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met to acquire duccio
Post #406 • November 10, 2004, 7:42 AM • 18 Comments
The Met is acquiring a little Duccio for over $45 million. Duccio tends to look a little clunky to me, even by Byzantine standards, and a lot of them have broken down to the point that the terre-verte underpainting of the flesh tones shows through, making the saints look amphibian. (Those of you who saw my painting Self Portrait (Howard Cimabue), not yet online, made a distant homage to this effect.) But this one is a jewel and looks like it's in excellent condition.
I find it interesting that everyone seems to know Duccio the same way.
"The first slide in an art history 101 course is a Duccio," [Met director Philippe] de Montebello said. "He was one of the founders of Western art."
Yep, specifically the first slide of Survey of Art History 2. A Duccio Madonna starts it off just like the Venus of Willendorf starts of Survey of Art History 1, intimating that if art has its own god, she is a woman.
2.
November 10, 2004, 9:35 PM
Duccio, Cimabue, and Giotto are where the Renaissance train leaves the station. From there on, European painting looks decreasingly Byzantine and increasingly naturalistic, until, well, maybe the Barbizon school. As for which Madonna, any will do.
3.
November 11, 2004, 12:39 AM
$45 million and worth every penny. That 20 million for Johns is starting to sound like a bit of a mistake, though, eh?
BTW, remember when I said kerry supporters were statisticaly smarter then bush supporters? I was talking out of my ass, but it turns out I was right. Check:
http://chrisevans3d.com/files/iq.htm
4.
November 11, 2004, 12:55 AM
I am a very stupid Kerry voter.
I am experimenting with Foxfire. Is this site's RSS feed compatible with foxfire, or am I completely off and have no idea what I'm talking about?
5.
November 11, 2004, 1:35 AM
SSM, do you mean Firefox? And what are you trying to do with the feed?
6.
November 11, 2004, 3:13 AM
yes, and i don't know . . . what is it supposed to do?
8.
November 11, 2004, 6:23 PM
Yikes:
The Duccio and the Johns are both tokens, in a way - the Duccio an excessive rarity used to fill a gap in a great collection (Like Franklin, I have always found Duccio clunky) and the Johns a concession to the huge pressures of recent fashion. Johns has the status that Gainsborough and the Salon painters had a hundred-odd years ago, but at $20 million, the fall, when it comes, should be even more precipitous.
9.
November 11, 2004, 6:30 PM
To return to the off-topic, I'm using Firefox right now too and the RSS subscription thingy is not appearing in the lower right hand corner as it has on many other sites . . . . on the other sites where I've seen it, you click on the thingy (when you mouse over it it says "Add Live Bookmark for this page's feed") and choose your feed type (if choices are available) and subscribe--after that in your bookmarks section, when you go to the page link a new menu opens up listing all recent posts. Artblog.net isn't showing the thingy.
10.
November 11, 2004, 7:52 PM
Firefox and RSS...
I'm guessing that Firefox uses RSS autodiscovery to find the feed. This utilizes a metatag that Artblog doesn't have in its markup...
... so Firefox is blind to Franklin's feed.
11.
November 11, 2004, 7:55 PM
Should have read:
This utilizes a metatag that Artblog doesn't have in its markup...
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.artblog.net/rss" />
... so Firefox is blind to Franklin's feed.
12.
November 11, 2004, 7:58 PM
Dan, you're awesome. I just installed it. How does it work now, folks?
13.
November 11, 2004, 8:07 PM
Works like a charm!
14.
November 11, 2004, 8:09 PM
Oooops. Maybe not! I just added the feed, but in my bookmarks it says "Live Bookmark feed failed to load".
15.
November 11, 2004, 8:20 PM
I have Firefox booted up and Kathleen's correct.
Um, Dan?
16.
November 11, 2004, 8:47 PM
You got me.
I use IE 6 here at work :)
Maybe it needs the feed URL to end in ".xml"?
17.
November 11, 2004, 8:54 PM
Or ".rdf" for that matter
18.
November 11, 2004, 8:59 PM
yep. I have the same thing. but when I install it on a "working" RSS feed (i tried BoingBoing.net) all it does is make a sub-menu in my Bookmarks with a separate listing for each recent entry. And each of those links only pulls up THAT post, so i can't get the full site. The whole thing seems to be un-useful.
1.
Hovig
November 10, 2004, 9:22 PM
The Met's piece is amazingly lovely. Why is Duccio so often the "first slide" in post-medieval art history? (And which madonna?)