYiSd7mzMGE1yd_EhyCKgyRpCL_vLbOcMiQ17qz0RbCY9/s1600/Pope+Pius+VII.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg161Uo-byDG2FIodjK1KHDiI0UNa8Hu5LH4uj19JA_zoHtiBW3FAm5-mDfa9vQisZLwVqHSGcq8D5o5JyUWudxJ0cxNly4fpifYiSd7mzMGE1yd_EhyCKgyRpCL_vLbOcMiQ17qz0RbCY9/s640/Pope+Pius+VII.jpg" width="417" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Pope Pius VII</i><br />
Royal Collection, Windsor</td></tr>
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In the 1820s Lawrence achieved a growing reputation in France. He stayed in Paris in 1825 and exhibited works such as the famous <i>Charles William Lambton</i> at the Paris Salon. He earned the respect of none other than Delacroix, who, according to Richard Holmes in his essay on Lawrence, said that the artist knew how to paint women's eyes; he also was praised by Baudelaire, who set him at odds with the neo-classical school of Ingres and David.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wikigallery.org/paintings/201501-202000/201882/painting1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://www.wikigallery.org/paintings/201501-202000/201882/painting1.jpg" width="313" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Master Charles William Lambton</i><br />
Private collection</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-_99iYgWSDGlp3puqoQ84lq4ti9v_dLoyVzfIv3YfL8m8mJMDvjWPgteN63qxN8EKmnQhgWM2a4fNpS89ygn_fStgJsfITad-DAa9_ikCUHY-XvJgD7Q-n73el1YEqzuCP3EMNj6B-u2j/s1600/Margaret%252C+Countess+of+Blessington.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-_99iYgWSDGlp3puqoQ84lq4ti9v_dLoyVzfIv3YfL8m8mJMDvjWPgteN63qxN8EKmnQhgWM2a4fNpS89ygn_fStgJsfITad-DAa9_ikCUHY-XvJgD7Q-n73el1YEqzuCP3EMNj6B-u2j/s400/Margaret%252C+Countess+of+Blessington.jpg" width="308" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Margaret, Countess of Blessington</i><br />
Wallace Collection, London</td></tr>
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Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance <a href="http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2010/thomas-lawrence-regency-power-and-brilliance-minisite.php">official exhibition site</a><br />
<a href="http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2010/thomas-lawrence-regency-power-and-brilliance-minisite.php"></a>Genius infected by Romance: Sir Thomas Lawrence at the NPG - article in <a href="http://artintheblood.typepad.com/art_history_today/2010/12/genius-infected-by-romance-sir-thomas-lawrence-at-the-npg.html">Art History Today</a><br />
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<br /></div>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-24862139331923819432010-12-25T00:38:00.003+00:002010-12-25T03:19:20.454+00:00Praeter rerum seriemWishing everyone a joyful Christmas!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyepNp8kPZ1NgvYtTsoKdE3GSG9ZGlRp2y-VwCVF7hR0T1Hh-uh-jcZtzylVs87VFDGTufPRIn3nB6kiYhZHHhJamRcx_jzGCmbTezVcfXXLbugEUGBu8jvjq5BYAXvXWzwdRwJ5IzoNR6/s1600/Adoration+of+the+Shepherds2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyepNp8kPZ1NgvYtTsoKdE3GSG9ZGlRp2y-VwCVF7hR0T1Hh-uh-jcZtzylVs87VFDGTufPRIn3nB6kiYhZHHhJamRcx_jzGCmbTezVcfXXLbugEUGBu8jvjq5BYAXvXWzwdRwJ5IzoNR6/s640/Adoration+of+the+Shepherds2.jpg" width="558" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), <i>Adoration of the Shepherds</i><br />
Basilica dei SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice</td></tr>
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Praeter rerum seriem Beyond the order of things<br />
parit deum hominem the virgin mother gives birth<br />
virgo mater. to the man who is God.<br />
Nec vir tangit virginem Neither has man touched the virgin<br />
nec prolis originem nor is the father responsible<br />
novit pater for the origin of the child.<br />
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Virtus sancti spiritus The power of the Holy Spirit<br />
opus illud cœlitus has carried out<br />
operatur. this heavenly work.<br />
Initus et exitus The beginning and the end<br />
partus tui penitus of your pregnancy<br />
quis scrutatur? - who can begin to fathom it?<br />
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Dei providentia God's providence<br />
quæ disponit omnia which disposes everything<br />
tam suave so sweetly<br />
tua puerperia elevates your childbirth<br />
transfer in mysteria. to a mystery.<br />
Mater ave. Our Mother hail!<br />
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Josquin Desprez (c.1450-1521), <i>Praeter rerum seriem</i> performed in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome by The Gabrieli Consort conducted by Paul McCreesh (from the DVD <i>Christmas in Rome</i>):<br />
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"Beyond the order of things" begins the text of a thirteenth-century Sequence about the mystery of the Incarnation; richly deep in the sonic depths begins Josquin Desprez's setting of the same text, <i>Praeter rerum seriem</i>. First printed in 1519, but probably composed earlier, this six-voiced Christmas motet presents an extremely tight series of imitative motifs around the central chant melody; the chant itself passes back and forth between Superius and Tenor voices in often near-canonic relationship. For much of the motet, Josquin counterpoises textural groups: the three lowest voices heard at the opening are placed in an antiphonal relationship with the upper three voices (when the melody is in the Superius), and both are juxtaposed with the full six-voiced sonority. Though all the voices are in fact freely composed, pairs throughout imitate one another so intimately that an illusion of canon obtains.<br />
<br />
<iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=viewfro04-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B000UA2P80&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>Following the common form of the late mediaeval Sequence, successive strophes of text, in pairs, take the same melody. Josquin's setting observes this underlying structure, but also imposes its own trajectory. The first two strophes comprise the first part of the motet, with the <i>cantus firmus</i> of the second strophe (from <i>nec vir tangit</i>) at double the speed, a vestige of the traditions of Isorhythm. Over the course of the second part of the motet, the rhythmic pace accelerates (to duple time, and then to a fast triple time symbolically referencing the Trinity), and the textural boundaries between voices blur themselves. Just before the final strophe of text, at the phrase <i>omnia tam suave</i>, hemiola syncopations blunt the edge of the jaunty triple-time, and the entire piece seems to revert to its opening sense of awe for the prayerful close.<br />
