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FeaturesIn 1896, a Scottish insurance magnate named Evan MacKenzie set himself to erecting a massive “medieval” castle on a glorious site overlooking the Mediterranean, hard by the outskirts of Genoa. For this extravagant client, a gifted young Florentine architect named Gino Coppedè concocted a huge turreted, crenellated, and rusticated fantasy that, to this day, remains a masterpiece of fin de siècle historicism run amok. As the final jewel in MacKenzie’s baronial crown, Coppedè designed a chapel and commissioned for its walls some suitably religious frescoes. Executed by the brilliant Russian copyist, and later restorer, Lockoff, these decorations paraphrase and mimic the one primitive (Roman Catholic) artist with whom the presumably low-church MacKenzie would have felt comfortable: Fra Angelico. The choice is not surprising: by the end of the nineteenth century, the “beatification” of the celebrated ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 24 December 2005, on page 23 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-angelic-friar-1407
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Christopher, for better & for worse On the critic, polemicist & raconteur Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011).
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