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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
What is a virtuoso? The answer is provided by a disfigured hand, one of the many spellbinding images that appear in the sleeper show of the summer, the Hendrick Goltzius exhibition at the Met. Who was Goltzius? He was this hand: tendons fused, index finger permanently bent, nail bed of the middle finger caved in--a decided handicap, you would suppose, for an artist whose forte was drawing. When Hendrick was around a year old, his friend and biographer Karel van Mander tells us, he fell face forward into a fire, and clutched at the hot coals. The result was the clawlike right hand, incapable of fully unclenching its fingers, but the result was also this pen-and-ink drawing, which, in its exacting precision, demonstrates the fine motor skills the deformity might have precluded. Beneath the drawing is an autographic inscription: "HGoltzius fecit." And indeed he did.
The Goltzius exhibition, and an equally surprising show, at the Frick, of the bronze sculptures of a forgotten Dutch master, Willem van Tetrode, capture a moment in the history of Western art--after Michelangelo and Durer but before Rubens and Caravaggio--which has all too often been written off as a hiatus between the classical monumentalism of the High Renaissance and the feverish theatricality of the Baroque. That anachronism is belied by these two exhibitions, charged with whipsaw violence and erotic play.
At the Frick, the normally demure garden court has been invaded by a small army of Tetrode's gesticulating titans, arms thrown out, heads wrenched back, the backs of horses arched and bucking. Multiple Herculeses...
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