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URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: MARRIAGE (89%); WEDDINGS & ENGAGEMENTS (90%); CHRONOLOGIES (72%); SMUGGLING (60%); THANKSGIVING (70%); CHRISTMAS (70%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (60%); BUSINESS EDUCATION (65%); ACTORS & ACTRESSES (73%)
GEOGRAPHIC: PARIS, FRANCE (88%) ILLINOIS, USA (90%); SOUTHWEST CHINA (72%); XIZANG, CHINA (55%) UNITED STATES (90%); FRANCE (88%); CHINA (72%); TIBET (72%)
LOAD-DATE: February 2, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
CORRECTION-DATE: February 6, 2008

CORRECTION: The Shortcuts column in Business Day on Saturday, about elaborate marriage proposals, misspelled the residence of Elaine Pursey, a British woman whose husband proposed on the Wollman Rink in Central Park in Manhattan. She is from Berkshire, England -- not Barkshire (though it is pronounced BARK-shire in England).
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Richard Heyderman and Tara Pokotilow on the day he proposed marriage. Mr. Heyderman took an elaborate route to the special day.
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company



1116 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 2, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final


Berlusconi's Long Shadow Casts a Chill Over Italian Politics
BYLINE: By IAN FISHER and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO; Daniele Pinto contributed reporting.
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Foreign Desk; Pg. 3
LENGTH: 998 words
DATELINE: ROME
To Silvia Tomassini, owner of a boutique in Rome's ancient center, Silvio Berlusconi is ''arrogant.'' At 71, he's too old. He endlessly commits ''brutta figura,'' which loosely means that you can't take the man anywhere nice.

Yet when elections come again to Italy -- and they may soon -- Ms. Tomassini will vote for him. Indeed, polls show that nearly two years after he was voted out of the prime minister's office, Mr. Berlusconi would probably win it back. In Ms. Tomassini's case, she does not love him, but thinks he cares for working people. Besides, she hates the other side.

''He's not a person of class or culture,'' she said. ''But he's better than the center-left.''

When Mr. Berlusconi -- Italy's richest man, its media king and leader of the political center-right -- won elections in 2001, he promised something new: as an outsider and entrepreneur, he would bring action and hope to do-nothing politics.

Now, having lived through five years with Mr. Berlusconi as prime minister, Italians know pretty clearly what they would be getting. He is now less a promising novelty than one option among the few open to voters, polarizing Italians into nearly equal camps for and against him.

Those against him are appalled that, knowing what they do, Italians could even think of choosing him again, after the center-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi fell last week. The list of complaints is long, starting with his unconventional oratory (''I am the Jesus Christ of politics,'' Mr. Berlusconi said in 2006. ''I sacrifice myself for everyone.'') and ending, inevitably, with what critics say is his corruption.

''We've seen Berlusconi at work, and we've seen that above all he's got his own interests at heart, passing tailor-made laws to avoid trouble or get advantages,'' said Eugenio Scalfari, former editor in chief of La Repubblica, a liberal newspaper that has strongly opposed Mr. Berlusconi.

Mr. Scalfari cited, as an example, Mr. Berlusconi's acquittal this week on charges of false accounting in the sale of the state-owned SME food conglomerate. The court's decision was based on the fact that the charges were considered a lesser criminal offense under changes made to the legal code in 2002 by the Berlusconi government.

But supporters, if several degrees less fervent than years ago, point to what they say were real, if limited, accomplishments in his term. Economic growth may have been zero, but he lasted five years, a record in Italy and a new level of political stability.

''There's nobody else, and he's very popular,'' said Paolo Guzzanti, a journalist and senator in Mr. Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. ''Berlusconi is hated for the same reasons he is beloved: He is an outspoken man. He is still considered not a political person, even if he has been in politics since 1994. He is always unpredictable.''

But nearly 14 years after he served his first, brief term as prime minister, Mr. Berlusconi's well-financed machine is showing signs of wear. He had a pacemaker implanted after he collapsed in public in 2006. His dyed and ever-more-robust hair, his plastic surgery, his oddly reddish makeup -- all remain part of Italy's running national chuckle.

And his allies, never completely loyal, have scrambled back only reluctantly since Mr. Prodi's government fell.

Late last year one key member of the coalition, the suave and articulate Gianfranco Fini, head of the National Alliance Party, declared that he had broken forever with Mr. Berlusconi. It was, he said, ''a closed case.''

