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©
David Hockney
David Hockney

In Memoriam of Cecchino Bracci

1962
Oil on canvas.
213.3 x 91.4 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
584
(
1978.12
)
ROOM 52
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Francesco (Cecchino) Bracci, the nephew of Luigi del Riccio, was an extremely beautiful youth closely linked to Michelangelo. When Bracci died at the age of just fifteen in January 1544, his family commissioned the artist to design his tomb in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, in Rome, and to write a series of epitaphs. David Hockney painted In Memoriam of Cecchino Bracci in London in autumn 1962. It shows the young man inside his coffin, wrapped in a shroud, his arms crossed over his chest and wearing an incongruous bowler hat, perhaps an eccentric touch of humour and irony. Above his body a laurel wreath encircles the word “CECCHINO” and, lower right, in tiny lettering, are the first lines of one of Michelangelo’s epigrams praising the youth’s beauty: “If buried here those beautiful eyes are closed / forever. This is now my requiem: / They were alive and no one noticed them. / Now everybody weeps them dead and lost.”

David Hockney, a companion of Kitaj’s at the London Royal College of Art and one of the foremost British Pop artists until he moved to Los Angeles to live in 1964, displays the versatility of his art in the present painting. The young man’s legs, hands and head are rendered in an expressionistic style, while the laurel wreath is painted with the technical virtuosity that would characterise much of the painter’s oeuvre. To these figurative elements Hockney adds various abstract brushstrokes dabbed on in lines, in white, ochre and black, in the central part of the composition. In addition, to establish a play between reality and the painted image, the canvas reproduces the shape of a tomb in order, according to the artist, to “ignore the concept of illusionistic space and paint merrily in a flat style.”

Paloma Alarcó
20th Centurys. XX - Figuración en la posguerra europeaPaintingOilcanvas
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In Memoriam of Cecchino Bracci. En memoria de Cecchino Bracci, 1962
In Memoriam of Cecchino Bracci
David Hockney

©

David Hockney

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In Memoriam of Cecchino Bracci. En memoria de Cecchino Bracci, 1962
In Memoriam of Cecchino Bracci
David Hockney

©

David Hockney

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