BBC Art Whoopsie
A keen-eyed reader who knows his sculpture sent me a review of BBC Four's latest art effort: Travels with Vasari. Basing a TV art series on Vasari's classic Lives of the Artists is a good idea long overdue, but the BBC seems to have taken "travels" as the operative word. It assumes the average viewer prefers travelogues to boring old art and sends the narrator on endless car journeys (so I'm informed). Now for the gaffe. While a voiceover witters on about Renaissance art, the camera wanders lovingly over Pio Fedi's magnificent sculpture The Rape of Polyxena (1866). The BBC sent its camera team to the right location - the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence -, but not to the right sculpture. This one is a few centuries too late for Vasari (1511-74) or for the Renaissance! Whoops!
posted by Unknown @ 4.12.08
2 comments
2 Comments:
I think you will enjoy reading Conrad's post on art appreciation. I recommend his wisdom! When you apply the same to the Turner Prize one ends up with questioning the 90% figure in Sturgeon’s law!
http://vunex.blogspot.com/2008/12/schllen-der-leidenschaft.html
Thanks, Robert. I shall try the link.
The Preface of Bernard Berenson's classic The Italian Painters of The Renaissance says it for me:
"Many see pictures without knowing what to look at. They are asked to admire works of pretended art and they do not know enough to say, like the child in Anderson's tale, 'Look, the Emperor has nothing on'."
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