''He is a man with a very strict scale of moral values, and in first place are his own personal interests,'' Mr. Fini was quoted in La Repubblica as telling a friend.

(The history behind the split is typically complicated: Mr. Fini was reacting in part to a failed effort by Mr. Berlusconi in November to bring down Mr. Prodi's government. Also, one of Mr. Berlusconi's three television stations broadcast an embarrassing video of Mr. Fini's new girlfriend, a showgirl and lawyer, with a former lover.)

While Mr. Berlusconi and his allies lead in most opinion polls, his return to power is by no means assured. He will probably face the popular mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, who is media savvy and nearly 20 years younger than Mr. Berlusconi.

Some polls show the new Democratic Party, which Mr. Veltroni heads, not far behind Mr. Berlusconi and his allies.

Mr. Berlusconi must also convince the nation that he has its best interests at heart as he presses for holding elections before fixing an electoral law that is broadly considered, even by Mr. Berlusconi's allies, to produce unstable governments no matter which sides wins.

It was Mr. Berlusconi who passed the law before the 2006 election, and even he has conceded it should be changed. But he says forming a strong government quickly with the blessing of voters is more important -- though critics say he is again putting his own interests above those of the country.

Next week the Senate president, Franco Marini, will decide whether there is enough support in Parliament to form a temporary government aimed at changing the law or, as Mr. Berlusconi advocates, elections should be held as soon as possible.

In the end, many Italians say, the issue is not so much Mr. Berlusconi but a blocked system that leaves few choices. Emilio Giannelli, a popular political cartoonist who depicts Mr. Berlusconi as a cunning dwarf in platform shoes, said he cannot work up excitement to begin drawing him again.

''Even for political cartoonists, change is good because these eternal personalities bore even those who have to draw them,'' he said. ''We have been drawing Berlusconi for 18 years, and we're tired of it.''

Asked which Italian politician he might prefer to draw as prime minister, Mr. Giannelli, who is also 71, said: ''I want young people, new people, people with new ideas. I would happily go into retirement if I saw young and capable people in power.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ELECTIONS (90%); HEADS OF STATE & GOVERNMENT (90%); POLITICS (90%); ECONOMIC GROWTH (72%); RELIGION (63%); ACQUITTAL (60%); CRIMINAL OFFENSES (60%); POLLS & SURVEYS (57%); FOOD & BEVERAGE (50%); SETTLEMENTS & DECISIONS (50%); LITIGATION (50%); LAW COURTS & TRIBUNALS (50%); PRIME MINISTERS (90%)
PERSON: SILVIO BERLUSCONI (94%); ROMANO PRODI (54%)
GEOGRAPHIC: ITALY (94%)
LOAD-DATE: February 2, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Naples last week. His eagerness to return to power troubles many Italians.(PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIO LAPORTA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE -- GETTY IMAGES)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company



1117 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 2, 2008 Saturday

Late Edition - Final


Jens Quistgaard, 88, a Designer of Popular Tableware
BYLINE: By MARGALIT FOX
SECTION: Section A; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 17
LENGTH: 537 words
Jens Quistgaard, a celebrated Danish industrial designer whose clean-lined and immensely popular pieces for the Dansk brand of tableware helped define the Scandinavian Modern style for postwar Americans, died on Jan. 4 at his home in Vordingborg, Denmark. He was 88.

The death was confirmed by Paul Thonis, the design director for Dansk. News of Mr. Quistgaard's death was not made public outside Scandinavia until this week.

Today a division of the Lenox Group, Dansk was founded in 1954 by Ted Nierenberg, an American entrepreneur and engineer. Originally based in Great Neck, N.Y., the company quickly became known for making sophisticated European styles accessible to the average American consumer. Working from his studio in Copenhagen, Mr. Quistgaard designed for Dansk from its inception until the mid-1980s.

A largely self-taught craftsman, Mr. Quistgaard was known for his fluid lines and for using unusual materials, often in combination. His signature pieces included salad bowls and cutting boards of teak and other exotic woods, and elegant stainless-steel flatware that was an affordable alternative to sterling silver.

Mr. Quistgaard's bowls were often made from separate staves of wood arranged in a circle, much as barrels are built. This used less wood than turning the bowls on a lathe and gave them striking radial lines in the process.

He was also one of the first designers to rehabilitate enameled steel as a medium for cookware. For years enameled steel pots were considered lowbrow -- flimsy speckled things that were at home over a campfire but not in a bourgeois kitchen.