(from All Music Guide)<br />
<br />
Paolo Veronese: Paintings in the <a href="http://www.wga.hu/html/v/veronese/02b/index.html">Chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary</a>, SS Giovanni e Paolo, Venice<br />
Christmas in Rome DVD d/l <a href="http://avaxhome.ws/music/music_video/concerts/christmas_rome.html">link</a><br />
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<br /></div>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-80929645856406320372010-12-24T02:24:00.000+00:002010-12-24T02:24:14.895+00:00The Doge's Palace and its Treasures<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf1uwklERrtPlJDs1FuobO3tUMroZbuBdiqI0brfXvjfw_pNu4RFEYgzEssvykcnvLxQ24e0UcqqnFiKj05WZkFBvXmU1B94Jsztt_aO9qVHb4W0_VKsFYK0Y_fXk2R7ge_9X0KPJ3bgy-/s1600/The+Lion+of+St+Mark.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf1uwklERrtPlJDs1FuobO3tUMroZbuBdiqI0brfXvjfw_pNu4RFEYgzEssvykcnvLxQ24e0UcqqnFiKj05WZkFBvXmU1B94Jsztt_aO9qVHb4W0_VKsFYK0Y_fXk2R7ge_9X0KPJ3bgy-/s580/The+Lion+of+St+Mark.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vittore Carpaccio (1465-1526), <i>The Lion of St Mark</i><br />
Palazzo Ducale, Venice</td></tr>
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No place in Venice can boast such a marvelous heritage as the Doge’s Palace, the political heart of the Venetian Republic for centuries. A masterpiece of Gothic and Renaissance architecture, it was built on the foundations of fortified buildings dating back to the origins of the city (V-VI century AD). The present area of San Marco was actually chosen as one of the three main strategic points of the Byzantine empire. It underwent many transformations in the course of the centuries and performed at least four fundamental functions: it was the seat of the Venetian government, the Palace of Justice, the Doge’s Residence and the Prison. Thus it was a centralised political and administrative complex intended to be not simply a functional building but also and especially the expression of the richness and supremacy of the city.<br />
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The Doge's Palace: official video by Venice Civic Museums (apologies for the wholly inappropriate music):<br />
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The first part of the Palace to be completed in its present form was the south wing, which faces the Lagoon. This wing, initially separate from the other two buildings, was conceived in the 1340s. On the first floor it contains one enormous room, one of the largest ever built in Europe: the Great Council Hall. With its impressive size (the room is 53m long, 25m wide and 14m high) the Great Council Hall is probably one of best examples of the engineering skills of the Venetians.<br />
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The Great Council was the main city assembly and was composed of all Venetian noblemen from 25 years upwards, so its membership could be up to two thousand! During these meetings the patrician class proposed and discussed new laws and appointed the members of all the other offices of State. The present decoration of the Great Council Hall is an astonishing collection of paintings which celebrate the greatness of Venetian history, the virtues of its government and its divine protection. Among the many Veroneses, Bassanos and Tintorettos, one is struck by what is possibly one of the largest oil paintings on canvas ever realised: the <i>Paradise </i>by Jacopo and Domenico Tintoretto. In the centre at the top can be seen Christ crowning the Virgin, while more than 500 angels, saints, evangelists, prophets and common people are present all around for the occasion. The picture is full of Tintoretto’s distinctive mystical light.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2C9sRZrRSQ63jXPsfPKOSDdrqWgRQkg_biOBsJoN7U0LyF7bkRUfXFkazfHiRRhqGUrFttNNifn7ThGK9qOH0uv_CyZBEvK9yYu9Ia22HyQh3kSI95tLRKbQ-jI7AfwusmAm0p51x2wTg/s1600/Paradise.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2C9sRZrRSQ63jXPsfPKOSDdrqWgRQkg_biOBsJoN7U0LyF7bkRUfXFkazfHiRRhqGUrFttNNifn7ThGK9qOH0uv_CyZBEvK9yYu9Ia22HyQh3kSI95tLRKbQ-jI7AfwusmAm0p51x2wTg/s640/Paradise.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jacopo Tintoretto and Workshop, <i>Paradise</i><br />Palazzo Ducale, Venice</td></tr>
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The second part of the Doge’s Palace to be built, almost a century after the first, is the wing facing the <i>Piazzetta</i>, opposite the <i>Biblioteca Marciana</i>. Erected as a Palace of Justice under Doge Francesco Foscari, it is not always opened to the public. Although it was constructed in the first half of the XV century, in order to guarantee uniformity it was built in the Gothic style. Its façade, like the one overlooking the lagoon, is decorated with multi-coloured-brick lozenges in the upper part and with loggias down below. The wonderful Gothic loggias are decorated in an elegant quatrefoil pattern. The Paper Doorway, between the Palace of Justice and the Basilica, was one of the two main entrances of the building. A masterpiece by Bartolomeo Bon, it is embellished with several statues: note the one of Doge Francesco Foscari kneeling before the Lion of St Mark. This is a copy dating from the XIX century, since the original sculptures were destroyed at the end of the XVIII century, when the city was invaded by Napoleon.<br />
