Paris-Milan-Venice-2022

 Yeah, there are so many masterworks here it's absurd. A lot of it stolen by Napoleon ! Here are some of my favorites from the visit, with a few brief notes. First up in the freak show is the Girl With the Extra Vetebrae ! OK, it's a gorgeous painting by Ingres. So what if he took a bit of artistic license with the human form. Remember the Fuseli show ? Below is one of the paintings that we would normally pass over.  Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson won the Prix de Rome and was a student of Jacques-Louis David, but he's not an artist the casual viewer would be drawn to. But, because we loved the dramatics of Fuseli, we took a second look at Girodet. He has the same theatrics and even apparently the same hair fetish. (Notice the hair pulling at the bottom of the painting.) Girodet was 70 years before Fuseli, and is often considered an early beginning toward Romanticism. More Mantegna! He's always worth looking at. The below picture was stolen from the Gonzagas. It ...

 This was a Beaux-Arts mansion owned by a rich couple who loved to collect art. (She was a talented society painter who painted the banking heir. They got married and indulged their love of art.) Not only did they collect an astonishing array of simply world-class paintings, the house itself is fascinating. The walls surrounding the ballroom were engineered to sink into the basement to make it even bigger. It's a testament to the power of money, certainly. Here are some of the many, many paintings. Tiepolo... Bellini... Mantegna... Rembrandt. I thought there was a Giorgione, but I missed it this trip. I think they built an elaborate staircase just to show off this magnificent fresco. Notice how the legs of the little person in the lower right-hand corner extend beyond the "frame." The Jacquemart-Andre's even cut out the marble surround to highlight this. Paolo Uccello is a crowd pleaser. He was early, early Renaissance who did a lot of technical perspective work. Hi...

 Such a great place in general (more to see in the next post) but the Fuseli show was amazing. Spelled Fussli in Europe, he's the guy that painted "The Nightmare," and that's about all I knew about him. Turns out, he's fascinating. A Swiss artist who came from an artistic family who became a pastor and, of course, moved to London to become a famous painter. As I was looking at his psychologically weird canvases, I thought, "He's a lot like William Blake." Turns out, they were friends. So enjoy some sights of this dramatic, emotive painter. Fuseli had a fetish for women and women's hair. This is Dido dying after being abandoned by Aeneas, and this is a spirit cutting off her hair, which contains the last of her soul. "Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble." This is a fragment of a painting where this guy is a giant who is intimidated by big, bad Thor, who's beating the hell out of a giant serpent. (There'...

 We had an afternoon flight, so enough time to walk over just one bridge and visit the Accademia . They've been doing extensive renovations, and while some galleries are still closed, it's already apparent that it looks much better. I never even knew it had an interior courtyard. There are so many masterworks here, so I'm just going to slap up some of my favorite paintings and sculptures from the visit and list the artist. This gorgeous Tiepolo ceiling fresco was mounted on the wall and angled slightly toward you, so it was easy to look at all the details. Usually, you are in a dimply lit church and craning your neck to look fifty feet up. Some fun Canova lions and a bust of Napoleon. If you've seen his work, you know the heights he can reach. These are minor works, but still great to look at. A great crucifixion of St. Peter by Luca Giordano . Yet another sacra conversazione by Bellini. Just a few Giorgione, including a powerful study of his mother representing the r...

 Another brutal and beautiful installation, La Commedia Umana , by Ai Wei Wei . It's astonishing, ornate, somber and completely gorgeous in a macabre way. It's perfectly sited in this large cathedral and looks to both the local glass industry and to the black devotional objects that are in the presbytery. Crafted in black Murano glass over the past three years, it's a major work art. Ai Wei Wei also worked on other pieces of glass while in Murano, including a very clever self portrait that shows him a combination Buddha/Mao. Here are some other works from his Venetian series in glass. I particularly liked the black fish, which I believe has his features, but not distinct enough to take away from the fish. And finally, the lego works, which he has been working on for years, part painting pastiche, part sculpture, part mechanical art, they are completely delightful.