Chop down a poplar tree. Other kinds of wood could work, too, but poplar is an especially soft one, and your task is to trim it into thin planes. These you'll need to coat in a barrier of plaster and animal gluenaked wood is highly absorbent, and you can't have it drinking down everything you put on it. Wait until the barrier has dried. Sand. Repeat until you have a perfectly smooth surface.
Sketch your preferred silhouettes with a stick of charcoal, slather the negative space in a gluey reddish mixture, cover that in translucent gold leaf (glueless, the metal has a queasy green tinge), and burnish that with a wolf's tooth. Now, and only now, you may pick up your brush.
The Met's new show about what happens next, "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350," makes clear how astonishing it is that paint, of all things, became the center of Western art. Gold was prettier. Wood was tougher. Textile and ivory, both well represented here, travelled from city to city more freely. Nobody ever looked at an egg yolk, the signature ingredient in tempera, and thought "sublime," let alone "enduring," but here we are, seven centuries later. There may never be another big American exhibition about this freakish little era, when artists figured out how to make colorful ooze do their bidding.
Esta historia es de la edición October 28, 2024 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición October 28, 2024 de The New Yorker.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
AMERICAN REFRAINS
“Hold On to Me Darling,” Our Town,” and Sump’n Like Wings.”
GIG ECONOMY
The decline of the working musician.
CITY OF GOD
The Met’ revelatory show on Siena.
POP CULTURE
How dirty soda became a Utah delicacy.
CLOSED CHAMBERS
What can memoirs by Supreme Court Justices teach us?
BUCKS WITHOUT BORDERS
In the geography of the rich and mobile, sovereignty is for sale.
WAR DOGS
The facility lies two miles away from the main terminals but within the grounds of the airport, at the end of a service road that skirts a pond where geese flock during their migrations.
PURCHASING POWER
What do the biggest donors to Donald Trump's campaign expect to get in return?
PIVOTAL, SEMINAL, RARE
He built an empire in high-end books. Then a rock star pressed charges.
FOREIGN INFLUENCERS
How the U.S.government decides when to alert the public about election meddling.