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Last but not least, the Renaissance wing houses the Doge’s Apartments and some important political rooms. As regards the former, one should bear in mind that the Doge’s Palace was not a monarchical residence, but rather a civic structure intended for the government of the city. The Doge, from at least the year 1000, had no great power and was obliged to live in the same building as the government.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6wILNX3BuDfv_YI8LCQN5ibHsjdycNTYUeLf-XNwsSPVRa29vF7c_FkztGK8ziyCAqWOKNP2EnWHro_s0lophU_3Q1m1XL-leVpZpBYPincfjA60coaw_OZZ5dk3mTaYuBeMQSimQpSHh/s1600/The+Rape+of+Europa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="475" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6wILNX3BuDfv_YI8LCQN5ibHsjdycNTYUeLf-XNwsSPVRa29vF7c_FkztGK8ziyCAqWOKNP2EnWHro_s0lophU_3Q1m1XL-leVpZpBYPincfjA60coaw_OZZ5dk3mTaYuBeMQSimQpSHh/s640/The+Rape+of+Europa.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), <i>The Rape of Europa</i><br />Palazzo Ducale, Venice</td></tr>
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The Doge, once elected (remember Venice was a Republic), had to move to these apartments with the rest of his family and had to remain there until he died. With the unique role of representing the State, the Doge had practically no private life. The rooms of his apartments, some in Baroque style and others in Rococo, are a magnificent testament of the richness of the Republic. On the third floor, visitors can admire some of the halls where the <i>Collegio</i>, the Senate and the Council of Ten met. None of the paintings here has a merely decorative function, each single element was conceived as part of an intricate political allegory aiming at the glorification of the city. The ceiling of the Room of the <i>Collegio</i>, for instance, is a priceless work by Paolo Veronese describing the features of the good government of Venice.<br />
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In the Renaissance wing the two ceremonial staircases cannot be missed. The first one is the so called Giants’ Stairway in the courtyard, at the top of which two enormous statues stand for the security of the Palace: Mars and Neptune, wonderful works by Jacopo Sansovino. These two symbols stand for the <i>Stato da Terra</i> and <i>Stato da Mar</i>, the power that Venice had on land and on sea. The second staircase has a spectacular gilded, stuccoed and frescoed vault and was therefore named the Golden Staircase. Here also one finds a large number of allegories and symbols praising the richness, the magnificence and the uniqueness of Venice.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFneBZo5mm1CZEPBJ3tAu7WT_g4xA2kzZn424ccw9al2ZpzzADaSPY3v43pnbliViVgJTHIsxBVnWuA0vtIC-wv6Ls01S5awejYhd0d00OFHaAKaQdpJI8wa-0Tj4mO_H2lbLav25-SLzx/s1600/Neptune+Offering+Gifts+to+Venice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFneBZo5mm1CZEPBJ3tAu7WT_g4xA2kzZn424ccw9al2ZpzzADaSPY3v43pnbliViVgJTHIsxBVnWuA0vtIC-wv6Ls01S5awejYhd0d00OFHaAKaQdpJI8wa-0Tj4mO_H2lbLav25-SLzx/s640/Neptune+Offering+Gifts+to+Venice.jpg" width="580" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), <i>Neptune offering gifts to Venice</i><br />Palazzo Ducale, Venice</td></tr>
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At the end of the tour, visitors pass across the famous Bridge of Sighs and into the New Prisons. The old prisons, called the Leads, which are still visible in the Doge’s Palace, were hellish, and the insufferable conditions led to the death of many prisoners. This is why in the 1580s new prisons were opened, in another building adjacent to the Doge’s Palace but seperated from it by a canal. Very modern at that time, the New Prisons still conserve some original carvings and graffiti left by the prisoners.<br />
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In conclusion the Doge’s Palace, not by chance the most visited museum in the city, is probably one of the most representative monuments in Venice. Full of charm, it contains not only great masterpieces but also evidence of the greatness of Venetian history.<br />
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Doge's Palace <a href="http://www.museiciviciveneziani.it/frame.asp?musid=8&sezione=musei">official website</a><br />
Web Gallery of Art: <a href="http://www.wga.hu/html/t/tintoret/4a/index.html">Tintoretto paintings</a> in the Doge's Palace<br />
<div>
Web Gallery of Art: <a href="http://www.wga.hu/html/v/veronese/08/index.html">Veronese paintings</a> in the Doge's Palace<br />
Doge's Palace: 15 high quality fullscreen interactive <a href="http://venice.arounder.com/it/palazzi-storici/palazzo-ducale">panoramas</a> (marvellous! highly recommended!)<br />
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'<i>I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord</i>' - (from Psalm 118) - note left by Giacomo Casanova for his captors on his escape from the Leads.</div>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-87811438283859000572010-12-23T01:01:00.000+00:002010-12-23T01:01:16.945+00:00Christen ätzet diesen Tag BWV63<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSd9fBBi1QkE-yVRjcoD_nwGYiOr2jBpdBiduDmxfdng1wkfVXbvxe_aBEX1b_1IEPQh9ejwjATpc1Vxcfxzf8KHPztve_oVT9jAmYcTz-PBI-_btj4Dcj5syOdkdO7FslXDBLAb18R5cy/s1600/gardiner+rehearsal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSd9fBBi1QkE-yVRjcoD_nwGYiOr2jBpdBiduDmxfdng1wkfVXbvxe_aBEX1b_1IEPQh9ejwjATpc1Vxcfxzf8KHPztve_oVT9jAmYcTz-PBI-_btj4Dcj5syOdkdO7FslXDBLAb18R5cy/s320/gardiner+rehearsal.jpg" width="212" /></a>Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750)<br />
<b>Christen, ätzet diesen tag</b> BWV 63, in rehearsal<br />
Arthaus DVD Release date: June 2002<br />
Running time: 101'<br />
<br />
Ann Monoyios, soprano<br />
Sara Mingardo, alto<br />
Rufus Müller, tenor<br />
Stephan Loges, bass<br />
Monteverdi Choir<br />
<b>English Baroque Soloists</b><br />
conducted by John Eliot Gardiner<br />
<br />
Amazon.co.uk review:<br />
The <i>In Rehearsal</i> series continues to offer fascinating insights into the technique of conducting with this film about John Eliot Gardiner rehearsing Bach's Cantata <i>Christen, ätzet diesen Tag</i> BWV63. The <iframe align="left" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=viewfro04-20&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=B00005UQ8K&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr" style="align: left; height: 245px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 5px; width: 131px;"></iframe>venue is EMI's Abbey Road Studios, so there are the obligatory hackneyed shots of that zebra crossing at the beginning, but there's nothing else hackneyed about the rest of this engrossing film. The devil is in the detail: what Gardiner says about Bach and period performance (enlightening though it is) is less interesting than the way he says it. After one rousing chorus, for example, he leaves everyone breathless in silence while he digs some dirt from his fingernails before giving them a cool "Well done". A mild contretemps with the first trumpet leads to an interview in which the brass player nervously and darkly hints at even greater conflict under the surface of the rehearsal. It's remarkable to hear the sublime music-making that results despite, or perhaps because of, the tension: Gardiner continually urges the musicians to swing the beat and feel the pulse as if it were a dance, and they do.<br />
