Marco Grassi, Who Brought Old Paintings Back to Life, Dies at 90

[ad_1] To his criticism for The New Criterion, Mr. Grassi introduced this tactile sense, his editor, Roger Kimball, recalled in an interview. “You felt that his encounters with the artwork was hands-on,” he mentioned. “You felt there was a deep interplay, having to do with the senses.”

Mr. Grassi’s evaluation of the well-known “Madonna and Little one” by Duccio di Buoninsegna, a Thirteenth- and early 14th-century work acquired by the Met in 2004 for greater than $45 million, the museum’s largest buy on the time, shows this visible sensitivity.

“Though tiny, it has not one of the annoying ‘look-at-me-with-a-magnifier’ precision of a miniature,” Mr. Grassi wrote of the portray in one among his essays. “The artist locations the Virgin at a slight angle to the viewer, behind a fictive parapet. The Madonna “gazes away from the kid into the space whereas he playfully grasps at her veil,” he wrote, including: “With these delicate modifications, Duccio consciously developed a picture of elegant tenderness and poignant humanity.”

For hundreds of years the work of this early interval have been held in lesser esteem, in contrast with the masterworks of the Renaissance. Mr. Grassi was their nice champion, an epoch in portray “usually referred to as the primitive interval, however which isn't primitive in any respect,” he remarked in an interview with the tremendous artwork agency Disegno.

Marco Grassi was born in Florence on July 7, 1934, the son of Arturo Grassi, an artwork supplier, and Cornelia (Lemky) Grassi, an American from Indianapolis. Mr. Grassi recalled that his dad and mom entertained the liberating American generals because the battle led to his boyhood dwelling in Florence, together with fellow Indianan Mark Clark.

These contacts helped the household acquire passage to New York in 1945. Mr. Grassi attended the Delbarton Faculty, a Catholic boys boarding faculty in New Jersey, and graduated from Princeton with a B.A. in artwork historical past in 1956.