renaissance | The Smart Set

Don’t Sing, Scarf, or Spit

John Capista — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 14:28:17 +0000

Culture, if we can still call it that, has taken a definite downward turn in the last couple of decades. Tee shirts with I HATE YOUR F—ING MASK (the F word spelled out) printed in large letters on the front. Texting at the dinner table. Parents using profanity to children. Being honked and tailgated while […]

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Masters and Madonnas

Charles Molesworth — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 12:30:58 +0000

In the fall 2017 season, the National Gallery in London mounted a show entitled “Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael around 1500.” Here were three of the greatest artists of any period, with several masterpieces on display, and each work breathtaking and all tied nimbly together. The point was to illustrate a moderate argument — namely that Michelangelo […]

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Make It New

Morgan Meis — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 16:12:43 +0000

One day in 1848, a trio of young Englishmen declared themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It was an absurd name for a ridiculous idea. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, proposed to take art more than 300 years backward. They wanted art to return to the period […]

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A Portrait of the Merchant as an Important Man

James Polchin — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:12:43 +0000

On a warm morning in April of 1478, Guiliano de Medici, the younger brother of the famous Lorenzo de Medici, was murdered in the crowded Duomo in central Florence. At the time, Florence was Europe’s largest city, a walled enclave of writers and artists exploring humanist ideas in aesthetics and politics. It also had a […]

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Fleshed Out

Morgan Meis — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 16:12:43 +0000

“Mannerism” sounds stupid. One immediately associates it with manners. And “manners” are not in the highest regard these days. Mannerism would seem to be a movement of affected and empty gestures, of style over substance. That’s what many do mean when they use the term. Mannerism has come to refer, primarily, to the group […]

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