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=E4AE1F3C345E8CF5&playnext=1&v=Xda83IjsqAE">Watch this DVD on YouTube</a><br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
The final chorus <i>Höchster schau in gnaden an:</i><br />
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The cantata <i>Christen ätzet diesen Tag</i> BWV 63, was heard on Christmas Day in the year 1723 in Leipzig; but in fact Bach had written it a decade earlier, in Weimar. Several features in this work point to an earlier date of composition, such as the absence of chorales and the <i>da capo</i> form of the framing choruses. But even in this comparatively early work many aspects of Bach's mature style can be recognised; the tendency towards symmetrical arrangement of the movements (chorus-recitative-aria-recitative-aria-recitative-chorus), the efforts to animate this symmetry through detailed contrasts,and most of all the art of vividly conveying the meaning of the text. Even in his later cantatas Bach hardly achieved a more expressive recitative than the one that follows the opening chorus here: <i>O sel'ger Tag</i>!<br />
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BWV63 <a href="http://www.jsbachcantatas.com/documents/chapter-30-bwv-63.htm">Listener and student guide</a> by Julian Mincham<br />
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Johann Sebastian Bach<br />
<b>Leipzig Christmas Cantatas:</b><br />
Gelobet seist su, Jesu Christ BWV 91<br />
Christum wir sollen loben schon BWV 121<br />
Ich freue mich in dir BWV 133<br />
Christen, ätzet diesen Tag BWV 63<br />
Magnificat BWV 243a<br />
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Total playing time: 117:09<br />
Released 2003<br />
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Dorothee Blotzky-Mields: <i>soprano; </i>Carolyn Sampson: <i>soprano; </i>Ingeborg Danz: <i>alto; </i>Mark Padmore: <i>tenor; </i>Peter Kooy: <i>bass; </i>Sebastian Noack: <i>bass; </i>Collegium Vocale Gent conducted by Philippe Herreweghe; <a href="http://aliomodo.blogspot.com/2009/12/bach-leipziger-weihnachtskantaten.html">d/l links</a><br />
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<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-14869694962612582352010-12-22T00:38:00.000+00:002010-12-22T00:38:23.661+00:00Caldara - Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg76wW_W8gC_TVLxWc2m_romGyyqTxqB0Es0WkAbDke47zJIC5YvcsRdVPriNRnAAxtS-3xcl54lxjYzcNjUb5ONu1zyhgHPixlJnrGVcg0Bt4rGPtDmIuwEKZZNO7RyEK0OhlMCV1uicV-/s1600/caldara1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg76wW_W8gC_TVLxWc2m_romGyyqTxqB0Es0WkAbDke47zJIC5YvcsRdVPriNRnAAxtS-3xcl54lxjYzcNjUb5ONu1zyhgHPixlJnrGVcg0Bt4rGPtDmIuwEKZZNO7RyEK0OhlMCV1uicV-/s400/caldara1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Antonio Caldara</td></tr>
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Antonio Caldara (1670 - 1736)<br />
<b>Maddalena ai Piedi di Cristo</b><br />
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<i>Maddalena</i>: Hana Blažíková, soprano<br />
<i>Marta</i>: Heidi Maria Taubert, soprano<br />
<i>Amor Terreno</i>: Markéta Cukrová, alto<br />
<i>Amor Celeste</i>: David Erler, countertenor<br />
<i>Cristo</i>: Tomáš Korínek, tenor<br />
<i>Fariseo</i>: Roman Janál, baritone<br />
<b>Collegium Marianum</b><br />
Conducted by François Fernandez<br />
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The oratorio as a musical form emerged toward the end of the seventeenth century as a kind of "spiritual exercise" encouraged by the <i>Congregazione dell'Oratorio</i> in Rome. The performances took place in oratories (prayer halls) constructed above church naves and were intended to be attractive but edifying entertainments. Then as later, oratorios generally reflected the popular forms and styles of secular music – and in late Renaissance and Baroque Italy, this meant opera, though based on religious rather than mythological and heroic themes. The most prolific composer in this genre was Antonio Caldara (c1670-1736); New Grove lists 43 oratorios (in addition to many operas) and there are probably more that have been lost, written for patrons in his native Venice, Rome, Florence, Mantua, and Vienna.</div>
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<i>Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo</i> (Magdalene at the Feet of Christ) was probably written around 1700 in Rome. The tight and cohesive libretto by Lodovici Forni (also used by Bononcini in 1690) is based on Luke 7:36-50, with the addition of Martha from John 11:1-2 and 12:1-4. For dramatic purposes, Forni introduced the figures of Celestial and Earthly Love (representing good and evil) in combat for the soul of Maddalena, whose irresolution and anguish – not reflected in the spare Biblical narrative – are movingly depicted.</div>
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The music is conventional for its time. All arias are in <i>da capo</i> form, some small-scale and intimate and scored for <i>continuo </i>only, others expanded and using larger orchestral forces, more flamboyant and operatic in nature. There are only three concerted arias, all duets for Earthly and Celestial Love, and relationships among the characters are explored only in the recitatives, with the arias reflecting a variety of moods and emotions. The instrumental writing is consistently imaginative and expressive, and many of the arias, especially those of Maddalena in the course of her renunciation of worldly pleasures in favour of Jesus, are full of feeling and exceptionally beautiful. Handel probably met Caldara in Rome, and may well have learned something from him; at any rate, the comparison is not at all in Caldara's disfavour.</div>
