Art

...the establishment of the so called Bolognese school, which included Guido Reni, Domenichino, and Guercino, all of whom are lavishly ^presented here...

...Ludovico, an artist only beginning to be appreciated, had a thoroughly independent taste in matters of color, composition, and figuration...

...Parmagianino fully embodies what is usually called Mannerism, a style which takes its motifs from the High Renaissance, but which enfeebled them by leaving their empty gestures cloaked in strangely brilliant colors...

...The portrait of the beautiful young woman is conservative in its simple and evocative frontality, and the forthrightness of her gaze is fully consonant with the classicism of Raphael...

...They achieved this so definitively that from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, Annibale Carracci and his followers Guercino, Domenichino, and Reni (collectively called the Bolognese school) dominated the critical discussion of art...

...1534), who invented a variety of motifs which show up throughout Europe for the next two and a half centuries, like seeds that are brought to flower long after the mother-plant has died...

...They have been among the hits of the exhibition...

...But these painters did not invent anything as earthshaking as perspective or a sculptural conception of the human form, innovations which have always endowed Florence with a special and irrefragable holiness...

...The scholar will be introduced to minor artists he or she may not have known before, or known only in reproductions, and he or she will cherish the rare opportunity to see gathered into a few rooms the greatest works from many countries...

...The moody classicism of DoiDenichino will be a little harder for modern viewers to ""Hire, but the nine paintings included here provide an cxcel*"* initiation into his art...

...Rather, these painters from the Emilian region of central Italy perfected, stabilized, and made current everything that was best in the traditions that preceded them...

...The Carracci's greatest legacy consisted in...

...The exhibit also includes four bizarrely religious paintings by Lelio Orsi...

...In the context of the history of art, it was Annibale who provided the basis for that classicizing baroque that held the field, in however many incarnations, down to the nineteenth century...

...In the next room Parmagianino, Correggio's greatest follower, has derived only sweetness from his master, disowning entirely the sinews of his strength...

...A strong and lambent light forces its way into the deep folds of their garments, which are agitated into movement by what seems to be a surge of wind, as an angel descends from heaven with faultless grace to place upon their heads the crowns of martydom...

...24 April 1987: 245...

...The paint is spread across the canvas like a length of iridescent silk bodying forth garments, manes, an enchanting sword, and a velutinous landscape...

...While its beauties are manifold, it is desperately in need of both critical and popular support...

...It is the best exhibition because of the maturity of its theme as well as the completeness and excellence of its choice of paintings...

...After them come the lesser artists, or ^^ less well represented, like Franceschini, Burrini, and P'i in whom the tradition of great Emilian art comes at last to its close...

...JAMES GARDNER James Gardner writes on the arts for Commentary...

...ART MANNERISM AT ITS BEST CORREGGIO & THE CARRACCI It would be hard to exaggerate the aesthetic success of "The Age of Correggio and the Carracci," which recently moved from the National Gallery in Washington to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it will remain until May 24...

...Its great power derives not from the violence depicted, for which the artist seems to have had little taste, but from the ecstatic enthusiasm of the martyrs...

...Probably the more energetic chiaro"""O of Guercino, inspired partially by Caravaggio, will apB^more readily to modern tastes...

...These conflicts came to a head in the Council of Trent which Paul IN convened in 1545, and which ended in 1563...

...Only towards the middle of the last century, when Baudelaire and Ruskin, from different perspectives, dealt the death blow to the Old Masters tradition, did their importance decline...

...probably nowhere else will you see so much of his work in one room, and his special qualities in a flash of lightning, richly evoke the religious and spiritual conflicts of the middle decades of the sixteenth century...

...The Metropolitan's own Madonna and Child •8 one of Guide's finest works, which features a magnificant Compositional thrust, combined with an almost magical vitally Imparted to the flesh passages...

...His Martydom of Four Saints, displayed in the first room, is a perfect conjoining of sweetness and strength...

...In addition to the rare privilege of seeing part of the fresco cycle of the Palazzo Fava, upon which the three Caracci collaborated, and in which they enunciated for the first time their reformist attitudes, this exhibition displays Annibale's splendid San Ludovico altarpiece, and The Assumption of the Virgin, which have a religious energy unknown since the time of the young Titian...

...Included with other works are a portrait of his supposed mistress, Antea, as well as a depiction of the convex 244: Commonweal sion of Paul...

...In addition to being a great landscape painter, the exhibit reveals him as one of the foremost figurative artists of the mid-century...

...The relevance of this council to art lay in its insistence that religious scenes be portrayed more devoutly and less frivolously than Mannerism had done...

...True, Correggio, Parmagianino, and the Bolognese school represent one of the most hallowed traditions in all of the Old Masters, and they are idolized wherever such paintings are cherished...

...Contemporary with these artists, there are the treasured *«fcs of Mastelletta, Albani, and the brilliantly eccentric ^olotneo Schedoni...

...here one is left in relative solitude before some of the grandest masterpieces ever to proceed from the human imagination...

...The best part of the exhibition is the section devoted to the three Carracci: Annibale, his brother, Agostino, and their cousin Ludovico...

...But the Conversion of Paul neutralizes into pure prettiness the violence of a man being trampled by a horse...

...This reorientation eventually produced the Carracci reform, which reinvigorated painting by hearkening back to Corrcggio and Raphael...

...Thereafter, the art of the Carracci and their disciples came to be viewed as staid and formulaic, an opinion whose prevalence has been only partially mitigated by recent reassessments...

...This general apathy towards the achievements of the Bolognese school is reflected in the attendance (or rather lack of it) at the Metropolitan show...

...To the general artlover, these two hundred large paintings will be extremely attractive at first glance since the Emilian artists as a rule strove for a rich beauty rather than for the brutality and harshness of Caravaggio and his followers...

...The Mannerism implicit in this latter painting is further exemplified in the cosmic colors of the Ferrarese Dosso Dossi...

...In the Met's recent Van Gogh exhibit, the galleries were several people deep in front of even minor works...

...But even they are done sufficient justice in "The Age of Correggio and the Carracci," which is easily the best Old Masters exhibition at the Met in many years...

...To begin with, there is no need fora special ticket to the exhibit, indicating that the Met has less than grand expectation !or it...

...The Metropolitan exhibition begins with Correggio (d...

...Indeed, the appeal of these paintings is so immediate that they may even serve to convert many who now are devoted almost exclusively to the Impressionists and their successors...

...New Criterion, and The New Leader...

...It is fully satisfying on two levels...

...However beautiful, and in some cases legendary, the two hundred paintings this show features — the finest works of Emilian art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries —there is as yet no established and expectant audience among American art-lovers for this remarkable period...