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March 26: Garza & Van Dyck
Pages 34-35 of the March 14 New Yorker present a piquant juxtaposition: Alicia Garza, labor organizer, today, and Mary, Lady Van Dyck, c.1640. How the world turns!
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March 19: Caravaggio v. Gentileschi
CARAVAGGIO V. GENTILESCHI The great Caravaggio (1571-1610) did many compelling paintings, but his tepid “Judith Beheading Holofernes” isn’t one of them. Holofernes is only melodramatically astonished, while Judith looks as if she’s performing some mildly distasteful task like combing out head lice, and even at that appears to be having second thoughts. Her maidservant stands…
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March 12: copying the Mona Lisa, sort of
COPYING THE MONA LISA, SORT OF And speaking of revisions to paintings, as in the Lady with a Unicorn last week, an interesting article by Suzanne Daley in the New York Times of April 13, 2012 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/14/world/europe/Not-Just-Another-Fake-Mona-Lisa.html ) demonstrates that the cleaned and restored copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Prado, shown here, reveals the…
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March 5: Lady with a Unicorn
LADY WITH A UNICORN Raphael’s “Lady with a Unicorn” is now on display at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. It was painted c. 1506, when he was about twenty-three. A promising young artist. The title is misleading, suggesting as it does that this is a two-character show. The painting is about the lady, and…