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[from Classical.net]</div>
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Maddalena ai piedi di Cristo <a href="http://www.andreasschollsociety.org/Maddalena_Libretto.htm">libretto</a> courtesy of the Andreas Scholl Society.<br />
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Caldara was born in Venice (exact date unknown), the son of a violinist. He became a chorister at St Mark's in Venice, where he learned several instruments, probably under the instruction of Giovanni Legrenzi. In 1699 he relocated to Mantua, where he became <i>maestro di cappella</i> to the inept Charles IV, Duke of Mantua, a pensionary of France with a French wife, who took the French side in the War of the Spanish Succession. Caldara left Mantua in 1707, after the French were expelled from Italy, and moved to Barcelona as chamber composer to Charles VI of Austria, the pretender to the Spanish throne, who kept a royal court at Barcelona. There, he wrote some operas that were the first Italian operas to be performed in Spain. He moved on to Rome, becoming <i>maestro di cappella</i> to Francesco Maria Marescotti Ruspoli, 1st Prince of Cerveteri. In 1716 he obtained a similar post at the Imperial Court in Vienna, and there he remained until his death.<br />
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</div>Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-34156451843719777832010-12-21T14:52:00.001+00:002010-12-28T13:21:24.907+00:00Tivoli - Variations on an 18th Century Landscape<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXeQvzQ1bbYt8VLpVMlySbLj8lpHTCYFE4W86kujAi4OQXGCBgvZa_Fkc6_M4OSSNRvfz_raUuuHNFUgpj8taXsIgh3LXgl_EtB0FfSWd4_Rtqo3blLWEHmBNBX9i_zbXHf8jyKXz7Hrvc/s1600/Joseph+Vernet+-+The+Waterfall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXeQvzQ1bbYt8VLpVMlySbLj8lpHTCYFE4W86kujAi4OQXGCBgvZa_Fkc6_M4OSSNRvfz_raUuuHNFUgpj8taXsIgh3LXgl_EtB0FfSWd4_Rtqo3blLWEHmBNBX9i_zbXHf8jyKXz7Hrvc/s400/Joseph+Vernet+-+The+Waterfall.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), <i>The Falls at Tivoli</i><br />
Petit Palais, Paris</td></tr>
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<b>Tivoli: Variations on a landscape in the 18th century</b><br />
Musée Cognac-Jay, Paris<br />
18th November 2010 - 20th February 2011<br />
Curator: José de Los Llanos, Director of the Cognac-Jay Museum<br />
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The exhibition <i>Tivoli: Variations on a landscape in the eighteenth century</i> offers an original reflection on the evolution of landscape painting from 1720 to 1830 through a particular subject: the site of Tivoli and its famous Temple of the Sibyl.<br />
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A location famous since antiquity, Tibur (the Latin name for Tivoli) was made fashionable by the Emperor Augustus and Maecenas, the lavish patron of the arts, and celebrated by the poets Catullus and Horace (first century BC). The Albunean Sibyl practised her divination here.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1sDj1OWlfgOU4PfgEWRgIRvnp4qsD4cX7ChVD74m7Yci-JPZ-L0wqQy4dXetteMlxLmG4IxVKgMvNVFN2weIvEtXcT_qVFzpcXc0H85x3T1XWmxZP18e1uwfRrJdnX-8IybuCnQLVllrE/s1600/van+Nieulandt+Temple+of+the+Sibyl+at+Tivoli.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1sDj1OWlfgOU4PfgEWRgIRvnp4qsD4cX7ChVD74m7Yci-JPZ-L0wqQy4dXetteMlxLmG4IxVKgMvNVFN2weIvEtXcT_qVFzpcXc0H85x3T1XWmxZP18e1uwfRrJdnX-8IybuCnQLVllrE/s400/van+Nieulandt+Temple+of+the+Sibyl+at+Tivoli.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">attributed to Willem van Nieulandt (1584-1635)<br />
<i>The Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli</i><br />
Musée Benoît-de-Puydt, Bailleul</td></tr>
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The site was exceptional: built in the foothills of the Apennines, about thirty miles east of Rome, Tivoli was a settlement on a mountainside overlooking the plain which stretches away to the sea . A river, the Aniene, cascaded through it in multiple waterfalls. A small acropolis stood on its precipice, containing the ruins of two temples, one square and one round. The latter especially became famous as the temple of the Sibyl or Vesta.<br />
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Introduction to the exhibition by José de Los Llanos, Director of the Cognac-Jay Museum (in French):<br />
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In the eighteenth century, Tivoli and its temple gradually became one of the most represented subjects in the history of painting, particularly in French painting. The architectural perfection of its monuments, its location in the heart of a sublime and terrifying landscape, the incomparable richness of its history and legends, made it a subject revered by artists and collectors. It was also at this time that the temple of Tivoli was surrounded by workshops built in the gardens.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH_aa2-LD0jRJZjz80q0DL3hlSUrSoVG559sH9Ew0nqpJ9XYBavkSX5bhaqzCnxGVpCvmdh40Rx-DLjZ-bD31bkcm9JArmLwURCeiDBmhRI3hGzY4nhm9Ym2kYeg8fzBjERKCLlzVqMmUJ/s1600/Piranesi+View+of+the+Temple+of+the+Sibyl+at+Tivoli.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH_aa2-LD0jRJZjz80q0DL3hlSUrSoVG559sH9Ew0nqpJ9XYBavkSX5bhaqzCnxGVpCvmdh40Rx-DLjZ-bD31bkcm9JArmLwURCeiDBmhRI3hGzY4nhm9Ym2kYeg8fzBjERKCLlzVqMmUJ/s400/Piranesi+View+of+the+Temple+of+the+Sibyl+at+Tivoli.jpg" width="277" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)<br />
<i>View of the Temple of the Sybil at Tivoli</i></td></tr>
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In fifty works: paintings, drawings and engravings, the exhibition aims to compare the views of the greatest artists of the time of this motif: a brief introduction explains the origin of its success in the early seventeenth century, around the works of Paul Bril and Gaspard Dughet. In the eighteenth century, Vanvitelli, Boucher, Vernet, Hubert Robert, Piranesi ... all take up the same subject. Then Valenciennes, Simon Denis and Granet, who were the French forerunners of modern landscape painting.<br />
