FEBRUARY 9, 2010 Volume 2, Issue 3 American Symphony Orchestra returns to Carnegie Hall.
Staatliche Kunstsamlungen, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden
PLUS GALLERY REVIEWS, JAZZ, NEW BOOKS AND MORE.
Bronzino is being celebrated at the Met with an exhibition of nearly all of his 61 known drawings, including “Crawling Male Nude,” ca. 1548–52.
Stretching the Standards In the first exhibition dedicated solely to Bronzino, we see the ideals of the High Renaissance being left behind BY LANCE ESPLUND Early in my writing career, I described a work of modern sculpture as “Michelangelesque.” My editor shot back: “Use another word; there is no such thing—or can there ever be such a thing—as ‘Michelangelesque.’” My editor was right: A work of art either is or isn’t by Michelangelo—arguably the most influential sculptor, painter and architect in the Western canon. That may be why the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s long-termloan exhibition of the fragmentary marble figure “Young Archer” (c. 1490), a sculpture attributed to the adolescent Michelangelo, is dubious. The exhibit asks “Is it or isn’t it?” It seems that Renaissance scholars, identifying “Michelangelesque” qualities in the work, are in a quandary. But if “Young Archer” is by Michelangelo, it falls short of Michelangelo— even a fledgling Michelangelo. Lacking Michelangelo’s inimitable harmony, torsion
and rhythmic complexity—signs of an inner life—the sculpture, ultimately, is soulless. Michelangelo may not weigh heavily on the minds of contemporary artists, who are still dealing with the innovations of Matisse, Mondrian, Klee and Picasso—modern masters who turned Renaissance conventions upside down and inside out. Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism and Postmodernism, in part, are all forms of acting out against those Modernist titans.
But imagine being born in Italy at the beginning of the 16th century, coming of age as an artist at the end of the High Renaissance, around 1520, and having to follow in the footsteps of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Titian and Dürer—artists so astonishing and innovative that the early Renaissance masters preceding them are still referred to as “the Primitives.” Faced with the divine establishment
BRONZINO on page 8