Recent stories of note:
“Marco Grassi, Who Brought Old Paintings Back to Life, Dies at 90”
Adam Nossiter, The New York Times
When I was introduced to Marco Grassi, The New Criterion’s longtime friend and contributor, late last year, someone mentioned that I was interested in the history of art. “Well,” Marco replied with a good-natured smile, “I hope you’re interested in fourteenth-century Florence.” He was indeed a “great champion” of the paintings of that place and time, as Adam Nossiter writes in The New York Times. Marco Grassi died in March of this year and is remembered in Nossiter’s obituary for his passion for Florentine art and his surpassing skill as a restorer and conservator. Read The New Criterion’s own remembrance of Marco, featured in the May issue, here.
“‘El Greco. Santo Domingo el Antiguo’ Review: Awe-Inspiring Altarpieces”
A. J. Goldmann, The Wall Street Journal
In El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin (1577–79), as Mother Mary rises above us with arms outstretched, she balances on a flat sliver of crescent moon, her toes grabbing onto it as if for stability. In The Holy Trinity (1577–59), Christ seems at risk of slipping through the cloudy floor—at least he would, if it weren’t for the cherubs holding up his feet for our view. El Greco completed these paintings, with these curious details, for his first commission in Spain, a complex series of altar paintings, sculptures, and retables for Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo—and now at the Prado, all but one of the astonishing paintings are gathered together for the first time since 1830. As A. J. Goldmann notes in The Wall Street Journal, the Prado hangs them traditionally, without trying to reconstruct their exact places in the church, and still the effect is overwhelming: “One can scarcely imagine the impact they must have made on their first viewers.”
“The Face You Put On”
Tom Crewe, London Review of Books
Though she said it ninety-five years ago, Virginia Woolf’s description of a “bright and animated company of authors who . . . are known by their hats, not merely their poems” surely recalls some contemporary names. Photography makes such celebrity possible, and in his new book Cartomania, Paul Frecker describes a photography fad of the 1860s that, as Tom Crewe writes in the London Review of Books, invented celebrity as we know it. The trending item was the “carte de visite” (of which Frecker has been a collector and dealer for twenty years): a small photograph produced in multiples that could be cut up and distributed. This wasn’t only the first time that ordinary people could inexpensively give photos of themselves to friends and loved ones. It was also the first time that photographs of public figures of all types—scientists, clergymen, courtesans, murderers, royals—became a hot commodity, to be bought, sold, and collected.