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Capriccios, poetic variations, outdoor studies, composed or more spontaneous, the works presented pose in contradictory ways the question of the subject in landscape painting. Most intriguing is without doubt the question of why the same subject interested artists from traditional to modern over such a long period,.<br />
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The exhibition is accompanied by a colour catalogue published by Paris Musées. In addition to detailed entries on each work, there are essays by various authors on the site of Tivoli, its significance for art history, the stories of tourists, and the importance of artists particularly associated with Tivoli (Joseph Vernet, Hubert Robert).<br />
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Such as it can be seen today, the Villa Gregoriana, the name given (after Pope Gregory XVI) to the entire site from the 19th century onwards, is vastly different to what can be seen in these works. In 1826, when rockfalls from the escarpment were thought to be endangering the temple, the popes Leo XII then Gregory XVI diverted the river, the waterfalls no longer falling at the foot of the buildings but much further away. At the end of the century, the temple of Tiburnus, which had been converted into a church in the Middle Ages, was demolished.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgilvAbNUaQqyGtgLoo5nB3Or_ksGcO_42-3actYlkqJ9o-ArzWmCkoM7anOt0YqpO6G1XKa4Hn1kcncC_MPQOMYMiC5qm7urUHD9xXhO9OXGwnKkZLpmg0txqhj8WWZ2uSQnABRfBiZmax/s1600/Vernet+View+of+Tivoli.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgilvAbNUaQqyGtgLoo5nB3Or_ksGcO_42-3actYlkqJ9o-ArzWmCkoM7anOt0YqpO6G1XKa4Hn1kcncC_MPQOMYMiC5qm7urUHD9xXhO9OXGwnKkZLpmg0txqhj8WWZ2uSQnABRfBiZmax/s400/Vernet+View+of+Tivoli.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714-1789), <i>View of Tivoli</i><br />
Private collection</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs8MQZzKyzxEvbDRFET8Dhj0onctzEvXHxY8RatUN-fuR4vk9eS55UDcYVGvPxt4iyhyphenhyphenfBos4M8x14goaPJWg_AKV2yfiE8k-ZWeralu38e1htGV-8s8bTeP3vd44KjeZjUnV6pTTQk2uQ/s1600/A+Scene+in+the+Grounds+of+the+Villa+Farnese%252C+Rome.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjs8MQZzKyzxEvbDRFET8Dhj0onctzEvXHxY8RatUN-fuR4vk9eS55UDcYVGvPxt4iyhyphenhyphenfBos4M8x14goaPJWg_AKV2yfiE8k-ZWeralu38e1htGV-8s8bTeP3vd44KjeZjUnV6pTTQk2uQ/s400/A+Scene+in+the+Grounds+of+the+Villa+Farnese%252C+Rome.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hubert Robert (1733-1808), <i>A scene in the grounds of the Villa Farnese, Rome</i><br />
Private collection</td></tr>
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<b>Extracts from <i>The Salon of 1767</i> by Denis Diderot:</b><br />
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<b>The Poetry of Ruins</b><br />
Oh what beautiful and sublime ruins! How solid yet at the same time what lightness, sureness, ease of brushstroke! What effect! What grandeur! What noblesse! Someone should tell me to whom these ruins belong, so that I can steal them away; the only way one can acquire when one is poor. Alas!<br />
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They probably only provide for a small amount of happiness to the stupid rich who own them; and they would provide me with such happiness! Oh what an indolent owner and blind husband. What ills do I do to you when I covet charms that you either ignore or neglect! With what astonishment and surprise I see the broken vault, debris superimposed onto the vault. The persons who erected this monument, where are they? What has happened to them? Into which great dark silent pit will my eye wander? To what enormous distance does that part of the sky go that I can see through the opening! The astonishing graduations of light! One does not become weary from looking. Time stops for he who admires. How little I have<br />
lived! What a short time my youth has lasted!<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS4faNe4jxJ0ch-LokM57jHpv8lI58RBkSFp2ZbWI3b0pFQ5DSrZA0s7OEKC0oQvoLg2rSqi90zn14I7lEu7XmUlC3VNaJdNCg7CiRE5CJ8LSy_WmoXXfoSgHqqXPxnc7Ar7l8w-vyRlKV/s1600/View+of+Ripetta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="327" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS4faNe4jxJ0ch-LokM57jHpv8lI58RBkSFp2ZbWI3b0pFQ5DSrZA0s7OEKC0oQvoLg2rSqi90zn14I7lEu7XmUlC3VNaJdNCg7CiRE5CJ8LSy_WmoXXfoSgHqqXPxnc7Ar7l8w-vyRlKV/s400/View+of+Ripetta.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hubert Robert, <i>View of Ripetta</i><br />
Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris</td></tr>
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It is a great vaulted gallery given onto the interior by a colonnade which goes from right to left. Towards the middle of its length, the vault has been broken and reveals above its fracture the remains of a superimposed building. This long and vast factory still receives light from its opening at the back. To the left, outdoors, a fountain; above this fountain, an antique seated statue, underneath the pedestal of this statue there is a raised basin on an earth foundation; around this basin, in front of the gallery, in the space between the columns, there is a crowd of small figures, in small groups, small diverse scenes. Some are taking water, some are resting, some are strolling, and there is conversation. There is movement and noise. Furthermore, I will give you my opinion, Monsieur Robert; in a moment. You are a talented man. You will excel, in fact you excel in your genre. But study Vernet. Learn from him how to draw, to paint, to make your figures interesting; and since you are devoted to painting ruins, be aware that this genre has its poetry. You have absolutely ignored it. Seek it out. You have the know-how but the ideal escapes you. Do you not have the feeling that there are too many figures here? You should eliminate at least three-quarters. You should only keep those which will add to the solitude and silence. A man alone, who would have wandered into these shadows, his arms folded across his chest with his head bent forward, would have had a greater impact on me. The darkness alone, the majesty of the building, the grandeur of the factory, the vastness, the peacefulness, and the resounding silence would have caused me to tremble. I could never have stopped myself from dreaming underneath this vault, to sit between the columns, and to enter into your painting. However there are too many nuisances. I stop. I look. I admire and I continue. Monsieur Robert, you still do not understand why ruins provide so much pleasure, independently of the variety of accidents that they bring to light; I am going to tell you what immediately comes to mind.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCkdoD-dRr8cR3Rxbd4WJapD4ojwkIMXvNIJVsJ3TuLttKWzwlqU0FMTE3uE4qXXm_Bauwz_NqV-sH3bucf63BiWGKiwZUi_NZz9_qzyD-f1n2Z0_WZN9YD_j4kIX6yyCKVh1Vj3GOYVEV/s1600/Le+petit+parc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCkdoD-dRr8cR3Rxbd4WJapD4ojwkIMXvNIJVsJ3TuLttKWzwlqU0FMTE3uE4qXXm_Bauwz_NqV-sH3bucf63BiWGKiwZUi_NZz9_qzyD-f1n2Z0_WZN9YD_j4kIX6yyCKVh1Vj3GOYVEV/s400/Le+petit+parc.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), <i>The Gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli</i><br />
