Simone Toffanin News Today

2/19/2021 Arriving in the U.S. almost simultaneously with his raved-about release Sin centers on another artist whose grand projects often competed with each other: Michelangelo, whose talents were demanded by one pope even as he had years to go on a job for that mans predecessor. A beautiful but decidedly unromantic look at artistic drive, the Italian/Russian production zeroes in on the great mans demons without, as art-biographical cliches usually have it, crediting them for his genius. A ca...

Print Neither agonizing nor ecstatic, but solidly cinematic, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Michelangelo biopic “Sin” sees the veteran Russian filmmaker tackling the mystery of genius with what might be described as sumptuous grit. It’s a Renaissance-era recreation that looks both lavish and hard, bracketed in a sense by the infinite gaze from the Italian alps at one extreme and at the other, the everyday dodge in Florentine or Roman streets of emptied waste buckets; in between, amidst popes and...

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI, that incomparable Renaissance Man, is masterfully brought back to life by Russian film maestro Andrei Konchalovsky in Sin (Il Peccato), which he co-wrote and directed. In it, Alberto Testone incarnates Michelangelo in early-16th century Renaissance Italy in Rome, Florence and the quarry where the sculptor connives to snag the world’s largest slab of marble known to man. Will “the monster,” as this gigantic chunk of snow-white rock is called because of its sheer im...

My father, Richard Rampell, was a photographer who used to exhibit his artsy black and white pictures in Manhattan’s top photo galleries. Always a good provider, Dad supported our family by teaching at Boys High in Bed Stuy, explaining: “All artists require patrons.