Seeking a pot that would be lighter and less expensive than cast iron, Mr. Quistgaard created the Kobenstyle line of steel cookware, which Dansk released in 1956. Sturdy, yet light and graceful, it was enameled in a range of vivid solid colors, including an intoxicating fire-engine red. As a sign that the pots were handsome enough to be put on the table, their lids, with distinctive flat cruciform handles, doubled as trivets.

Jens Harald Quistgaard was born in Denmark on April 23, 1919. His father, Harald, was a well-known sculptor who provided his son's only formal training. As a child, Jens cheerfully made his own toys from the scraps of wood his father brought home. For Christmas, the 14-year-old Jens requested, and received, a blacksmith forge and anvil.

As a young man, Mr. Quistgaard served an apprenticeship at Georg Jensen, the well-known Danish silversmiths. During World War II, he was a member of the Danish underground.

In 1954 Mr. Nierenberg was visiting Copenhagen, where he caught sight of hand-forged flatware by Mr. Quistgaard in a museum. It was made of stainless steel with teak handles, an unusual marriage of materials at the time. He sought out Mr. Quistgaard, persuaded him that his singular creations could be properly mass-produced, and Dansk was born.

Mr. Quistgaard's survivors include a son, Anders; a daughter, Jette; and several grandchildren. Information on other survivors could not be confirmed.

His work, which won many international awards, is in the permanent collections of major museums, among them the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Louvre.


URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SILVERWARE & HOLLOWARE MFG (89%); SCULPTURE (78%); CUTLERY & FLATWARE MFG (76%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (75%); APPRENTICESHIPS & INTERNSHIPS (74%); WORLD WAR II (50%)
GEOGRAPHIC: COPENHAGEN, DENMARK (73%) UNITED STATES (93%); DENMARK (90%)
CATEGORY: Science and Technology
PERSON: Jens Quistgaard
LOAD-DATE: February 2, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Left, Jens Quistgaard in 1996. Above, a pot designed by Mr. Quistgaard. He created the Kobenstyle cookware line.(PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Obituary (Obit); Biography
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company



1118 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 1, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final


A Green Energy Industry Takes Root Under the California Sun
BYLINE: By MATT RICHTEL and JOHN MARKOFF
SECTION: Section C; Column 0; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 1247 words
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
The sun is starting to grow jobs.

While interest in alternative energy is climbing across the United States, solar power especially is rising in California, the product of billions of dollars in investment and mountains of enthusiasm.

In recent months, the industry has added several thousand jobs in the production of solar energy cells and installation of solar panels on roofs. A spate of investment has also aimed at making solar power more efficient and less costly than natural gas and coal.

Entrepreneurs, academics and policy makers say this era's solar industry is different from what was tried in the 1970s, when Jerry Brown, then the governor of California, invited derision for envisioning a future fueled by alternative energy.

They point to companies like SolarCity, an installer of rooftop solar cells based in Foster City. Since its founding in 2006, it has grown to 215 workers and $29 million in annual sales. ''It is hard to find installers,'' said Lyndon Rive, the chief executive. ''We're at the stage where if we continue to grow at this pace, we won't be able to sustain the growth.''

SunPower, which makes the silicon-based cells that turn sunlight into electricity, reported 2007 revenue of more than $775 million, more than triple its 2006 revenue. The company expects sales to top $1 billion this year. SunPower, based in San Jose, said its stock price grew 251 percent in 2007, faster than any other Silicon Valley company, including Apple and Google.

Not coincidentally, three-quarters of the nation's demand for solar comes from residents and companies in California. ''There is a real economy -- multiple companies, all of which have the chance to be billion-dollar operators,'' said Daniel M. Kammen, a professor in the energy and resources group at the University of California, Berkeley. California, he says, is poised to be both the world's next big solar market and its entrepreneurial center.

The question, Professor Kammen says, is: ''How can we make sure it's not just green elite or green chic, and make it the basis for the economy?''

There also are huge challenges ahead, not the least of which is the continued dominance of fossil fuels. Solar represents less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the $3 trillion global energy market, leading some critics to suggest that the state is getting ahead of itself, as it did during the 1970s.

The optimists say a crucial difference this time is the participation of private-sector investors and innovators and emerging technologies. Eight of more than a dozen of the nation's companies developing photovoltaic cells are based in California, and seven of those are in Silicon Valley.

