Featuring over 2,000 newly digitized catalogs, a new database will revolutionize Nazi-era art research. More»
Many know Lyonel Feininger as an accomplished painter, printmaker, and caricaturist whose work is forever linked to the Bauhaus movement. He was Walter Gropius’s first faculty appointment to the Weimar art school in 1919, and he helped shape an artistic… More»
In the 1920s, Lyonel Feininger was one of Germany’s best-known artists. He painted, drew, and made prints; he sketched caricatures and composed music; he even created a miniature city that would presage stop-motion animation. But in 1928, at age 58,… More»
In the emerald-green galleries of the exhibition Spirit of an Age: Drawings from the Germanic World, I was drawn to a cluster of quiet drawings that convey beautiful stories: miraculous healings, heroic quests of medieval knights, momentous coronations. These are… More»
New for summer 2012—The Vexed Man is back at the Getty, but he’s moved from his usual haunts for the exhibition Messerschmidt and Modernity, July 24–October 13, 2012. The show brings together several of Messerschmidt’s Character Heads, including the excellently… More»
The Augsburg Display Cabinet—the Getty Museum’s 17th-century “cabinet of curiosities” on display starting tomorrow in our New Galleries for Medieval and Renaissance Sculpture and Decorative Arts—is both a work of art and an early prototype of museums. With dozens of… More»
Andrea del Sarto, Various studies, c.1520’s
Son of a tailor (sarto). Andrea became one of the best loved artists of Florence. Vasari had good things to say about him.
…Andrea del Sarto, in whose single person Nature and art showed all that painting can achieve by means of drawing, colouring and invention: and indeed if Andrea had possessed a little more boldness and daring of spirit, to match his very profound judgement and talent as a painter, he would, there is no doubt at all, have been without equal.
Browning wrote poems about him:
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?His drawings are natural, graceful and sensitive, an excellent draughtsman.
…and he was very much in love with his wife… (something we don’t often hear about Renaissance artists!)
Our curator Julian Brooks is in Florence now researching del Sarto for an exhibition in 2015.