I love them both.

Let’s start in Italy.  How can you go wrong?!  You can’t.

Galleria degli Uffizi. I could look at this view–in person of course– for hours, or days.

Here’s a nighttime view, looking the opposite direction. Sigh.

Here is just one of the masterpieces included in the Uffizi collection.  Botticelli‘s Birth of Venus.
Time spent looking at this painting is my idea of heaven, although I have little patience with the crowds that gather in front of this beauty.

And, before I get carried away with the incredible Florentine museum, let me turn to ukiyo-e.  Japanese wood-block prints.

Here is a masterpiece by Hokusai known as The Great Wave.  Try imagine yourself as one of the boaters in the lower right quadrant.  Scary thought!  Is the artist making a statement about the magnificence of nature and man’s tiny role in it?  Maybe.

Do you know about the Venice Biennale?   The first Biennale was held in 1895 and it is still one of the major international exhibitions of contemporary art.  It is happening right now in its 55th iteration.  This year’s version was curated by Massimiliano Gioni.  He entitled it “The Encyclopedic Palace” (Il Palazzo Enciclopedico) and it includes 88 “national pavilions” with 158 artists.  Several countries are participating in the important Biennale for the first time, including Angola, the Bahamas, the Kingdom of Bahrain, the Ivory Coast, the Republic of Kosovo, Kuwait, Maldives, Paraguay, Tuvalu and, perhaps most surprisingly, the Holy See!

If you’d like to know more about this year’s exhibition, here is a link:

http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/

I haven’t been to this year’s exhibition (nor would I want to be in Venice in the summer heat and crowds, but that’s just me!). I was there one August for the…

Back to the alphabet in art.

Andy Warhol. Marilyn Monroe. Campbell’s Tomato Soup. Pop Art. Celebrity.

Here’s a picture of Warhol:  life is art.

I once had an Andy Warhol siting in Manhattan in the 1980s.  I was at Christie’s, the famous art auctioneers, on Park Avenue, and Andy was there too.  We were both looking at the current offerings (i.e. the next bunch of paintings for sale) and, once I saw him, I stopped looking at the art on the walls and looked instead at Andy.  He was so “put together” as his easily noticed persona as art god, that I followed him from section to section, never taking my eyes off of him unless he seemed to notice me.  Which he mostly didn’t.  And, when he did, he just thought I was one of the usual culture vultures.  At least, I assume that was his assumption.

Quick: what is the one thing that every Italian Renaissance man– including Lorenzo the Magnificent, ruler of the Florentine republic— wanted?

To have their son named Pope, of course!

And Lorenzo got his wish!

And on top of that, Lorenzo’s son, known as Pope Leo X, had his portrait painted by Raphael.  Wow, some people really do have all the luck!

Pope Leo X had the good fortune to be born in Florence (in 1475), the second son of il magnifico.  His birthname was Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici.  In Italian families, the eldest son inherited the business or other elite endeavors of the father; the second son went into the church.  Young Giovanni was therefore destined to rise in church hierarchy and, sure enough, was made a cardinale in 1489 at the ripe age of 14. He must have been filled with wisdom at this…

This great dress was designed by Yves Saint Laurent, the well-known French couturier, for his fall-winter collection of 1965-66.  Saint Laurent was born in Algeria in 1936, and would later in his life live in Morocco (see my earlier post on Saint Laurent’s fantastic garden in Marrakech), which gives his life a kind of North-African symmetry.  He called this The Mondrian Day Dress, 5.

In the mid-1950s, designers started playing around with dress shapes, and the “sack dress” like this one by Christian Dior evolved as a fashionable new version of the shift. Saint Laurent had worked within this framework but was evolving away from the looseness of the format.  Of course, the French designer was also familiar with the flat planes of color in paintings by Piet Mondrian.

So, Saint Laurent began boldly borrowing Mondrian’s color block idea and added it to the new shift design with which he…

I don’t know what has gotten into me recently.  I just really feel like blogging about art.  For some reason, Harriet Hosmer’s Zenobia has been on my mind today and so–just for fun–I decided to try blogging each day with an artist, artwork, or art-related subject for each letter of the alphabet.  And, because I am Lauretta, I decided to do it from Z to A.

Ahem.

So, here we go, let’s start at the very end.  Z is for Zenobia.

So, I can hear you asking, who is Harriet Hosmer and what is a Zenobia?

Well, let me introduce you to “Hattie” who is shown working here in her studio in Rome, c. 1860.

Got your attention?  Excellent!

Harriet Goodhue Hosmer was born (1830) in Massachusetts and was encouraged by her physician father to live an active life to overcome early illnesses.  He taught her anatomy and she liked…