Among the companies that academics and entrepreneurs believe could take the industry to a new level is Nanosolar, which recently started making photovoltaic cells in a 200,000-square-foot factory in San Jose. The company said the first 18 months of its capacity has already been booked for sales in Germany.

''They could absolutely transform the market if they make good on even a fraction of their goal for next year,'' Professor Kammen said. ''They're not just a new entrant, but one of the biggest producers in the world.''

Many of the California companies are start-ups exploring exotic materials like copper indium gallium selenide, or CIGS, an alternative to the conventional crystalline silicon that is now the dominant technology.

The newcomers hope that CIGS, while less efficient than silicon, can be made far more cheaply than silicon-based cells. Indeed, the Nanosolar factory looks more like a newspaper plant than a chip-making factory. The CIGS material is sprayed onto giant rolls of aluminum foil and then cut into pieces the size of solar panels.

Another example is Integrated Solar, based in Los Angeles, which has developed a low-cost approach to integrating photovoltaic panels directly into the roofs of commercial buildings.

In 2007, 100 megawatts of solar generating capacity was installed in California, about a 50 percent increase over 2006, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group.

That growth rate is likely to increase, in part because of ambitious new projects like the 177-megawatt solar thermal plant that Pacific Gas and Electric said last November it would build in San Luis Obispo.

The plant, which will generate power for more than 120,000 homes beginning in 2010, will be built by Ausra, a Palo Alto start-up backed by the investor Vinod Khosla and his former venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The industry in California is also helped by state and local governments' substantial subsidies to stimulate demand. The state has earmarked $3.2 billion to subsidize solar installation, with the goal of putting solar cells on one million rooftops. The state Assembly passed a law to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020, which could spur alternatives like solar.

Additional incentives have come from a small but growing number of municipalities. The city of Berkeley will pay the upfront costs for a resident's solar installation and recoup the money over 20 years through additional property taxes on a resident's home. San Francisco is preparing to adopt its own subsidy that would range from $3,000 for a home installation to as much as $10,000 for a business.

The subsidies have prompted a surge in private investment, led by venture capitalists. In 2007, these seed investors put $654 million in 33 solar-related deals in California, up from $253 million in 16 deals in 2006, according to the Cleantech Group, which tracks investments in alternative energy. California received roughly half of all solar power venture investments made in 2007 in the United States.

''We're just starting to see successful companies come out through the other end of that process,'' said Nancy C. Floyd, managing director at Nth Power, a venture capital firm that focuses on alternative energy. ''And through innovation and volume, prices are coming down.''

Whether any of this investment pays off depends, as it did in previous eras, on reaching the point at which solar cells produce electricity as inexpensively as fossil fuels. The cost of solar energy is projected to fall steeply as cheaper new technology reaches economies of scale. Optimists believe that some regions in California could reach that point in half a decade.

At present, solar power is three to five times as expensive as coal, depending on the technology used, said Dan Reicher, director for climate change and energy initiatives at Google.org, the philanthropic division of the Internet company. Among its investments, Google says, is $10 million in financing for eSolar, a company in Pasadena that builds systems that concentrate sunlight from reflecting mirrors.

''We're at the dawn of a revolution that could be as powerful as the Internet revolution,'' Mr. Reicher said. The problem is, he said, ''renewable energy simply costs too much.''

At a conference of alternative energy companies in San Francisco last month, to discuss how to encourage the industry's growth, Mr. Brown, the former governor, joked that if the participants wanted to make real headway selling alternative energy, they should try not to come off as flaky. ''Don't get too far ahead of yourselves,'' said Mr. Brown, now the state's attorney general. ''You will be stigmatized. Don't use too many big words and make it all sound like yesterday.''
URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: SOLAR ENERGY (95%); RENEWABLE ENERGY (91%); ELECTRIC POWER PLANTS (90%); ELECTRIC POWER INDUSTRY (90%); ENERGY & UTILITY TRADE (90%); ENERGY & UTILITY SECTOR PERFORMANCE (90%); ENTREPRENEURSHIP (89%); MOUNTAINS (89%); NATURAL GAS MARKETS (76%); PUBLIC POLICY (75%); SALES PROJECTIONS (73%); NATURAL GAS PRODUCTS (73%); ELECTRICITY MARKETS (70%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (67%)
COMPANY: GOOGLE INC (54%)
TICKER: GOOG (NASDAQ) (54%); GGEA (LSE) (54%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS518112 WEB SEARCH PORTALS (54%); SIC8999 SERVICES, NEC (54%); SIC7375 INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SERVICES (54%); NAICS519130 INTERNET PUBLISHING & BROADCASTING & WEB SEARCH PORTALS (54%)
PERSON: MICHAEL MCMAHON (55%)
GEOGRAPHIC: SAN JOSE, CA, USA (79%); SAN FRANCISCO, CA, USA (79%); SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, CA, USA (93%) CALIFORNIA, USA (94%) UNITED STATES (94%)
LOAD-DATE: February 1, 2008
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Peter Rive of SolarCity, an installer of rooftop solar cells in California.(PHOTOGRAPH BY NOAH BERGER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. C1)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company



