Link to Post:
http://www.haberarts.com/2013/01/the-unmerry-prankster/
John Haber muses on the enduring "strangeness" of Rosso Fiorentino's Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist on view in the exhibition Fantasy and Invention: Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing at The Morgan Library, New York, through February 3, 2013.
Haber writes: "On loan from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Holy Family has not lost its strangeness. That may sound impossible after so many years. Now that anything goes, plenty of people have needed Robert Hughes to reawaken and then assuage 'the shock of the new' even for modern art, much less Renaissance Italy... Rosso starts with a tight-knit family right out of the High Renaissance, but after that, all bets are off. Only Jesus has anything to stand on, a green cushion way too plush for a manger, while John and Joseph without their lower bodies barely fit into the picture. An insensitive later owner—or a prankster like Rosso—might almost have cropped a much larger composition, but no, this is it. The background is dark, confused, and indefinite, and the foreground is insanely crowded. Jesus clings to Mary for comfort, while Joseph presses up against her in worship and fear. Revision of the past has slipped into subversion."
Link to Post:
http://leftbankartblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/mannerism-at-morgan.html
Charles Kessler visits two exhibitions at the Morgan Library: Fantasy and Invention: Rosso Fiorentino and Sixteenth-Century Florentine Drawing (through February 3) and Dürer to de Kooning: 100 Master Drawings from Munich (through January 6).
Of Rosso's Holy Family with the Young Saint John the Baptist (c. 1520), Kessler writes: "Rosso makes no attempt to create a plausibly real scene in a real space. What's being depicted is not ordinary human activity, and it's not an idealized scene either, but rather it's an almost hallucinogenic, spiritual ecstasy more akin to medieval mosaics in spirit than to the High Renaissance. This ecstatic emotion is conveyed by the glowing colors and the swirling, rhythmic brushwork. (The painting is unfinished so it's probably rougher and less polished than it would be if he had finished it — but still.) In the Rosso, St. Joseph and St. John are so emotionally overwrought they seem to be dissipating visually."
