Hints and tips:
...Parlour maid Mary Hillier is “Mary Madonna”, pastiche of a Florentine Renaissance profile....
...“Madonna of the Clouds” sets the still, watchful child and flowing figure of the Virgin in heaven: wind, airy atmosphere, flying angels are made permanent — eternal — in compact marble....
...The puzzled goats and convalescent mother add earthy counterpoint to the orchestra of angels up in their gilded heavens....
...Botticelli’s parade of fashionable Florentines converging from opposite sides in his “Adoration” tondo was painted when the Medici were staging Epiphany processions as power displays of harmonious rule....
...For drinks, I go to San Angel Inn. It’s a traditional restaurant and has a very particular atmosphere emblematic of a different era, like a time capsule....
...And Bellini’s crystalline “Dead Christ Tended by Angels” repeats Donatello’s treatment of the subject, here in both bronze and marble....
...Aside from Piero, the Florentine architect Brunelleschi was a key influence. His cavernous Euclidean cathedrals radically transformed Jaray’s ideas about space and the human figures who inhabited it....
...These included the eerie “Florentine Garden” (1938), by the magical realist Dutch painter Pyke Koch, which sold for £450,000 (£555,000 with fees, est £200,000-£300,000)....
...Conceived for a church in Milan, where Leonardo moved in 1482, it shows Madonna, Christ, St John the Baptist and an angel in a rocky, flower-filled glade....
...Painted between 1467-68, this Annunciation scene — normally in Perugia — sets Mary and the Angel either side of a corridor bordered by blinding white Corinthian columns....
...According to Vasari, he was so shamed by the brilliance of Leonardo’s angel in the Uffizi’s 1475 “The Baptism of Christ” — sadly not present here — that he never picked up a brush again....
...Below Jesus’s sallow corpse, an avenging angel brandishes a sword to smite the Florentine lion and visit apocalyptic justice on the sinful city....
...Florentine artists thrived thanks to patrons such as the Medicis. Today’s “Medicis of Silicon Valley” are venture capitalists and angel investors....
...In 1980, he found a life-size marble figure of Bathsheba in Sweden and identified the hand of Florentine master Giambologna, before selling the work to the Getty Museum....
...By the 16th century, a new, post-Savonarola austerity had somewhat dampened Florentine religious imaginations....
...More telling, however, is the decision by Florentine master Domenico Ghirlandaio to copy the aforementioned “Christ Blessing” in 1490....
...Rosso’s “Assumption of the Virgin” (c1513) sets the Madonna floating in a cloud of angels above a row of apostles whose flattened perspective and staccato movements gives it the air of a classical frieze...
...“He has done numerous things for Florence, but most of all he has given confidence back to the Florentines and life to the city,” he adds....
...There, in a darkened room, his five-screen video “Five Angels for the Millennium” (2001) unfurled....
...It’s a small city and you get to know everybody – Florentine, American and German alike.”...
...Probably a pupil of Gaddi, this Florentine-born painter’s cosmopolitan travels earn him a place in the spotlight here....
...The Louvre deals deftly with the rapid assimilations of Raphael’s Umbrian and Florentine years....
...At the Palazzo Vecchio he chose to commemorate an event from Florentine history, The Battle of Cascina....
...flowers, each petal perfect as a botanical drawing, reveals the inspiration of Ghent painter Hugo van der Goes, whose “Portinari Triptych” (c1475) – featuring a similar bouquet – had just been hung in a Florentine...
...Paintings like these, which influenced Florentine artists enormously, would never have arrived in Italy without the international reach of the Medici banks....
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