1119 of 1231 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
February 1, 2008 Friday

Late Edition - Final


Artistic Muscle, Flexed For Medicis
BYLINE: By HOLLAND COTTER
SECTION: Section E; Column 0; Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk; ART REVIEW 'MICHELANGELO, VASARI AND THEIR CONTEMPORARIES'; Pg. 33
LENGTH: 1524 words
Michelangelo was a terrible kvetch. His back forever ached; popes were slow with the paychecks; the local food was always an insult, a disgrace. No one worked half as hard as he did, and slacker artists made him nuts. ''Draw, Antonio; draw, Antonio; draw and don't waste time,'' he scrawled on a sketch he gave to a lackadaisical young pupil and studio assistant, Antonio Mini, in 1524.

He gave Mini many drawings -- two trunks full, according to one account -- as he did to several other pretty men he taught. You'll find a choice example from the Mini cache -- a stormy, swirling study of a muscular male leg -- in ''Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries: Drawings From the Uffizi'' at the Morgan Library & Museum. That sketch is just one of 79 16th-century Florentine works, shaped into a thematic exhibition that would give even the fault-finding master scant cause for complaint.

For Michelangelo drawing was the most practical and personal medium; it was a laboratory, a diary, an end in itself. If you could do a perfect drawing, he came to think, why bother to turn it into a painting or sculpture? Perfection in any form was the goal. One of the most famously perfect drawings he made, ''Bust of a Woman, Head of an Old Man and Bust of a Child,'' is in this show.

Of the three figures, the woman is the most vivid and polished. With her chiseled features bordering on masculine, her breast-baring gown and horned helmet of braids, she blends Renaissance neo-Classicism with proto-Mannerist fantasy. She looks completely at home in the mannerist phase of our own postmodernism, and was hugely influential in her time. Everyone wanted to make art this good and this strange.

The matter of influence is important. It is one reason that 16th-century Florence is usually cast in art history books as something like the Age of Michelangelo and the Michelangelettes, or Michelangelini if you prefer, referring to the many students and emulators who toiled in his shadow. The title of the Morgan show seems to echo this interpretation, though the curator, Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, a former director of the Uffizi in Florence, has done something more interesting. Through her selection of artists she has drawn a picture of Florentine art not as a heroic, strictly top-down hierarchy but as a collective endeavor. This was exemplified by the decorative plan organized by Giorgio Vasari for the Palazzo Vecchio, the hulking fortress-palace in the center of Florence that had been city hall since the 14th century and later a Medici residence.

Heroes come first, though. Among them was Jacopo Carucci, called Pontormo (1494-1556), who zealously scrutinized Michelangelo's work, then took it in a new direction -- away from a reliance on natural forms -- to create an intensely personal, conceptual style known as Mannerism. In Pontormo's hallucinatory altarpiece of the Entombment at Santa Felicita in Florence, mourning figures float around the body of Jesus like a funerary wreath of pink and blue clouds. We are in the zero-gravity realm of mind and spirit, not on earth.

At the Morgan two side-by-side studies of a seated male on a single sheet of paper illustrate the transition between these realms. The figure in red chalk on the right looks grounded enough; the figure in black chalk on the left, though, is a snarl of snaking lines. It's as if Pontormo were drawing a constantly moving model and trying to record each motion in an overlaid stop-action sequence. We don't see a solid figure; we see the vapor trails of moving atoms.

Pontormo was a difficult character who ended up living in paranoid isolation. But for art as a record of neurosis, nothing quite compares with the work of his exact contemporary, Giovan Battista di Jacopo, known as Rosso Fiorentino, or the Redheaded Florentine, who all but erased the line between spirituality and satire.

