“From a personal standpoint, what happens to me in museums, what I bring to it as a viewer, is I go to a museum and see works of fellow craftsmen and it is like looking back in time at these ancient pieces from which one learns to point and draw,” says Prosperi.  “You have to let the Greeks speak to you at some level as that is what makes one a classical painter. This is what I’ve dedicated my life to and so when I see work like this, it helps me understand what I’m doing with my life.”

Prosperi was particularly taken with the sculptural piece known as the Kaufmann head attributed to the great Praxiteles.

“It is truly magnificent and I, had an epiphany drawing that piece,” says Prosperi.  “I was first impressed by the simplified geometry that it has, so I tried to simplify my geometry by softening it and then it looked too mushy. And that is why his is such a great piece—it is a perfect  blance between optical softness and geometrical clarity, so balanced that it is a thing of exquisite refinement.”

And, by drawing this classical head, Prosperi’s epiphany came to him about classical art.

“It told me what the Greeks were upto,” says Prosperi. “The balance between the ideal and the real, the goddess and the human, they hunted for that balance and that is the perennial lesson for painters and sculptors for 2,000 years until modernism. How do you get that balance? How do you make your point through Collector, design?

From American Art Collector,  June 2011. Also see this link:  prosperistudio.com