Wallace Collection, London</td></tr>
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The ideas that ruins awake in me are important. Everything is obliterated, all perishes, all passes. There is nothing but the world that remains. Time, is all that remains. How old is earth is! I move between two eternities. No matter where my eyes fall, the objects that surround me speak of an end and resign me to the one that awaits me. How can my transient existence be of comparison to this boulder that is collapsing, or this small valley that is being dug out, or this tottering forest, or of this weakened mass suspended above my head? I can see the marble tombstones disintegrate into dust; and I do not wish to die! I envy the weak tissue of flesh and bones rather than a general law for the pouring of a bronze! A torrent is dragging one nation over another to the depths of a common abyss; I pretend all alone to stop on the edge and cleave the waters that rush by my sides.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgabLb6yxzMk9OXRdaiOYLunezDiNjgWdgx_jLDCYPuuSK4DPaySWaHzkC9AE1qb09NakBgTDBDS-N0_CegbAj1K5bTFxYj73TXGB2Y2OaQfiKOwZn1eDvFWyiiRQ4Ayr1i-TMzYSTKLlwJ/s1600/The+Waterfall+atTivoli.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgabLb6yxzMk9OXRdaiOYLunezDiNjgWdgx_jLDCYPuuSK4DPaySWaHzkC9AE1qb09NakBgTDBDS-N0_CegbAj1K5bTFxYj73TXGB2Y2OaQfiKOwZn1eDvFWyiiRQ4Ayr1i-TMzYSTKLlwJ/s400/The+Waterfall+atTivoli.jpg" width="322" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean-Honoré Fragonard, <i>The Great Waterfall at Tivoli</i><br />
Musée du Louvre, Paris</td></tr>
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<b>The Qualities of a Landscape Artist</b><br />
Mr. Juliart, you think that all it takes to be a landscape artist is to throw a few trees here and there, terrace the land, put up a mountain, show some streaming water which is blocked by some boulders, extend a field as far as the eye can see, light it up with the sun and the moon, draw a pasture and place some animals within the pasture? Do you not think that these trees should also be strongly felt; that there is a certain poetry in imagining them, according to the subject matter, lithesome and elegant, or broken and cracked, hanging, hideous; whereas here they are pressed together and dense, it is important that they be majestic and beautiful, as opposed to few and separate, air and light must circulate between their branches and trunks and that their layering should be warmly painted; that these waters, by imitating the limpidity of natural flowing, must show me as through a mirror, the almost image of the surrounding scene in which the light must tremble on their surface; and that they must foam and whiten when they encounter an obstacle; that one must know how to create this foam; provide the mountains an imposing view; to open them up by suspending the craggy summit above my head and dig caves, to strip them in one place and cover them with moss in another, prick its summit with bushes and practice poetic license, which through them reminds me of the ravages of time, the vagaries of things and the age of the world. The effect of your way of lighting must be striking, that the limited fields must, in their disintegration extend all the way to where the horizon melds with the sky and that the horizon plunges into a never ending distance?<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYtPCOe6hmuD-MBZal-qktPRPf4j-JUtqKfrm-OlBP6bUOOm6_5S51HEwd6PA3dkfqlulupr1Hl1_VXUwlDThjGs6mGEIYWEitqJdXXMhwjGrVtZnC3VxWKsu9NM5x5PJjHlf_3du7ZcJk/s1600/Vernet+Shepherd+in+a+Landscape.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYtPCOe6hmuD-MBZal-qktPRPf4j-JUtqKfrm-OlBP6bUOOm6_5S51HEwd6PA3dkfqlulupr1Hl1_VXUwlDThjGs6mGEIYWEitqJdXXMhwjGrVtZnC3VxWKsu9NM5x5PJjHlf_3du7ZcJk/s400/Vernet+Shepherd+in+a+Landscape.jpg" width="281" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claude-Joseph Vernet, <i>A Shepherd in the Alps</i><br />
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours</td></tr>
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Even a countryside which has its boundaries also have their magic, with solemn ruins, the factories should unravel a picturesque and lively imagination with interesting figures and real animals and that each of these things is nothing if the total is not enchanting, insofar as that it is made up of several locations here and there in nature if they do not offer a <i>romanesque </i>view as though it were the only one on earth. You haven’t figured out that a landscape is either flat or wonderful, where the intelligence of the light is not superior then the painting is bad; that a landscape with little colour and consequently of little effect is a very poor painting; that a landscape which says nothing to my soul, which is not in its finer points of overwhelming strength, a of surprising truthfulness is a very bad painting; that a landscape where the animals and the other figures are poorly done is a very bad painting, if the rest pushed to the highest degree of perfection cannot redeem these defects to which one must pay attention, to the light, the colour, the objects, the skies of the time of day, of the seasons,, that one must been expansive to paint skies, to fill the sky with clouds which are sometimes thick, sometimes light, to invade the atmosphere with fogs and so lose objects, to dye the totality with the sun’s light, to construct every manner of natural incidents, all possible field scenes, to bring about a storm, to inundate a field, to uproot trees, to display a cottage, the flock, the shepherd swept away by the waters; to imagine the scenes that evolve from this devastation, to show the losses, the dangers and the help in interesting and comforting ways.<br />