A Rosso drawing of the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints is a brittle, twisting affair of posturing figures in a depthless space. It looks the way Gesualdo's music sounds. It could be sincerely devotional; it could be a satire of devotion. More peculiar still is a presumably secular image of a nude woman sketched on an oddly cut sheet of paper. Is she pregnant, or just out of shape? Or does she represent a foreign, Gothic standard of beauty? (Durer was hot in cinquecento Florence.) And what act or thought has prompted her look of languidly shocked distress?

We'll probably never know, just as we'll never know where piety ends and devilry starts in Rosso's religious art, or what led to his death, reportedly a suicide, in 1540.

With younger artists, like Bronzino (1503-72), we are in a more consciously stylized Mannerist phase. The subjective energies that charged the drawing of Rosso and Pontormo are all but gone. In their place we have the chilled, expensive exquisiteness of a court art. A Bronzino drawing of a buff male nude might as easily have been based on a sculpture as on a live model. It appears to be made of stone rather than flesh.

What links all of these artists is patronage. Each of them at one time or another worked for the Medici family, the ruling dynasty of Florence. And each of them, early or late, contributed to the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio. And by focusing on this link Ms. Tofani transforms the show from a survey of Uffizi treasures into a concentrated historical essay, one in which Vasari (1511-74) assumes a leading role. Vasari is best known now for his '' Lives of the Artists,'' the series of biographical essays that supply much of our firsthand knowledge of Italian Renaissance art from Giotto onward. But he was admired in his day as a cultural polymath, a painter, architect and writer who was also an entrepreneurial art-world insider.

He was a familiar type, one common in New York today. Professionally and socially ambitious, he made his way with shrewd judgment, acquired sophistication and engaging but dissembling charm, the charm of a back patter who is also a backbiter. His artistic talents were broad but thin, made up of well-schooled expertise and a knack for imitation. Because he lacked originality, he could mold himself to the needs of any patron, and he became house artist to rulers of the era.

It was largely for his connections that Cosimo I, the Medici grand duke of Tuscany, hired Vasari in 1555 to bring some order to the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio interior. With a handpicked crew of artisans, Vasari began replacing the accumulation of older, piecemeal works -- Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Pontormo and Rosso had all contributed to the palace -- with a unified visual program that was essentially a walk-in piece of Medici propaganda.

Vasari was also a chief painter of the new scheme, and an entire wall of the Morgan's gallery is devoted to his drawings, some for the Palazzo Vecchio. They range from sketches for an allegorical ceiling design to a swooning study for an altarpiece to a worked-up image of the young Cosimo dressed in Roman armor and lording it over his political foes.

To see so many Vasari drawings -- there are 14 -- makes for an interesting study in personal style, mostly because none is apparent. You can tell a Pontormo or Rosso at a glance. To scan a dozen Vasaris is to see a dozen artists, all related, all slightly different, some more imaginative than others.

This also applies to the selection of drawings by several artists who worked under Vasari on the Palazzo Vecchio, in the majestic civic halls or in the Mannerist jewel box called the Studiolo. Some of these artists are familiar to even beginning students of art history. Alessandro Allori, who had studied Michelangelo's work in Rome, is one; Santi di Tito, leader of an anti-Mannerist, return-to-naturalism movement, is another. His murmurous art -- a sketch of a sleeping child is as soft as a lullaby -- stands out in a room of operatic voices.

Not all the artists display such assurance. Girolamo Macchietti (1535-92) had a fabulous hand, but could made mistakes. In his study of a male figure made for the Studiolo, the left leg is, to my eye, slightly off; it doesn't quite belong to the body it's attached to.

Michelangelo, of course, would have spotted this in a flash and delivered a rebuke. (Draw, Girolamo, draw!) And he might have had problems with another Michelangelino, a whippersnapper named Francesco Morandini (1544-97), known as Poppi, at least until he saw the drawing titled ''The Punishment of Titius'' in the Morgan show.

It is Poppi's copy, exacting, almost stroke for stroke, of a drawing that Michelangelo had done decades earlier, in 1532, as a gift for Tommaso de' Cavalieri, his inamorato at the time. Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but copying is also a form of love, as Michelangelo knew. ''Poppi?'' you can almost hear him say, ''He's young. He's got a lot to learn. But the kid's all right.''

''Michelangelo, Vasari and Their Contemporaries: Drawings From the Uffizi'' runs through April 20 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, (212) 685-0008; morganlibrary.org.



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