Nothing remotely links the Florentine Renaissance busts of Baccio Bandinelli with the minimalist paintings and sculptures of present-day Turin artist Gianni Piacentino.
But by an “art coincidence” the work of both men, albeit with a 450-year gap in between, is currently attracting public attention in Berlin.
Since July of last year the Bode Museum has been prominently featuring in its Florentine Renaissance Hall the Bust of a Young Man by sculptor Bandinelli (1493-1560).
Art critic Klaus Grimberg, writing in the German Times, quotes one visitor as saying: “If Nefertiti is the most beautiful woman in Berlin’s museums, then this youth is the most beautiful man.”
Critics took another view of Bandinelli’s work during his lifetime. His art was often scorned and he was mocked as the “eternal runner-up” to Michelangelo (1475-1564).
His Hercules and Cacus on the Piazza della Signorina in Florence was even seen as “symbolizing his inadequacies as a sculptor.”
But today it’s different. The Bust of a Young Man is hailed by art connoisseurs as a heroic portrait of “classical beauty and melancholic tranquility.”
German museums liked it so much they bought it for an undisclosed sum from a London art dealer after a weak US dollar and the financial crisis drove its price down.
Not far from the Bode Museum, the work of Gianni Piacentino, a modern-day artist-sculptor, has also been pulling in the crowds at the unusually named El Sourdog Hex Gallery.
Located near the Checkpoint Charlie Museum documenting Berlin Wall escapes, the gallery is a brainchild of Reinhard Onnasch, a millionaire property dealer.
Onnasch uses the premises to display his huge private collection of paintings and sculptures assembled over the past 40 years.
Hundreds of works by artists such as George Brecht, Bernd Koberling, Kenneth Noland, Jason Rhodes and Claes Oldenburg have been shown over the past two years. Now it’s Piacentino’s turn.
Long a prominent figure on the Italian scene, the artist lives and works in Turin. Like others in the “arte povera” group, with whom he exhibited in the late 1960s, Piacentino began his career with a kind of homegrown minimalism that swiftly grew more richly metaphorical and suggestive.
Soon he was integrating his “other career” as a sidecar motorcycle racer and custom motorcycle painter into his art — by creating sleek, semi-abstract and elongated versions of racing cars, airplanes and motorcycles.
It is this element of Piacentino’s work that is now being spotlighted in a show titled Homage to the Wright Brothers.
Art critics argue that by defying prevailing currents, Piacentino arrived at certain artistic issues ahead of the crowd, and stayed on to “more deeply explore some of them long after the crowd had moved on.”
Property dealer Onnasch first began exhibiting “artists of my generation” in Berlin in the late 1960s, and later opened galleries in Cologne and New York.
The Piacentino exhibition, inaugurated on Nov. 10, runs until Dec. 27.
Anyone who has been to Alishan (阿里山) is familiar with the railroad there: one line comes up from Chiayi City past the sacred tree site, while another line goes up to the sunrise viewing platform at Zhushan (祝山). Of course, as a center of logging operations for over 60 years, Alishan did have more rail lines in the past. Are any of these still around? Are they easily accessible? Are they worth visiting? The answer to all three of these questions is emphatically: Yes! One of these lines ran from Alishan all the way up to the base of Jade Mountain. Its
The only geopolitical certainty is that massive change is coming. Three macro trends are only just starting to accelerate, forming a very disruptive background to an already unsettled future. One is that technological transformations exponentially more consequential and rapid than anything prior are in their infancy, and will play out like several simultaneous industrial revolutions. ROBOT REVOLUTION It is still early days, but impacts are starting to be felt. Just yesterday, this line appeared in an article: “To meet demands at Foxconn, factory planners are building physical AI-powered robotic factories with Omniverse and NVIDIA AI.” In other words, they used AI
Last month historian Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published an opinion piece in the New York Times with suggestions for an “America First” foreign policy for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Of course China and Taiwan received a mention. “Under presidents Trump and Biden,” Wertheim contends, “the world’s top two powers have descended into open rivalry, with tensions over Taiwan coming to the fore.” After complaining that Washington is militarizing the Taiwan issue, he argues that “In truth, Beijing has long proved willing to tolerate the island’s self-rule so long as Taiwan does not declare independence
Nov. 25 to Dec. 1 The Dutch had a choice: join the indigenous Siraya of Sinkan Village (in today’s Tainan) on a headhunting mission or risk losing them as believers. Missionaries George Candidus and Robert Junius relayed their request to the Dutch governor, emphasizing that if they aided the Sinkan, the news would spread and more local inhabitants would be willing to embrace Christianity. Led by Nicolaes Couckebacker, chief factor of the trading post in Formosa, the party set out in December 1630 south toward the Makatao village of Tampsui (by today’s Gaoping River in Pingtung County), whose warriors had taken the