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See how Poussin is marvelous and touching, when next to a pastoral scene, he laughingly focuses my attention to a grave where I read: <i>Et in Arcadia ego</i>! Then see how serious he becomes when he shows me in another painting a woman coiled by a serpent who is pulling her down to the bottom of the water. If I were to ask you for a dawn, how would you go about it? As for myself, Monsieur Juliart, though it is not my business, I would show the gates of Thebes from a hillside view; in front of the gates there would be a statue of Memnon; surrounding the statue would be people from all walks of life attracted to the statue in order to satisfy their curiosity and feel its resonance with the first rays of the sun. Seated philosophers would be drawing astronomical figures in the sand; women and children would be laying and asleep, others would have their eyes fixed on the horizon at the sunrise; one might see in the distance those hastening their pace for fear of arriving too late.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD3iUxEnoPmVOCH5EHEXvwgOZWzF-6Oy-wwVeEcWcRW6XfWCX70X7cFRRSo6VnfuZgeSJHmurMwmwnawUx1y7L0xbN37FYq-palw4ZY2weIBAvQ7fwLIDsxewgmM6t6UhLLYUi_h5QRe4N/s1600/Vernet+Castel+Sant%2527angelo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiD3iUxEnoPmVOCH5EHEXvwgOZWzF-6Oy-wwVeEcWcRW6XfWCX70X7cFRRSo6VnfuZgeSJHmurMwmwnawUx1y7L0xbN37FYq-palw4ZY2weIBAvQ7fwLIDsxewgmM6t6UhLLYUi_h5QRe4N/s400/Vernet+Castel+Sant%2527angelo.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Claude-Joseph Vernet, <i>The Bridge and Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome</i><br />
Musée du Louvre, Paris</td></tr>
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This is how one might describe a moment in the day. If you should better enjoy simpler, common and less grandiose, send a woodsman into the forest; ambush the hunter, beat the bush for wild animals away from their lairs; beat them to the entrance to the forest that they are looking back to the fields from which the break of day is forcing them to return; lead the peasant with his horse load of provisions; cause the horse to stumble under its load, paint the peasant and his wife in an attempt to raise the animal. Brush into the scene anything that you wish. I haven’t spoken to you about, fruits, flowers or any rustic labours. I should never end. Presently, Monsieur Juliart, tell me if you are a landscapist.<br />
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Diderot: Essais sur la Peinture on Gallica<br />
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Denis Diderot On Art and Artists: An Anthology of Diderot's Aesthetic Thought<br />
<br />
Springer 2010 ISBN: 940070061X<br />
250 pages <a href="http://avaxhome.ws/ebooks/science_books/philosophy/940070061XDiderotThought.html">PDF</a> (4,2 MB)<br />
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<br />Seingalthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07033469145728918598noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4209231301984320799.post-54266695977044265542010-12-20T04:07:00.001+00:002010-12-20T04:26:27.204+00:00Lully's Bellérophon from Versailles<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Jean-Baptiste_Lully.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Jean-Baptiste_Lully.jpeg" width="336" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean-Baptiste Lully</td></tr>
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A performance from the Opéra Royal,Versailles<br />
17th December 2010<br />
filmed by Olivier Simmonet<br />
for ARTE Live Web<br />
Running time: 02:57:17<br />
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Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687)<br />
<b>Bellérophon</b><br />
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Robert Getchell - <i>Bacchus</i>, <i>La Pythie</i><br />
Evgeny Alexiev - <i>Pan</i>, <i>Jobate</i><br />
Jean Teitgen - <i>Apollon</i>, <i>Amisodar</i><br />
Cyril Auvity - <i>Bellérophon</i><br />
Céline Scheen - <i>Philonoé</i><br />
Ingrid Perruche - <i>Stenobée</i><br />
Jennifer Borghi - <i>Argie</i>, <i>Pallas</i><br />
Namur Chamber Choir<br />
director: Thibaut Lenaerts<br />
<b>Les Talens Lyriques</b><br />
conducted by Christophe Rousset<br />
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"One could say that all Paris was there, and never was there a more numerous nor more illustrious assembly. I hear from all sides the cry of 'miracle'. Each one agrees, M de Lully has outdone himself and this latest work is his masterpiece." This was the reception for the creation of <i>Bellérophon</i>, heroic tragedy in honour of the Sun King, on the 31st January, 1679. Regularly staged up until 1773, the work has since sunk into oblivion.
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The libretto of <i>Bellérophon </i>is a landmark in the history of French opera. The mix of comic and tragic genres, hitherto assiduously practiced by Quinault, is totally rejected. French lyric tragedy is liberated, and the increased importance given to the music itself is another feature of this work: for the first time ever, arias and recitatives accompanied by the full orchestra predominate. This method was taken up by the immediate successors of Lully (Colasse, Desmarest, Marais, Campra). In <i>Bellérophon</i>, Lully in places surpasses anything he had written up to then, especially in the second and third acts: the appearance of Pythia and the magic rites are treated in vast frescoes of sound, where the orchestra and the choir combine to create a particularly impressive monumental whole.
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<i>Bellerophon </i>was until now the only tragic opera by Lully not to have been performed since the revival of the French Baroque in the early 1980's: this happens now in 2010 under the baton of Christophe Rousset.
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